[p. 122]
June 25 — The International Secretariat of the Fourth International today issued the following declaration on the events in East Germany and the present general situation in the European "People's Democracies" and the USSR.
On the basis of information and precise reports sent to us from a number of different sources including our own members active in Berlin and the East German zone, and on the basis of the programmatic considerations and political line characterizing our world movement founded by Leon Trotsky, we are in a position to give the only objective analysis of the recent events in East Germany and to draw from them conclusions and perspectives which concern the entire international working class movement.
[p. 123]
### FALSE EXPLANATIONS
Up to now the press and the direct or indirect pro-capitalist and pro-imperialist spokesmen have sought to explain the events as a revolt of the German working masses against "the Communist regime," against the USSR in order to more vigorously resume their propaganda for the counter-revolutionary war they are preparing. Behind these events they have tried to mask their own difficulties, their crimes and their plans for a reactionary and counter-revolutionary war which has nothing in common with a genuine defense of the material, cultural and political interests of the working masses of the whole world.
The cries of indignation from the Social Democratic leaderships sound no less false. Almost unreservedly arrayed by the side of the capitalists in all their foul enterprises of colonial wars or of anti-Soviet war under American leadership, as defenders in practice of the capitalist status quo and disrupters of working class actions, they are in no position to preach sermons to their competitors in bureaucratism, the Stalinist leaderships.
On the other hand the press and spokesmen for the Kremlin, the satellite governments in the European "People's Democracies" and the Communist Parties in the world, upset, taken by surprise and gripped with fear by the gigantic uprising of the working masses in East Germany, have plunged into a series of contradictory, embarrassed and deceitful statements which well illustrate their bureaucratic nature.
### THE WHOLE TRUTH
Only our movement, the Fourth International, under whose banner thousands of people have fought in the Soviet Union and on all continents to avert the Stalinist bureaucratic degeneration in the USSR and in the workers movement influenced by the Third International, can understand the profound meaning of the events now going on and tell the unvarnished truth, the whole truth to the workers.
Workers and poor peasants of the entire world:
In East Germany, at Berlin, Magdeburg, Leipzig, Halle, Rostock, Wismar, Meersburg, etc., there has just been projected the political revolution of the working masses of an economically and culturally developed country, Germany, against the bureaucratic and police regime established in the name of socialism under the auspices of the Soviet bureaucracy and by its native imitators.
This beginning of political revolution by the German workers, together with their Czech brothers the most advanced in the entire domain controlled by the Soviet bureaucracy, has nothing in common with any alleged sympathy of these workers with the capitalist regime at Bonn or the "democratic" capitalist countries of the West or with American imperialism, their supreme patron. It is an authentic revolutionary workers movement, very conscious of its path and its methods of action.
### ANTI-CAPITALIST
It is resolutely opposed to capitalism, and at the same time it is against the political expropriation of the working class, against a bureaucratic and police regime which deprives the workers of control and direct administration by themselves of the anti-capitalist state.
Its historical significance is colossal and enormously progressive.
The reactionaries of Bonn, London, Paris and Washington have nothing to hope for from such a movement.
It is not directed back to the rut of a capitalism which has been historically abandoned in an irrevocable manner, but toward an expansion of genuine proletarian socialist democracy. It is the herald of a new, post-Stalinist, anti-Stalinist era, where the matured revolutionary forces in the capitalist world as well as in the Soviet Union itself and in the "People's Democracies" will emerge clearly to the surface and will conquer. It takes its place in the world revolutionary upsurge which is steadily changing the relation of forces between capitalism and the masses in favor of the latter and the relation between the bureaucratic leaderships and the masses likewise in favor of the latter.
To understand what is happening and will happen in East Germany, as well as in Czechoslovakia, the "People's Democracies" and the USSR itself, it is necessary to take into account the following facts:
### CRISIS OF STALINISM
In all these countries the Soviet bureaucracy established during Stalin's lifetime a bureaucratic and police regime opposed to the aspirations, interests and needs ofthe broad masses. Their discontent was great and growing greater, stimulated by the world revolutionary upsurge. Stalin's death precipitated the crisis in the Soviet Union and the "People's Democracies." His successors, more aware than he was of the extreme tension now prevailing, entered upon the road of reforms and concessions in order to allay the tension and give a firmer foundation to their regime on a more popular basis. It is also for this reason, the better to handle their own internal situation, that they have very likely undertaken a policy of formal concessions to imperialism in order to decrease the tension with the latter and if possible to gain time.
But their concessions did not come quickly enough and were not made in a direct and frank manner. The impatient and exasperated masses passed to action.
In countries where their cultural level is the highest and where general conditions were most favorable, as in Czechoslovakia, and especially in East Germany, the political revolution of the working masses against the bureaucratic and police regime inspired and managed by Stalinism has already begun.
### WORKERS REGROUP
In these two countries, the mass actions which took place in May and June, following Stalin's death, are the culmination of a long process of renewal of consciousness, of reorientation and even of organizational regroupment in the ranks, of the most advanced elements of the working class.
[p. 124]
It is now certain that since 1949 in these two countries there has been the assertion of an organized working class resistance against the bureaucratic methods of intensifying labor in the factories and against police control over the workers. The workers have succeeded in opposing these measures, in forming resistance groups in the factories and trade unions, in winning over to their cause the lower organisms led by the bureaucracy itself — for example, factory or departmental committees. All the legislation and methods of work promulgated by the bureaucratic leaderships (collective contracts disadvantageous to the workers, the arbitrary increase of work norms) without any compensation on the plane of wages, housing, food or working conditions, have met with a bitter and more and more organized resistance from the workers.
### EAST GERMANY
If this resistance was able to break out in a more ample and impressive manner in East Germany, that is to be explained by the following considerations:
(a) The working class of this country is traditionally among the most developed and best organized in the entire East European zone.
(b) It is farthest from the Soviet Union and the closest to the West.
(c) It has been the most abused from the first by the armies of Soviet occupation because they belonged to a conquered "enemy" nation.
(d) Special conditions have precipitated the developments in this zone: There has recently been an acute economic crisis, food was neither plentiful nor cheap, consumption goods were lacking and expensive, the rate of rebuilding workers houses was not up to the pressing needs.
The concessions made on June 10 in Eastern Germany were directed to the middle classes and completely neglected the workers who instead had to "increase the norms of labor."
### WHAT SET IT OFF
The conciliatory measures taken by the Kremlin and the Soviet authorities since Stalin's death have aroused hopes of a relaxation of the bureaucratic and police regimes throughout the "buffer countries."
The recognition by the leadership of the Socialist Unity Party of its previous "wrong" course, added to the previous consideration, operated to encourage the masses, catalyzing their energy and precipitating their action.
The setting created by the whole of these considerations explains the events in East Germany. They broke out as an unalloyed working class movement against the bureaucratic and police political regime, in the strictly anti-capitalist framework of the social regime. In Berlin, the intervention of dubious and disruptive elements, open provocateurs of reactionaries, where the demonstrations of the East and the West met, at certain moments did pervert the anti-bureaucratic and anti-capitalist working class character of the masses. The propaganda of the bourgeois press and politicians and of their reactionary agents has subsequently attempted to swamp the essential in the episodic and secondary.
But it was the demand clearly expressed by the workers, as well as the motives behind their strikes, their street demonstrations and their meetings, which express and illustrate the genuine class character of their movements against the legislation and the bureaucratic methods of work, for the improvement of their material living conditions, for the democratization of the party and the trade unions, the liberation of political prisoners, that is to say, those workers who undertook the defense of the interests of the working class. In certain places there were added demands for secret, general and free elections in all of Germany to guarantee a working class victory in these elections.
If the capitalists have nothing to hope for from such a movement and, upon consideration, really feel tremendously disturbed by this colossal upsurge of genuine revolutionary forces on all planes, the Soviet leaders and those of the various "People's Democracies" and the Communist Parties could no longer falsify or ignore the profound meaning of these events. They have been obliged to continue along the road of still more ample and genuine concessions to avoid risking alienating themselves forever from support by the masses and from provoking still stronger explosions.
From now on they will not be able to stop halfway.
They will be obliged to dole out concessions to avoid more serious explosions in the immediate future and if possible to effect a transition "in a cold fashion" from the present situation to a situation more tolerable for the masses. But the workers ought to have confidence only in themselves.
Only their organized action guided by a clear and precise political program can put an end to the bureaucratic regime without harming the anti-capitalist social conquests or playing into the hands of the capitalist reaction which is preparing counter-revolutionary war.
### REVOLUTIONARY PROGRAM
Here is the program of the political revolution which is now on the order of the day both in the Soviet Union and in the "People's Democracies":
Genuine organs of people's power, democratically elected by the working masses, exercising effective control over the state, at all levels, including the government.
Real democratization of the Communist Parties.
Legalization of all working class parties.
Complete independence of the trade unions in relation to the state, including the workers' state.
Democratic elaboration of the economic plan by the workers and for the workers.
This is the program that the Fourth International has always defended and that the masses, taught by their own experience, are spontaneously taking up today. Let them persevere along this road, and, far from weakening the anti-capitalist regime in the Soviet Union and the "People's Democracies," they will consolidate it and fortify it. Only in this way will they render it invulnerable to the attacks of the capitalists and their agents.
Down with capitalism and its projected counter-revolutionary war!
Long live working class democracy!
Long live the socialist rebirth of the Soviet Union, the "People's Democracies" and the international working class movement.