I. The Meaning of the 1968 Turn in the World Situation
The theses on the new rise of the world revolution which I am presenting to the congress sum up in six basic points the turn which occurred in the world situation in 1968.
1. The imperialist counteroffensive unleashed in the aftermath of the victory of the Cuban revolution has been halted decisively by the heroic struggle of the Vietnamese popular masses. This counteroffensive, directed essentially a gainst the colonial revolution, had the aim of preventing at any cost a recurrence of conditions permitting this revolution to grow over into a socialist one. The offensive began by scoring important successes, above all the victorious military coups in Brazil, Indonesia, and the Congo-Kinshasa, which caused momentary halts in the colonial revolution in three of its principle epicenters. The massive counterrevolutionary intervention of American imperialism in Vietnam represented a kind of culmination of this counteroffensive. This intervention failed thanks primarily to the indomitable courage and combativity of the Vietnamese masses. After the 1968 Tet offensive, these masses went on the offensive against the American forces and their puppets and forced them to withdraw from a good part of the countryside, where a new state power, elected by the poor peasants, is beginning to be set up. The unexpected breadth of the antiwar movement in the United States played an important though subsidiary role in this development. And the revolutionary Marxists in America are now trying to take this movement into the imperialist army, which must be disintegrated. It is the scope of this international movement of solidarity with the Vietnamese revolution that has forced the Kremlin to extend important material aid to the Vietnamese—although this aid is totally incommensurate with what it could give and with the extent of the involvement of imperialist forces.
2. The victorious resistance of the Vietnamese people coincided with a general slowdown in the economic growth of the imperialist countries. The successive recessions in Japan, Italy, France, Great Britain, and West Germany culminated in 1967-68 in the first downturn in the growth rate of the American economy, which will certainly lead to a new American recession this year or the next. This slowdown in its economic growth has reduced imperialism's margin for maneuver, which was already cut into by the unexpected costs and losses of the Vietnam war. The result of this has been a general toughening toward labor on the part of capital, except in Japan. In the United States, real wages have even failed to rise for more than two years. In West Germany, the first recession since the end of the second world war also reduced total wage payments for the first time. In France and Italy, the increase in wages, which was considerable in the early sixties, declined sharply after the recessions in those countries. In Great Britain, the Wilson government's reactionary wage-freeze policy followed by its incomes policy even produced wage dips at times.
3. From this has resulted a general change in the socio-economic climate in West Europe which helped to produce the outbreak of the revolution of May 1968 in France. In most of the imperialist countries, massive youth unemployment has reappeared as a result of the coincidence between the slowdown of economic growth and the advance of the third industrial revolution, which has been distinguished by an exceptional increase in productivity. This unemployment has played an important role in transferring into the factories the spirit of social revolt shown by the students on the barricades. The outbreak of the first widespread revolutionary struggles in West Europe for twenty years is not an episodic phenomenon nor one limited to one country. A pre-May climate is establishing itself in Italy and Spain, and even a country like Great Britain is evolving in this direction, although at a slower rate. Thus, the interrelation among the three great sectors of the world revolution, as it emerged over the last twenty years, has been profoundly altered. The proletariat of the imperialist countries is once again called upon to play an important, even preponderant, role in this worldwide process in the years to come.
4. The victorious defense of the Vietnamese revolution, followed by the renewal of revolutionary struggle in the imperialist countries, has given the colonial revolution time to overcome the most debilitating results of the temporary setbacks it suffered in the 1962-67 period. The revival has been clearest above all in Southeast Asia, where the influence of the Vietnamese revolution has been felt most immediately. Today, it is extending progressively to several sections of the Indian peninsula, beginning with East and West Bengal, and to certain sectors of the Arab world. But in Latin America and Africa signs are also multiplying of the revival which is imminent or already begun.
5. Stimulated by the Vietnamese revolution and by the revolutionary upsurge in France, the ripening of conditions for political revolution in the bureaucratically deformed or degenerated workers states has also accelerated, determined in the last analysis by the inner contradictions of the society in these countries. The outbreak of broad mass struggles in Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia has been the most important expression of this. But phenomena like the very extensive outflanking of the Maoist leadership by the masses of Red Guards in the final phase of the "cultural revolution" in China must also be put in this category. The same is true of the reappearance of an articulate communist opposition in the USSR, whose manifestations are no longer merely literary or ideological but directly political. By aggravating the crisis of the Communist parties internationally, the various episodes in the crisis of the Soviet bureaucratic system of rule have considerably weakened the bureaucratic hold of these parties over the substantial sectors of the mass movement which they controlled or still control. And this has favored the reappearance of independent vanguard groups, endowed with a capacity for revolutionary initiative.
6. The emergence of this vast revolutionary youth vanguard has its own social and political causes which the crisis of Stalinism has only accentuated. Its appearance makes it possible to approach more concretely and with perspectives for important successes in the short run the historic task of our epoch—solving the crisis of leadership of the world proletariat. If the revolutionary upsurge in France and Czechoslovakia in 1968 could once more be stemmed by counterrevolutionary forces, it is obviously because there was a lack in these two countries of a revolutionary leadership with sufficient authority among the masses. However, the scope of the revolutionary upsurge was so great in both cases that the betrayal of the bureaucratic leaderships could not decisively break the movement. The movement is regrouping conscious and organized forces on the basis of the experience gained. These forces are doubtless greater in France than in Czechoslovakia, but in both countries the strengthening of the revolutionary forces marks the opening of a new stage in the process of forming a new revolutionary leadership. The same phenomenon can and must be repeated in the years ahead of us in a series of countries and result in a breakthrough for the Fourth International, at least on the vanguard level.
These six new factors, taken together, explain a real reversal in the world situation. They must be considered a coherent whole, each factor reinforcing the others. What this change reflects on a historical level is a new deterioration in the relationship of forces for imperialism as against the working masses and for the bureaucratic apparatus against the mass movement which they seek to canalize. In this sense, the remarks made by various comrades in our movement who have compared 1968 to the great revolutionary years of 1848 and 1919 were entirely justified. What is more, we have never seen such a broad mass participation as in the general strikes in France and in Czechoslovakia (as well as in the successive twenty-four-hour general strikes in Italy since then). Nor have we seen a revolutionary explosion spread literally to five continents, as did that of the French students.
Regardless of the immediate vicissitudes of these movements, it is clear that they reflect extremely profound social crises and that those who are counting on a rapid solution of these crises by a combination of reforms and repression, as do the bourgeoisie and the bureaucratic apparatuses, are greatly deceiving themselves. March 1969 has already confirmed this in France. And we will no doubt soon see a confirmation of this in Czechoslovakia as well. Movements of such scope cannot be dammed up or broken in the space of a few weeks or a few months. They will continue at least for several years, thus increasing the chances that the process of building a new revolutionary leadership will come to fruition before the pendulum begins to swing decisively in the other direction.
Thus the imperialist bourgeoisie and the Soviet bureaucracy, in their respective spheres of domination, find themselves facing a real dilemma. Whether they stiffen or relax their policy they risk adding fuel to the revolutionary process and stimulating its spread. It is this dilemma which in the last analysis explains the crisis of leadership that has become manifest both in the major imperialist capitals and in Moscow. But the best illustration of it is offered by the twisting and turning of the American imperialist leaders confronted with the failure of their counterrevolutionary war in Vietnam.
Both the obvious military impasse into which they have stumbled as well as the exorbitant costs of this war are putting pressure on the leaders in Washington to finish with their dirty war in Vietnam. And high on the list of these exorbitant costs is the revival of mass radicalism in the United States which in the long run threatens the political and social equilibrium in the principal imperialist fortress. The unpopularity of the war among the majority of the working people of the United States was already apparent before and during the 1968 presidential campaign. It makes it imperative for the Nixon administration to bring a halt to the war. It is heading for certain electoral defeat if it continues the intervention in Vietnam.
But, faced with the exemplary combativity of the Vietnamese masses and the impossibility of transforming its retreat from Vietnam into a political "draw," Washington is compelled to recognize that retreat would lead to an impasse comparable to the one that would result from pursuing the war. Without even considering the encouragement such a retreat would represent for the revolutionary masses on other continents, the Pentagon sees that it would threaten to considerably stimulate armed insurrection in several Asian countries, above all those bordering Vietnam.
Of all these countries, imperialism is most worried about Indonesia, where mass armed struggle is reviving, and Thailand, where it has already passed the stage of consolidating armed nuclei. In Thailand, American imperialism has to confront a three-front guerrilla war, in the North, the Northeast, and in the South. Bourgeois sources estimate that there are 4,000 armed combatants and "unknown thousands of communist political, administrative and propaganda cadres together with peasants who support the revolt." (Far-Eastern Economic Review, January 23, 1969.) According to the London Economist of March 29,1969, the Thai guerrillas have already begun to levy taxes—which the rubber plantations are paying. This says a great deal about the relationship of forces!
For Washington, Thailand consitutes the staging base for its entire military system in Southeast Asia, covering a tangent extending from the Philippines to Bengal. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent there to build one of the most powerful air-naval bases in the world. About 100,000 American troops are already there, and the bulk of the troops in Vietnam would be brought there if a retreat were decided on. But what would be the sense of such a retreat of it involved them, after a brief interval, in a war that would more and more resemble the war in Vietnam?
Nixon's hesitations reflect not only the personal limitations of this very mediocre individual. They reflect the insoluble difficulties in which imperialism has trapped itself in Southeast Asia. The war in Vietnam is costly, but withdrawal could be as costly as remaining. And the American masses are less and less ready to pay the price either of remaining in Vietnam or of other such wars in the future.
In this situation, certain voices have been raised among the American bourgeoisie in favor of revising the policy toward China. We do not believe, as certain tendencies in the international workers movement do, that this reflects a desire for an alliance with China against the USSR, which would remain its No. 1 enemy. In a situation of revolutionary revival in Europe, imperialism really has no interest in forcing Moscow and the leaders of the European CPs to reconsider their policy of "peaceful coexistence." Quite the contrary! I think that these maneuvers reflect the hope that in exchange for the proffer of lifting the quarantine, the Peking leaders will exercise the same braking role on the revolutionary movement in Thailand, Indonesia, and Burma that Moscow is exercising in France and Italy. But despite the fact that this hope may not prove illusory-I say "may not" instead of "will not" because the revolutionary fervor of the masses of youth in China and the internal situation in the Chinese CP may very easily upset these calculations—it is still very unlikely that the Indonesian and Thai masses will let themselves be demobilized by a mere directive from Peking. It is not very likely that they will accept this after a rich experience of struggle extending over several years, after having learned the terrible price of defeat—symbolized by the Indonesian massacres of 1965- and after having been able to see by the Vietnamese example the effectiveness of revolutionary struggle, even against the most powerful army in the world!
The dilemma of imperialism is, then, a real one. It indicates in the most concentrated way the improvement that has occurred in the international situation over the last eighteen months from the standpoint of the world revolution.
II. The Crisis Shaking Imperialist Society Is a Global Crisis
What is the historic meaning of May 1968 in France? What does it presage for the other imperialist countries in the months and years to come?
Some bourgeois sociologists, cheerfully seconded by the reformists and neo-reformists of all stripes, have claimed that there was no real revolutionary crisis in France because that country was not suffering any economic crisis or recession, but was going through an upturn. They seem not to understand that this argument—which no one invoked in May and early June and for good reason!- in reality turns against all the open or veiled apologists of capitalism.
It is in fact impossible to deny that in France we witnessed the most extensive general strike in the history of capitalism, which far outstripped not only the one of June 1936 but even the broader strikes in Germany between 1918 and 1923. It is likewise impossible to deny that this general strike mobilized a movement of confrontation that drew in not only the workers in big industry and the public services—that is, the best organized and most conscious part of the working class—but also the marginal layers and the technical "new middle classes," the great majority of which for the first time joined in challenging the system.
And if this occurred when there was neither a grave economic recession nor pronounced poverty, it must reflect a more profound social crisis, a refusal by the majority of the vital forces of the nation to accept the capitalist system and the bourgeois state. And this heralds still more violent explosions if an economic downturn should be added to the basic, structural causes of these outbreaks.
It is worth noting in this regard that between the revolution of 1848 and the publication of his famous "Preface" to his Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy [ 1859], Marx modified his views on the underlying causes of social revolutions. In his writings on the revolution of 1848 and later in his Class Struggles in France, he still linked social revolutions closely to economic crises of overproduction. But in the preface to Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy, he explained the nature of the epoch of social revolution in a much more profound way:
"At a certain stage of their development, the material forces of production in society come in conflict with the existing relations of production, or—what is but a legal expression for the same thing—with the property relations within which they had been at work before. From forms of development of the forces of production these relations turn into their fetters. Then comes the period of social revolution."
And further on:
"Just as our opinion of an individual is not based on what he thinks of himself, so can we not judge of such a period of transformation by its own consciousness; on the contrary, this consciousness must rather be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the existing conflict between the social forces of production and the relations of production."
What May 1968 revealed in a flash was that despite the long boom in the imperialist economy this fundamental contradiction, far from attenuated, had become exacerbated to the point that for the first time it became the main target for the action of millions of workers. This is the new aspect of the revolutionary upsurge which is now developing in West Europe. It is challenging more and more directly, for the first time in the history of conflicts between capital and labor, the power of capital, its representatives, and its state to command men and machines. Nothing could be more fundamentally revolutionary in a society dominated by monopoly capital.
This instinctive, or at best semiconscious, revolt of the working masses against capitalist production relations obviously did not come from nowhere. In the last analysis, it has resulted from a clear aggravation of the contradiction between the development of the productive forces and the survival of capitalist productive relations. This crisis of these production relationships has been glaringly evident in all economic development over the past fifteen years. It has been revealed in the growing difficulty of maintaining the advance of science and technology in the framework of private property, and the resulting necessity for the capitalists to force an increasing socialization of these costs, if not even of the cost of the productive investments this research leads to. This crisis has likewise been revealed in the impossibility of containing the productive forces within the limits of the bourgeois national state, which is as outmoded as private property. Without this growing socialization of the costs of development and without the appearance of multinational companies, the third industrial revolution could not have occurred within the framework of the capitalist system.
On top of the crisis of private property and of the bourgeois national state, there is the crisis of hierarchical work relations. It is not by chance that the students and the researchers were the ones who first perceived the fraudulent nature of the argument defending such relationships on the basis of differences in skills. But as the third industrial revolution drives unskilled labor out of industrial life and raises the level of the skills and culture of the working class, the workers' revolt against these hierarchical relationships will become as pronounced as that of the intellectual workers and students today, if not still more so.
If we give such importance today to the question of workers control, it is because the struggle for this transitional demand can and must constitute the bridge between the objective necessities of the revolutionary crisis which is rising in capitalist Europe, and the still insufficient consciousness of the masses. Between the absence of a revolutionary leadership and this insufficient level of consciousness, there is an interaction which must not be underestimated. The proletariat needs a revolutionary leadership to overthrow capitalism and take power. It will only follow this revolutionary leadership when it has reached a certain mature level of revolutionary consciousness. The revolutionary leadership can, in its turn, help along this process of maturation by providing the necessary bridges between what the workers sense in a confused way and what they must understand—bridges first in the form of slogans and propaganda motifs and then in the form of struggle experience. It would be self-deception to believe that the workers are prepared to go in one leap from immediate objectives to the seizure of power, which involves their managing the plants themselves in a framework of socialist planning. The campaign for, and the struggle to win, workers control will be an indispensable school for convincing the worker vanguard of the necessity both for this self-management and this planning.
Only an explanation of the crisis which has now struck imperialist society—above all in Western Europe-as a general crisis can, in the last analysis, integrate phenomena like the world student and youth rebellion into a coherent framework. However, in insisting on the totality of this crisis as a crisis of capitalist production relations per se, I am by no means trying to minimize the importance of the changes that have occurred in the economic position of imperialism and which helped to cause the turn in the situation starting in 1968.
The slowdown in the growth rate is shown both in the successive recessions since 1964, in the deepening crisis of the international monetary system, which is closely related to the means the capitalists use to prevent recessions from turning into grave economic crises, and in the extension of the phenomenon of excess capacity which has now hit such numerous branches of world capitalist industry such as coal, textiles, steel and petro-chemicals. It is also revealed in the decline in the growth rate of those industries which largely "carried" the long phase of expansion in the last two decades. The example of the automotive industry is particularly significant in this regard. In the six Common Market countries, the annual increase in the number of automobiles in use remained stable from 1955 to 1963, fluctuating around 16.5% a year. Then it dropped sharply to 13.9% in 1964, 12.3% in 1965, 10.9% in 1966, 9% in 1967, 8.2% in 1968; and the Brussels Commission anticipates that the rate will continue to drop toward 6.6% at the beginning of the 1970's. Even in absolute figures, the annual increase which had reached 3,000,000 automobiles in the period 1961-1966 has been dropping since then and will undoubtedly stabilize around 2,500,000 to 2,700,000 cars.
In this context, the slow but constant decline in the rate of profit, sharpened international competition, and accelerated capital concentration, including in its international form, are advancing inexorably. Capitalist experts anticipate that in fifteen to twenty years, some 250 to 300 multinational companies will dominate the international capitalist economy. There are no longer any sanctuaries from the ferocity this competitive struggle stoked by the needs of realizing stocks of capital often exceeding $500,000,000 or $1,000,000,000. While American penetration is increasing in Western Europe, European monopolies are storming the U.S. market, Volkswagen and FIAT have assured themselves a preponderant place on the automobile market in Brazil and Argentina. And at the same time Japan is winning stronger and stronger positions not only in Asia but even in Australia and its most powerful steel combine has become the second largest in the world, capable even of challenging U.S. Steel for first place, which has been the predominant power in the world steel industry for more than half a century.
In these conditions, the capitalists' makeshift efforts to reorganize their political and legal structures to contain this formidable dynamic of capitalist concentration, such as the European Common Market, already seem outworn. Still more pitiful are the attempts of the Khrushchevist parties, mimicked by some Maoist groups, to pose as the defenders of "national sovereignty" against this thrust of international capitalist concentration. The only possible counter to this thrust would be the international or worldwide organization of a socialized economy on the basis of conscious control of the economic forces. The economic and social needs felt by millions of workers and young people demand satisfaction so urgently that the boldest postulates of revolutionary Marxists thirty years ago seem like commonplaces today!
It is most of all for the Japanese and American comrades to draw the necessary conclusions from the stirring experience of May 1968 in France and all that this implies for capitalist Europe. France is not the capitalist country with the most advanced industry or economy. It never has been. But, to borrow a phrase from Engels, it is the country where "more than anywhere else the class struggles have been fought to a clear decision and where, therefore, the changing political forms in which these struggles move and in which their results are summed up, assumed the sharpest contours." In the present phase of the new rise of the world revolution, May 1968 revealed these sharper contours and we will find the same outlines repeated in the years to come in most of the important imperialist countries.
III. The Rise of the Political Revolution in the Bureaucratically Deformed and Degenerated Workers States in the Light of the Czechoslovak Example
The theses review how in the wake of the crushing of the Hungarian revolution a "reformist" climate was gradually established in the USSR and in most of the so-called people's democracies. They also recapitulate what factors have eroded the masses' illusions that they would see their objectives—which remain essentially analogous to those of the Hungarian revolution—progressively achieved by means of reforms granted from above by an "enlightened" wing of the bureaucracy. I will not repeat the full analysis here. I will only indicate that with the fading of these illusions in the USSR and in Eastern Europe, certain tendencies in the international workers movement which exhibited similar illusions, also began to free themselves from them. The most important example of this is Isaac Deutscher who, toward the end of his life, was moving close to the view that an antibureaucratic political revolution was inevitable in the USSR and in Eastern Europe, a concept he had moved away from twenty years before.
To complement the analysis in the theses, it is worth examining the mechanisms which governed the rise of the antibureaucratic political revolution in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic [CSSR] and which later led the Soviet bureaucracy to intervene. These mechanisms, without any doubt, offer an indication of what will happen in the USSR in the years to come.
The source of the crisis of bureaucratic regime in the CSSR was objective—a complete halt in economic growth in the early sixties and the transformation of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic in less than ten years from a leader in industrial and scientific technology in Europe to a country missing out on the third industrial revolution. In the conditions of general political apathy generated by the Gottwald and Novotny police state, and which was still more pronounced because de-Stalinization was relatively delayed in Czechoslovakia in comparison with several neighboring countries, this objective crisis provoked a split in the Czechoslovak bureaucracy. A so-called "liberal" wing emerged, which favored a more "efficient" system of economic management and planning. This technocratic wing was to demand political and ideological "liberalization" measures arising from its economic objectives. It is, in fact, impossible to increase the independence and initiative of economic specialists without a minimum of freedom to discuss and to advocate nonconformist opinions both in the ideological and political spheres. The technocratic wing of the bureaucracy quickly got the support of the workers, the scholars, and the journalists, who suffered the most from the stifling Stalinist atmosphere which had fallen on a country with an old industrial and bourgeois liberal tradition. Facing this bloc, the old Stalinists no longer exercised the decisive weight, and began to lose their footing. The Stalinists' attempts to sabotage the various reform movements were thwarted by the first autonomous mass intervention, that of the students in October 1967, which rallied working-class opinion against the repressive forces and led to the January 1968 plenum of the Central Committee of the Czechoslovak Communist party.
Up to this point, we were seeing the classical development of an intrabureaucratic conflict, in which both wings feared to make a real appeal to the masses, who remained on the sidelines watching and waiting. There was not much in the liberal reformers' program to attract the working masses. They could even fear that their already very meager standard of living would worsen as a result of the objective consequences of some of the measures proposed by the technocrats, such as an increase in the price of consumer goods, the reduction of social security benefits, layoffs in the factories, and the reappearance of unemployment. It must also be remembered that during this phase the question of workers' self-management was not raised at all.
Three factors altered this situation and caused the development of political consciousness and increasing independent activity by the masses.
First, the de-Stalinization filtered into the trade-union organization. There was a massive replacement of appointed shop stewards by delegates elected by the workers, and a certain number of these elected representatives penetrated into the trade union apparatus itself.
Next, this apparatus took the initiative of promoting the beginnings of workers self-management-or more precisely of workers codetermination—in a certain number of big plants in the country and a broader participation by some factory collectives in public debates on the economic reform.
Finally, there was the brutal and cynical arm-twisting by the Soviet bureaucracy and its agents to force a despised leadership on the Czechoslovak CP and workers. This pressure from the Kremlin caused a shift in the attitude of the popular masses which became apparent in June 1968 through the astonishing success of the campaign organized by the students to collect signatures in support of the Dubcek team. While the first two factors impelling the politicalization of the Czechoslovak working class were motives of class interest, the third was a motive of defending the right of the Czechoslovak working people to choose its leadership freely without interference from the Soviet bureaucracy.
It was in response to the military intervention of the Kremlin and its satellites, that the rise of the political revolution in the CSSR reached its height. The political activity of the Czechoslovak working class in the decisive week of August was the most advanced seen in Eastern Europe since the Hungarian revolution. More over, given the different social structure in Czechoslovakia, the workers were much more decisive in the entire process of resistance than they had been in Hungary. The workers self-management bodies, shop stewards' committees, and certain CP groups in the factories and working-class neighborhoods—which were often supported by sections of the state apparatus and most frequently given their impetus by revolutionary students—served as organs of dual power and broad mass mobilization. Confronted with the exceptional scope of this mobilization which threatened to turn the easy military success into a total political failure, the Soviet bureaucracy made a turn. It temporarily dropped the idea of replacing the Dubcek team with a more servile leadership, and used the liberal wing of the bureaucracy to undermine the combativity of the masses. Once the main danger was eliminated, it would be relatively easy for them to get rid of the capitulationist liberals.
The Kremlin's tactic again ran into unforeseen obstacles, most of all because of the high degree of mobilization which characterized the attitude of the working class over long months and because of the manifold links the revolutionary students had developed with the vanguard sectors of the proletariat. But this interlude is now coming to a close. Taking advantage of the "ice hockey game incidents," which were probably staged by provocateurs, the pro-Stalinist faction has begun to score important gains in this period. The gap between the Dubcek team and the masses is widening and the antibureaucratic vanguard is becoming isolated. The progressive wing of the unions is retreating to positions of purely economic self-defense. Even the workers codetermination experiment is beginning to suffer profound distortions. This is clear above all when we see that 70 percent of the members of these "workers councils" are now technicians and specialists.
It is probable that while some convulsions are still possible, the antibureaucratic political revolution will not achieve victory within the limits of Czechoslovakia alone. Such a victory can only come from an international extension of this revolutionary rise, above all in the USSR itself. We must, then, examine the lessons that can be drawn from the Czechoslovak experience regarding the conditions for the development of the political revolution in the USSR itself.
I will not go back over the analysis which our movement has made in the past of the objective contradictions of the bureaucratic dictatorship in the USSR in economic, social, cultural, and ideological areas. Instead, let us examine, in the light of the Kremlin's reactions to the Czechoslovak events, what it was that really worried the Soviet bureaucracy, provoking even momentary panic.
It is clear that it was not the economic "liberalization" that worried the Kremlin. All those who sought to justify the Soviet intervention, entirely or in part, by presumed dangers of capitalist restoration resulting from this "liberalization" have wasted their effort. As we predicted in the period preceding the military intervention, the Kremlin has no intention of making the slightest change in the economic reforms introduced in the CSSR. In expanding trade with the imperialist countries and even in admitting foreign capital investment, the Soviet bureaucracy itself has gone at least as far if not further than the Dubcek-Sik team.
The aims of the Soviet intervention were to reverse in the order of importance: (1) The CP statutes that reestablished the right of tendencies. (2) The authorization of revolutionary organizations independent of the CP. (3) The abolition of censorship and centralized control by the CP central apparatus over all the press, radio, and television media serving the workers of the CSSR. (4) The steps taken in the direction of workers self-management. (5) The project of introducing real federalism, real autonomy for the Czech and Slovak republics. All these reforms were converging toward a central point shaking the bureaucracy's monopoly of political power. Secondarily, in the eyes of the Soviet bureaucracy the transmission belts between the Kremlin and the Czechoslovak bureaucracy-that is supervision of the secret police, the security forces, and the Czechoslovak army by the Kremlin's direct agents—had to be defended or reestablished at all cost.
If we transfer this analysis to the political and social tensions that are mounting in the USSR, we can outline the paths which the rise of the political revolution will take there as follows: a struggle to deepen the de-Stalinization through the intellectuals and the youth demanding that the whole truth be told about Stalin's crimes, that all his victims be rehabilitated, that broad freedom of discussion be established not only in scientific matters (where it cannot be repressed) and in the artistic field but also in the areas of ideology and politics; a struggle for the reinstitution of the Leninist norms of party life, especially the right of tendencies; a struggle for real equal rights for nationalities in the Soviet Union and for a genuinely federal state system; defense of the interests of the workers not only as consumers but also and above all as producers, with a drive toward planning based on democratically centralized workers self-management.
These basic thrusts must be the axes of a transitional program for the bureaucratically deformed workers states. It is these thrusts which are beginning to develop in the USSR, which the Soviet bureaucracy fears more and more in its own country. The ferment in the Ukraine, where the Czechoslovak cause was very popular, clearly revealed their existence. And, far from repressing these drives, the military intervention in the CSSR doubtless even stimulated them. We have just learned from a confidential report transmitted by the Czechoslovak ambassador to Moscow, which was cited in Le Monde, that more than eighty cells of the CPSU [Communist party of the Soviet Union] protested against the military intervention in Czechoslovakia. For the first time since the Left Opposition was crushed, an open and public political opposition has manifested itself in the USSR. This is another aspect of the historic turn represented by the year 1968.
The bureaucracy in power in the workers states has not been insensitive to the driving forces of the political revolution that are gaining momentum. It has reacted in its own way by alternating concessions and repression and sometimes by a combination of the two. The question which many tendencies in the revolutionary movement have asked themselves—that is, how can you measure exactly the nature of the different political currents within the bureaucracy—cannot be answered unless you start from the conception of the program of political revolution as a coherent whole aimed at establishing a system of socialist democracy based on collective ownership and a planned economy. In fact, this political revolution must at once assure the democratic exercise of power by the workers, the manage ment of the economy by the workers themselves, a fundamental reversal of the more and more crystallized tendencies toward social inequality, and a return to a foreign policy aimed at supporting the process of the world socialist revolution.
Every one of the tendencies now showing up in the international Communist movement combine progressive reforms in some areas with clear regression in others. The Titoists advocate advances in workers self-management and in political democratization combined with increasingly pronounced social inequality and a more and more right-wing foreign policy. The Maoists advocate advances in the area of social equality and an international revolutionary line, combined with clear retrogression in the area of workers democracy and a refusal to raise the question of workers self-management. The Fidelistas share many of our views with regard to struggling against social inequality and for setting a course toward world revolution. They may move close to our point of view on democratically centralized workers self-management. But they do not understand the question of socialist democracy. Only our movement presents a coherent position on this question, a position which meets as a whole the fundamental problems posed by the necessity of reconstructing the societies arising from the overthrow of capitalism on the basis of the exercise of power by the working masses themselves.
IV. Some Problems in the Revival of the Colonial Revolution
The revival of the colonial revolution, the initial stages of which have been quite apparent for a year, poses a series of general and specific problems, which I want to review rapidly here. The general problems concern the social and political relationships between the different classes and social layers which in the last analysis govern the process of the colonial revolution. The specific problems have to do with the concrete obstacles which in the previous phase prevented a new leap forward by the colonial revolution in each of its main epicenters—the Latin-American revolution, the African revolution, the Southeast Asian revolution, and the revolution on the Indian peninsula. Since there is a separate discussion on the Latin-American resolution at this congress and many questions concerning the Arab revolution may be dealt with in depth at another point on the agenda, I will say a few words on the problems of the African revolution and on the revolution on the Indian peninsula.
First of all let us consider the general problems of the revival of the colonial revolution. The theses recall that one of the principal features of the period coincident with the imperialist counteroffensive of 1962-67 was the collapse of a series of traditional leaderships of the anti-imperialist movement, bourgeois or petty-bourgeois national leaderships that progressively exhausted their capacity to mobilize broad masses, or their political credit among the most exploited masses of their countries. The fall in succession of Nkrumah, Ben Bella, and Sukarno, the decline of the Congress party in India and the Muslim League in Pakistan, the decline of political Peronism in Argentina and of the APRA in Peru have been the clearest manifestations of this process of decomposition. In other cases this decline was only on the order of a loss of predominant influence within the vanguard, as in the case of Nasserism within the Arab revolutionary vanguard. But the phenomenon in itself seems universal. The whole mythology of the "third world" in the political sense of the term, of "active neutralism," and "nonengagement," as well as their Khrushchevist reflection in the theory of a "noncapitalist road of development" which at the same time would not be socialist, collapsed barely ten years after the Bandung conference.
Our movement has already stated its position on the causes of this collapse and a brief review will suffice in this regard. The social crisis in the semicolonial countries continued to deepen after independence was granted. The social contradictions sharpened. The mass movement continued to broaden. Theexamples of the Chinese, Cuban and Vietnamese revolutions exercised an ever more pronounced attractive power over the masses. On the other hand, imperialism accelerated this process of polarization by intervening in a more and more open counterrevolutionary manner. Under these conditions, there was no longer any historical margin for a limited bourgeois or petty-bourgeois anti-imperialism. The revolution on the one hand demanded more and more an immediate growing over toward socialist measures; on the other, it required a broadening mobilization of the increasingly radical masses against imperialism and its native allies. For all the well-known reasons involving social interests and political vacillations, the traditional national bourgeois and petty-bourgeois leaderships proved either incapable of making this turn or became even more stubbornly opposed to it. And so, the ground literally caved in under them.
But we also know that the retreat of the mass movement, resulting from the temporary successes that imperialism managed to win in its struggle against the colonial revolution can only be of brief duration. All the economic, social and political motivations which stimulate anti-imperialist struggle are still present. The reactionary teams installed in power with the aide or compliance of imperialism are incapable of extricating semicolonial society from its historical stagnation. The question then arises: Will this new rise of mass struggle—most clearly heralded by the great student mobilizations in Latin America in 1968, the growing resistance of the Palestinian masses to the Zionist occupation, the revolutionary rise in East and West Bengal, the unleashing of armed struggle in Indonesia, and the advances of the guerrillas in a series of Southeast Asian countries—will this new rise of the mass struggle be confronted with a compact bloc of imperialism, the traditional oligarchy, the comprador bourgeoisie, the national bourgeoisie, and the traditional petty-bourgeois national teams? Or will it instead be the signal for a new political differentiation within the conservative forces, for the appearance of new attempts to canalize the resurgent mass movement toward objectives other than those of socialist revolution?
We cannot yet give a categoric answer to this question but all the experience of the past ends to indicate the second variant. Imperialism, the national bourgeoisie, the nationalist petty bourgeoisie will continue to maneuver as long as they survive and have the minimum material means for maneuvering. The commitment of American imperialist forces in Southeast Asia, the necessity of reinforcing imperialism's clearly threatened European front; and the reduction of the reserves available to imperialism, especially as a result of the slowdown in economic growth and the dollar crisis, all strengthen the probability of certain retreats, of certain attempts to canalize the mass movement. The divisions which are appearing in the Indonesian and Brazilian dictatorships; the electoral farce in Thailand, which without any question has stimulated the process of the politicalizing of the masses; the reestablishment of a few democratic rights—very limited to be sure—in Ghana; and even the anti-imperialist maneuvers of the military junta in Peru are all indicators of new fissures appearing among the counterrevolutionary forces in the semicolonial countries.
Maneuvers of this type must be expected and it would be illusory to think that from here on out the masses will be faced only with a clear choice between open counterrevolution and permanent revolution. However, we must nonetheless stress that it is not to be concluded from this that there are still chances for a prolonged period of democratic freedoms and a constitutional climate paralleling a rise in the mass movement. In this regard, examples as geographically distant as the bloody repression of the student movement in Mexico and the restoration—temporary, we hope—of the military dictatorship in Pakistan indicate clearly that neither imperialism nor the native reaction in the semicolonial countries have abandoned what might be called "the Santo Domingo line." Whatever the cost, whatever may happen, they will not tolerate the rise of a revolutionary mass movement to an insurrectional level in which the masses are armed, even under a traditional bourgeois-liberal anti-Communist leadership. It is in this sense, that we speak of a new historic phase in the colonial revolution and an inevitable bypassing of these old leaderships through the process of permanent revolution.
On the specific problems of the African revolution in its present stage, I will limit myself to two remarks. First, we have submitted a discussion bulletin to this congress with three articles which seek to provide a Marxist analysis of the civil war in Nigeria. The articles were published by our African comrades themselves. A fourth contribution which came to us from Ghana arrived too late to be included in this bulletin and we will try to distribute it during the congress. In this civil war, revolutionary Marxism has been confronted with one of the most complex problems it has yet had to deal with—the problem of the formation of nationalities, of the birth of a national reality in countries where there has been no tradition of bourgeois national struggle and where tribalism and feudalism have provided the essential political structures of nationalism, even if this nationalism clearly involves phenomena of primitive capitalist accumulation. There is no need to stress the opportunities for maneuvering which this extreme example of uneven and combined development has offered imperialism and the Soviet bureaucracy. But it is important, above and beyond the specifically Nigerian aspect of this question, to understand the wider theoretical problem which this problem raises in an underdeveloped society like that existing in most of black Africa. In the course of the sharpening confrontation be tween the revolutionary and counterrevolutionary forces on the African continent, we can be certain that we will come on this problem again tomorrow in other countries.
Precisely because it is the only country in black Africa which is much more developed economically, socially, and culturally, South Africa occupies a special position in the process of the unfolding African revolution. For this reason, it is an imperialist bastion. The investments in South Africa represent, if you add them to those in Rhodesia, more than the private imperialist investment in all the rest of black Africa. For the same reason, there is a special kind of proletariat in South Africa very similar to the Cuban rural proletariat before the revolution. It is in part an industrial and mining proletariat and in part a proletariat of farm workers. It is alternately urbanized and sent back to its reservations. It is at one and the same time a poor peasantry and a proletariat. And because of this combined character it has an enormous objective capacity to rally the immense majority of the South African population in a resolute anti-imperialist and anticapitalist armed struggle.
On the basis of all their experience, our own South African comrades have reached the conclusion that this is the road to follow to carry out an uprising which promises to be without any doubt the most difficult in the history of Africa and one of the most difficult the world will witness. Imperialism can rely on a broad white bourgeois and petty-bourgeois layer which will fight with every means at its command. But the combativity and heroism of the masses will be equal to the oppression, exploitation, and innumerable humiliations which they suffer and of which they have become fully aware. To help our South African comrades organize this revolutionary struggle is one of the most important tasks of revolutionary Marxists throughout the world.
The problems of the revolution in the Indian peninsula take a different form today. In the immensity of this subcontinent, the ruling national bourgeoisie has not even succeeded in creating the political and legal framework of a unified national market and famine may reign in one district while bringing in surplus foodstuffs from a neighboring region is forbidden. Here the primary problem is to change an immemorial tradition of submission and apathy among the most exploited masses, which has been successively reinforced or consolidated by the caste system, British colonialist domination, and the Gandhian ideology of the bourgeoisie. It is improblable that in this immense country the revolution will break out everywhere at once. It is more likely that the uneven ripening of the revolutionary crisis will favor certain states like Bengal or Kerala. In any case, that is the eventuality which American imperialism is now actively preparing for. It expects the breakup of the Indian union.
In view of the dimensions of the country, the crystallized political forces, the explosive character of the poverty in the big proletarian cities, as long as the situation remains what it is, there is no reason to advocate small isolated uprisings in the countryside. Such uprisings cannot even assume the form of organized guerrilla warfare, to say nothing of a general peasant insurrection. To the contrary, what is needed is to promote bold experiments to revive and organize the most oppressed masses, the landless peasants and the agricultural workers in the countryside, and the slum dwellers of the big cities. This must be done to alter the relationship of social forces which remains unfavorable for the organized proletariat. The workers threaten to be drowned in the ocean of the Indian countryside. There, in my opinion, is where the key to the Indian revolution lies.
All the traditional organizations of the Indian workers movement, including the so-called left Communist party, have failed in this task, particularly because their leading cadres came almost without exception from the higher castes and from the landlord strata. If, after reinforcing their organization and training the number of cadres necessary to tackle such a task, our Indian comrades succeed in breaking with this tradition and plunging themselves into the work of revolutionary organization and action among these poorest masses, then the explosive nature of the situation in India will be apparent not just in Calcutta or among the plantation workers of Assam. Then, this explosiveness can surface in much vaster regions, which will be the natural cradles of the Indian revolution. Today, this advice may still seem premature, because we are still in the stage of assembling the initial cadres, without which broader action tomorrow will not be possible. But experience has taught us that these first cadres can be assembled more easily and more effectively if an organization has a longer term strategic plan, and this is what must be developed.
V. The Place of the Ninth World Congress in the Process of Building a New Revolutionary Leadership
The Fourth International finds itself today at a turning point in its history. This turning point has been made possible by the interaction of two factors. On the one hand, there is the new rise of the world revolution in which the imperialist countries have assumed a greater weight and which has taken some of the so-called classical forms of socialist revolution—with more massive intervention by the industrial proletariat in the process. Secondly, there is the appearance of a new youth vanguard on a world scale, which includes millions of college and high-school students, as well as young workers, who can be mobilized for anti-imperialist, anticapitalist, and objectively revolutionary causes. And within this new youth vanguard, the influence of the old traditional leaderships of the workers movement is in rapid decline, if not, in some places, virtually vanishing. These youth no longer have the old prejudices against revolutionary Marxism and Trotskyism.
The combination of these two factors has radically improved the chances for building our movement. It has created opportunities for revolutionary Marxists to fill the vacuum produced by the criminal passivity of the Khrushchevists and Social Democrats toward events like the American imperialist agression against the Vietnamese revolution. The role that our sections and our militants have been able to play in the struggle against the Vietnam war in many countries as distant from each other as Japan and Great Britain, Canada and Belgium; and the role they have been able to play in inspiring the antiwar movement in the United States and radicalizing it by stages have clearly demonstrated these new possibilities. Revolutionary Marxist militants have organized meetings attended by thousands. They have participated in demonstrations numbering some times in the tens of thousands. They have been able to speak to thousands and thousands of young people.
But it is in France that the juncture between a revolutionary upsurge and the primitive accumulation of revolutionary Marxist cadres really epitomized the new period of international Trotskyist expansion. Thanks to the bold and politically effective intervention of our young comrades in May and June, the bases were laid for a breakthrough by the revolutionary Marxist organization surpassing anything our movement has known in the past. This breakthrough makes it possible to envision an accelerated process of assembling young working-class cadres, which will prepare the way for a new qualitative leap—provided that the objective conditions do not change fundamentally and that serious errors in orientation can be avoided.
The example of France, we are convinced, can bear immediate fruit in several other countries, and not only in Europe. But this example must be studied and evaluated by our sections and militants in all countries most of all in order for them to appreciate the turn in our situation and the new dimensions of the problem of building revolutionary parties and a revolutionary international.
Of course, when we talk about the possibilities our movement has to achieve a breakthrough on the French model, we must immediately make it clear that this does not at all mean that we can build mass revolutionary parties in short order. It does not mean that we can rapidly build the kind of parties that could, under their own banner, lead mass struggles opening up the way to a seizure of power by the proletariat. The forces at our disposal are still too meager for us to realistically outline such a perspective for our organizations in the short run.
What we mean is a breakthrough beyond the threshold of "primitive accumulation" of cadres—that is a breakthrough creating organizations capable of intervening independently and boldly in the class struggle and in revolutionary combat. These organizations would not yet be revolutionary mass parties, but they would be already the nuclei of such parties. They would no longer be propaganda groups satisfied with propagating our program and our ideas in word and in writing and limiting their intervention to criticizing or denouncing the traitorous traditional leaderships. They would be organizations already able to demonstrate in action that a different solution is possible for the mass movement than the reformist and neoreformist line of the old leaderships. And because of this they could become a pole of attraction for the young and critical forces in the mass move ment, which have never been as numerous as they are today.
It is in the same spirit that we must approach the problem of how we can win or consolidate hegemony in the new vanguard against the adversaries we must face—essentially the Maoists, the spontanéists, and the Mao-spontanéists.
The obstacles these currents put on the road to building a revolutionary party do not derive so much from the strength of the ideas they represent. They reflect rather social factors militating against the construction of revolutionary Marxist parties—on the one hand, the attractive power of the Chinese revolution, including the "cultural revolution," which represents tens of millions of human beings; on the other hand, the specific social and psychological characteristics of the student milieu, which are not the sort to facilitate an understanding of the Leninist theory of the party and of the principles of organization and democratic centralism.
In confronting these obstacles, we can base ourselves on three factors which can counterbalance them and which must enable us-sooner in some countries, but in the not too distant future in an important series of countries—to become the main political force in the new youth vanguard.
The first of these factors is our theoretical and political superiority, which remains our principal card. Clearly the Maoists and spontanéists cannot counter our analyses with their confused and pragmatic, dogmatic and revisionist views which events will soon discredit. But in order for us to fully exploit this superiority, it is necessary for us to remain always on the alert, not to think that mere defense of the theoretical gains of Trotskyism is enough; it is necessary for us to approach open mindedly all the new phenomena which the reality of today's world, more complex, dialectical, and contradictory than ever, ceaselessly generates.
In recent years, our movement has made a considerable theoretical effort in analyzing phenomena like black nationalism in the United States, the economic contradictions of neocapitalism, the economic problems of the transitional period, and the sociology of the student revolt. The first foundations have been laid in the development of a transitional program in the bureaucratically deformed or degenerated workers states as well as in the analysis of the "bureaucratic bourgeoisie" and state capitalism in the semicolonial countries. And at this congress, the first elements of a transitional program for the youth are being added. All these questions require an ever deeper analysis, testing against experience and practice. And they need critical evaluation through the contribution that can be made by the new forces that are appearing in the revolutionary arena, such as the revolutionary left forces in the workers states, the young revolutionary forces in the countries caught up in the whirlwind of the colonial revolution, and the young forces in the imperialist countries of Europe, America, and Asia.
To maintain and increase our superiority in this area, it is more than ever necessary to free ourselves from all dogmatism, from any stereotyped recitation of formulas learned by heart, of any reluctance to cross swords at the highest appropriate theoretical level with all the new ideological tendencies promoted or revived by the revolutionary rise. The vanguard within which we are fighting for hegemony is neither simple minded nor ignorant, nor primitive. It is much more cultivated than similar vanguards in 1918-23 or 1944-48, not only as regards general culture but also in political culture. Simplistic answers and neat formulas will scarcely satisfy this vanguard. We hold all the cards to get the majority to agree that we are right. But to achieve this a constant struggle is necessary and this struggle makes it necessary also to constantly raise the level of our own publications and deepen our analysis of the world reality today and its great historical tendencies.
The second factor is a systematic attempt to extend the revolutionary organization among the working class, which by nature is less inclined to spontaneism than the student milieu.
All this organizational, theoretical, and political work is essential to win hegemony in the new youth vanguard. It is indispensable but it is not sufficient. The vanguard we are trying to win is no longer restricted to a handful of individuals who can be attracted by ideas. This vanguard already has a mass character. The masses—and this is a fundamental truth of Marxism and Leninismcan only be won in action. The breakthrough that we can make in a series of countries can equip us for action. In the stage that has now opened, our ability to build our organizations depends on our capacity to act, to take the initiative, and to lead actions that in practice draw in the healthiest sectors of the vanguard.
This does not mean yielding to the narrow activism of some spontanéist tendencies. But it does mean understanding that the profound break of the new youth vanguard with a certain type of debilitating politics which the Khrushchevist parties have given perfect examples of in many countries is also a break with everything which is purely verbal and literary, which is critical only at the theoretical level and which threatens to end in a pure play of words. The young generation is starved for action especially because it is revolted by the hypocrisy of all the leaderships which daily practice the opposite of what they affirm in their declarations of principles. Its skepticism toward us is essentially a skepticism toward any current known to be right but whose capacity to put its theory into practice is suspect. It is here that a decisive turn is necessary. The new conditions we are working under offer the means and the opportunity to make a turn toward action in several countries.
This appeal must not be misinterpreted or permitted to give encouragement to adventurism or activist excesses. With the limited forces at our disposal, we are duty bound to practice a strict economy in our activity, carefully weighing the risks and not proposing any actions which are beyond our means. Miscalculation on this score would inevitably lead to demoralization. But we must fully and completely understand what is new in the opportunities facing the Fourth International and not miss these chances out of routinism, skepticism, or an inability to understand the profound changes in the objective and subjective situation which are now in progress.
A young leader of my section, who already has rich experience in mass work in the student milieu ended a recent report on youth work with these words: "We will build our organization if we are able to demonstrate the necessity for its existence to the vanguard by our action itself." These words sum up admirably the task of the International in the period now opening. In different ways, depending on the different conditions of the revolutionary struggle in each country, these words apply to the work revolutionary Marxists are already engaged in in France and Bolivia, in the United States, in Japan, in South Africa, in Argentina, in Great Britain, in India, and in many other countries. If we are capable of carrying out this line, with all that it implies, then at the next congress we will be able to record, as many advances over the present congress as we can record today over the last world congress.