The present stage of building the Fourth International

I

SINCE THE Eleventh World Congress, the programmatic foundations and role of the Fourth International have been subjected to more and more systematic challenges in the course of internal discussions.

The stakes in this debate are high. In the first place, whereas most previous polemics and differences appeared as differences over the interpretation or implementation of a common programme, the present disagreements explicitly concern the very programmatic questions around which our movement originated. Second, this revision has been intiated by the leadership of the American Socialist Workers' Party (SWP), an organisation that constitutes one of the pillars of the International's continuity.

The majority of the United Secretariat, aware of the importance and far-reaching implications of the issues raised, proceeded with the utmost caution. The major questions were dealt with as they arose in a series of meetings of the United Secretariat (USec) and International Executive Committee (IEC):

• resolution on the Cuban revolution and the Castroist leadership (May 1981 IEC);

• reports on the Central American revolution and solidarity work (particularly at the May 1982 IEC and at the January, March and October 1983 USec meetings);

• resolutions on Poland at the January 1981 USec and May 1981 and May 1982 IECs;

• resolutions and reports on the Iranian revolution (August 1980 and January 1983 USecs);

• resolutions on the imperialist wardrive and the anti-war movement (October 1981 USec and May 1982 IEC);

• reports on the turn to industry (May 1981 and May 1982 IECs);

• finally, a discussion on the permanent revolution was initiated orally, on the basis of the articles of comrades Doug Jenness and Ernest Mandel (October 1982 USec).

Section leaderships were kept abreast and alerted of new developments in these debates. Section members were informed through the International Internal Discussion Bulletin and, in some cases, through publication of debating articles in our press.[1]

At the same time, we tried not to let the necessary discussion interfere with the life and activity of the International. We coordinated solidarity work with the Central American revolution and the Polish workers and our intervention in anti-war mobilisations in line with the means at our disposal. In addition to French Inprecor, we began the regular publication of a Polish Inprecor, of a Portuguese-language review entitled Perspectiva Internacional (in collaboration with the Brazilian comrades), and of International Viewpoint in English. We resumed publication of the review Quatrième Internationale. We re-established yearly European-wide educational meetings, and later workshops of the European and Latin American section leaderships (in 1983). We began to coordinate the relaunching of youth organisation building in Europe. Finally, and most importantly, we launched a permanent international school whose fourth session is due to begin in a few weeks.

While avoiding precipitating a crystallisation of the accumulating differences, we presented a first report synthesising the programmatic and organisational issues involved in building the International at the May 1982 IEC.[2] But on none of these questions, which had sometimes been placed on the agenda at the request of the SWP leadership comrades (as was the case with Cuba, the anti-war movement, and the building of the International), did we receive written counter-resolutions or counter-reports which would have made it possible to clarify the substance of the debate. The only exception was the counter-report on Poland presented by comrade John Steele of the Canadian section.[3]

Comrades of the SWP leadership have reduced their participation in the life of the International to a minimum. As early as late 1980, they withdrew from the day-to-day functioning of the USec Bureau; since then, their attendance at USecs and IECs has become irregular. At the same time, they presented the International with more and more accomplished facts and resorted to strongarm tactics. Although they failed to introduce any alternative document into the discussion on the 1981 IEC resolution on Cuba, they began changing their position to such an extent that they said they could no longer vote for the resolution adopted by the 1979 SWP convention. They did not even try to initiate a discussion on permanent revolution in the regular bodies of the International to check the positions of different comrades and attempt to influence them, but directly took the initiative of opening a public debate by publishing the articles of comrade Doug Jenness.

Instead of using all the necessary means to carry through the internal discussion on this question which they themselves considered decisive (up to and including a world congress discussion and vote), the comrades of the SWP leadership unilaterally took the responsibility of publicly announcing their decision to revise the founding programme of the Fourth International on this point in comrade Jack Barnes's December 1982 Chicago speech and in his article in the August 1983 issue of New International (Vol. 1, No. 1, p.13):

Permanent revolution does not contribute today to arming either ourselves or other revolutionists to lead the working class and its allies to take power and use that power to advance the world socialist revolution. As a special or unique frame of reference it is an obstacle to reknitting our political continuity with Marx, Engels, Lenin, and the first four congresses of the Communist International. It has been obstacle in our movement to an objective reading of the masters of Marxism, in particular the writings of Lenin.

We will return to the political content of this statement later. For the time being, we merely wish to point out that for a number of months the comrades had been presenting their position as simply an interpretation or updating of our founding programme.

They waxed indignant at us for supposing this was a revision. Today, comrade Barnes writes straightforwardly:

In some ways, the shift I am proposing is one of the biggest changes in our movement since we first emerged, more than half a century ago, as a distinct political current in world politics. Since that time, permanent revolution in all its meanings has been a guiding concept of our entire world movement, including the SWP. (NI, Vol. 1, No.1, p.81).

Now here is a revision that at least has the merit of being up front.

Nothing could be more legitimate than the desire to confront the theory of permanent revolution to the concrete revolutionary experience of colonial and semicolonial countries over the last 40 years; nothing could be more legitimate than the desire to make it more complete, more subtle, or to correct it if necessary. Comrades have an undeniable right to question this programmatic gain if they now think it is erroneous or has been invalidated by history. But before arriving at such a far-reaching conclusion, they should have arranged to conduct the discussion with the utmost seriousness, both in the SWP and in the International, in an organised fashion, through their established leading bodies. This is not a formal objection: on a question of this importance, the experience of the sections and sympathising organisations active on all continents can shed more light than the "innovations" drawn by the SWP leadership from its own limited and partial experience. In fact, this is precisely one of the International's functions and reasons to exist.

We might have decided to make this debate public through the channels and at a pace defined by the leading bodies of the International. Instead, the publication of Jack Barnes's article in August 1983 and at the very moment when the SWP's own regularly scheduled convention was postponed for a year, constituted a sort of coup d'etat inside the SWP and the International.

This method of approaching the decisive issues at stake is the root cause of the many organisational conflicts which have developed both with respect to the administrative handling of the SWP minorities opposed to the revision, and with respect to the increasing number of attacks the comrades have launched since 1981 against sections with neither prior consultation nor the acceptance of a written discussion of the issues raised: against the anti-military work of the French section, against the Mexican PRT and its solidarity work with the Salvadorean revolution, against the Australian SWP and its leadership.[4]

The situation has now come to the point where the debate must be settled by the world congress. Its very nature threatens to lock us into a quarrel between the ancients and the moderns, the dogmatists and the realists, the orthodox and the innovators. If we confined ourselves to defending the programmatic gains and banner of the Fourth International instead of coming to grips with the real party-building problems faced by the sections, we would confirm our adversaries' depiction of us as a fossilised sect. We would be regressing in relation to the efforts we have already undertaken with the establishment of the international school and the working meetings of the European Political Bureaus. This is why the preparation of the world congress must not be allowed to detract from this work. For the building of the International is first and foremost the building and development of its sections.

But it is equally indispensable to begin with a clarification of the programmatic discussion, a delineation of its terms and stakes, in order to define the solid ground on which we intend to move forward. Whatever the ways in which this discussion has cropped up in our ranks, it does not correspond to some oddity or diversion, but to concerns that are widely shared, although sometimes in different forms, within the workers and revolutionary movement across the world.

Before defining the stage of building of the Fourth International that we have reached, and how this stage fits in with the rebuilding of a mass revolutionary International, we must answer the vital and elementary questions that have been raised:

1) Should key aspects of the programme of the Fourth International be revised in light of the new events of the class struggle?

2) Can the turn to the Castroist current and the turn to industry constitute a line for building the International and its sections, as the US comrades have argued?

3) What type of International is necessary and possible to build today? How centralised should it be? What type of leadership system and functioning should it have?

I. Should our programme be revised?

1) What is at stake?

The SWP leadership comrades claim that their revision was motivated by a desire to be open to reality, which led them to abandon the sections of our programme that have proved to be "an obstacle" to revolutionary practice.

Questioning the validity of one or another point of our programme in the light of new events is a perfectly acceptable practice. But in this precise case, the SWP comrades have directly linked their proposed revision to an organisational challenge, thereby setting a relentless logic in motion. They no longer explain the isolation of the International and its sections — which they call its "semi-sectarian existence" — mainly on the basis of objective conditions, but on the basis of a programmatic malformation acquired at birth. They allege that by introducing his own pre-1917 conception of the permanent revolution into the International's programmatic foundations, Trotsky introduced the worm of sectarianism into the apple. This fact would help to explain both the lasting isolation of the International and the mistaken course of certain sections when faced with decisive tests such as the Chinese revolution and the Nicaraguan revolution. But if this were the case, one would have to probe still further and query the very nature and reason for existence of an international organisation built from the outset on a sectarian and false line for the entire colonial revolution.

Moreover, the revisions seldom come singly. If at the time of the founding of the Fourth International Trotsky was ultraleft and sectarian on the question of the permanent revolution in the dominated countries, why would he not have been on other key questions too, such as that of the political revolution in the Soviet Union?

The fact is that in proposing to junk the theory of permanent revolution, the comrades are not only proposing to get rid of an artificial "trademark" (New International, Vol. 1, No. 1, p.11) or an ultimatistic conception of the growing over of the democratic tasks into the socialists tasks in the course of the colonial revolution. As early as 1929, Trotsky considered that the theory of permanent revolution had three aspects. It had not only "established the fact that for backward countries the road to democracy passed through the dictatorship of the proletariat." (Permanent Revolution, p.132, Pathfinder Press). Its "second aspect" posited "the permanent character of the socialist revolution as such", which by the mid-1930s was concretised in the necessity for a political revolution to overthrow the totalitarian dictatorship of the bureaucracy in the USSR. The "third aspect" emphasised the international character of the revolution and counterposed the extension of the socialist revolution to the Stalinist theses on building socialist in one country. From the 1930s on, this international extension of the socialist revolution includes the indissociable tasks of defending the gains of the October revolution and struggling for the overthrow of the ruling Soviet bureaucracy.

By curtailing their heritage to the Trotsky of the first congresses of the Communist International and renouncing his systematisation of the theory of permanent revolution, the comrades are at one and the same time sliding towards a line of "reform" of the bureaucratically deformed and degenerated workers states, a line of peaceful and gradual democratisation which would empty the necessity of political revolution of any real content.

We had already noted this point in comrade Barnes's written report on the workers and farmers government circulated at the May 1982 IEC: "This is what we think the permanent revolution is," wrote Barnes. "It is the strategic vision of the world socialist revolution that integrates the proletarian revolution in the developed capitalist countries, the anti-imperialist democratic and socialist revolution in the colonial and semicolonial countries, and the fight to defend, extend, and democratise the workers states."[5] In this quote, the political revolution has disappeared and been replaced by the defence and democratisation of the workers states, indistinctively. The phrase was removed from the final version of the document on the workers and farmers government published in the internal bulletin. Probably not to correct this quote on the workers states, but rather because comrade Barnes seems in the meantime to have radically moved away from the understanding of the permanent revolution which he still supported at the time.

However comrade Steele's report on Poland is a broad confirmation of the beginning of a revision on the political revolution.[6]

The comrades of the SWP majority, then, believe that the Fourth International suffered from excessive programmatic definition. By adopting as part of its heritage false or superfluous tenets, it fostered the chronic sectarianism of some of the organisations identified with Trotskyism. The tendency platform submitted by comrades Hoffman and Heredia takes the opposite tack.[7] They believe the International's problems arise mainly from a lack of definition and programmatic timidity in dealing with the characterisation of the bureaucratised workers states.

These challenges to key tenets of the programme cannot be simply the result of an accidental combination of circumstances. They reflect doubts about the perspective of building the International in the present situation. The doubts spring from questions about the revolutionary potential of the proletariat of the industrialised capitalist countries. This gives birth to a two-fold temptation.

The first is to replace the international class struggle with a struggle between camps: this approach, in the name of some pseudo-realism, reduces revolutionary strategy to support of revolutions in the colonial countries, defence of the workers states against imperialism and workerist propagandism in the imperialist countries themselves. Thus we witnessed the SWP comrades tone down their solidarity work with Solidarnosc in the name of the priority of the anti-imperialist struggle. We saw them adopt tail-endist positions towards the bourgeois leaderships involved in the Iranian revolution and the Malvinas war. And we heard them go over to the thesis that the entire skilled proletariat of the imperialist metropolises allegedly constitutes a labour aristocracy and is responsible for the reformist policy of its leaderships (with the exception of the less skilled and more exploited sectors, particularly the immigrant workers).

Conversely, the idea is beginning to arise in a confused way that the Fourth International cannot hope to play a significant role in countries where the industrial proletariat is not sufficiently developed. In this view, the International's role should be to concentrate more and more on defending political revolution and socialist democracy which, allegedly, can only be generated by the large proletarian armies of the imperialist countries and the most industrialised workers states. This alternate version of propagandism is sometimes rounded out in Europe with the perspective of a long march through the majority organisations of the working class which, in the last analysis, reflect the low level of consciousness of the working class itself.

Both these temptations derive in part from differences in the appreciation of the international situation which is dealt with in the draft resolution adopted by the October 1983 USec.[8]

Under normal conditions, the world congress preparations would not require a reaffirmation of programmatic points that are part of the very foundations of the International. A discussion on party-building should confine itself to defining the concrete tasks posed by events, and drawing from that analysis of the situation political and organisational guidelines for the main countries.

However, in a situation where the programmatic and historical foundations of the International have been explicitly challenged, it would be irresponsible to pretend not to notice, and continue a routine discussion that would avoid a reappraisal of the major questions at issue.

2) The revolutionary heritage and historic role of the Fourth International

The Fourth International places itself in the continuity of the Communist International and carries on the revolutionary heritage of its first congresses. From its inception, it has added the programmatic lessons of the major experiences of the class struggle, ranging from the Russian revolution to the defeat of the Spanish revolution, and including the defeat of the Second Chinese revolution, the victory of Nazism in Germany and the Moscow trials. These are the lessons that are brought out in the definitional documents of the Fourth International which are the Eleven Points of the Left Opposition of 1933 and the Transitional Programme of 1938:

• intransigent defence of class independence against all forms of class collaboration;

• recognition of the international, "and therefore permanent" character of the proletarian revolution, against the theory of the building of socialism in one country;

• characterisation of the USSR as a workers state, despite its bureaucratic degeneration, and of the need to defend it against imperialism;

• the necessity of a political revolution to overthrow the dictatorial rule of the bureaucracy;

• "rejection of the formula of the democratic dictatorship of the workers and peasants as a regime separate from the dictatorship of the proletariat winning over the support of the peasant masses and of the oppressed masses in general; rejection of the anti-Marxist theory of a peaceful growing over of the democratic dictatorship into a socialist dictatorship";[9]

• the importance of transitional slogans for the mobilisation of the masses towards the conquest of power, and the particular role of democratic slogans against national oppression and various sorts of dictatorships;

• the necessity for a united front policy counterposed not only to class collaboration in all its forms but also to divisive policies such as that followed by the Communist International during the "third period";

• the necessity for a democratically centralised revolutionary vanguard party and a genuine mass revolutionary International;

• respect for internal party democracy.

Nothing in these fundamental points of the Fourth International's programme can be described as superfluous or as an artificially-nurtured idiosyncracy that doomed the FI to the fate of a sect. They include only the major programmatic delineations that come out of the experience of the workers movement and are indispensable from the standpoint of the world revolution, that is from the standpoint of the defence of the historic and international interests of the proletariat. In his article, Jack Barnes points out that when Trotsky became convinced that a new International was necessary in 1933, he insisted that "there was no parallel necessity to lay a new theoretical foundation, to develop a new programme and strategy" (New International, Vol. 1, No. 1, p.55). This is partially true insofar as the Communist International and its first congresses laid the irreplaceable foundations for all revolutionary strategy. But it is false insofar as the Fourth International could not be content to defend the CI's programme against Stalinist reaction. It had to face a new historical phenomenon of major significance for our epoch: the bureaucratic degeneration of the first workers state and its catastrophic consequences for the entire communist movement.

From this standpoint, the incorporation of the analysis of bureaucratic degeneration and of the struggle for political revolution and socialist democracy into the revolutionary programme did not constitute a mere "enrichment". It laid the foundation for a new current of the international workers movement intent on remaining true to the interests of the workers of the whole world, including those living under the boot of the bureaucracy.

From the standpoint of the world proletariat, there is no possible minimum revolutionary programme. Returning to the first four congresses of the Communist International represents an important step forward for organisations and currents that are breaking with the Stalinist tradition or coming over to communism in the present context of the crisis of Stalinism. In some countries, it can open the road to a sincere revolutionary struggle for the conquest of power and the abolition of capitalism. But, in and of itself, it is not sufficient to lay the necessary programmatic foundations for rebuilding a genuine Communist International and beginning to resolve the crisis of revolutionary leadership on a world scale.

Such an International must take into acount the needs and demands of the millions of proletarians in Poland, the Soviet Union and China. It must respond to the arms race and war-drive from an internationalist point of view. These are major questions that concern the proletarians of imperialist and dominated countries as well as of the bureaucratised workers states.

This is why we maintain that many intermediate positions and subtle shades of opinion can arise between the Social Democratic, Stalinist, and revolutionary Marxist currents within the international workers movement, but no new fundamental historic current from the programmatic point of view. In practice such intermediate currents are decisive for building a mass revolutionary party in this or that country, and eventually for the building of a mass International — we will return to this point; but establishing a dialogue and ultimately converging with them does not imply that we should indulge in programmatic self-mutilation.

Our attractiveness for these groups lies precisely in the fact that we are the continuators of a historical tradition that goes back to the big tests and lessons of the Russian revolution, that we really exist on an international scale and that consequently we can help orient them with respect to the various currents of the workers movement. On the other hand if we are talking about immediate strategy for the conquest of power, we have much to learn from them and find ourselves in the position of pupils. We wholeheartedly and modestly accept this role without however throwing overboard the lessons history has taught us.

Just as we cannot afford to slice any fundamental point off the programme that defines us historically, we cannot either add any superfluous particularism to it. History did not stop in 1933 or 1938. We have to learn from all the great experiences of the workers since then, from the victory of the Chinese, Yugoslav, Cuban, Vietnamese, and Central American revolutions as well as from the defeats and setbacks in Indonesia, Chile, Iran, Portugal, Czechoslovakia... Each new major event requires that we subject our gains to the test of practice and tasks.

All these lessons have made possible a considerable enrichment of the strategic and tactical experience of the workers movement in its struggle for the conquest of political power. But to this day, no event of the magnitude of the Russian revolution or of the bureaucratic degeneration of the first workers state has yet to cause a general realignment of forces inside the international workers movement.

3) The permanent revolution: "an obstacle"?

One of the reasons some time went by before the current discussion became clear was that the SWP majority comrades hesitated before choosing the best approach to present and argue for their revision. They began by correcting the theory of the permanent revolution by generalising the need for an intermediate workers and farmers government stage. Eventually they decided on a frontal revision. This has enhanced the clarity of the discussion.

According to J. Barnes, Trotsky allegedly began after 1927 to say that he had been right on some important strategic questions before 1917, "in particular on those associated with his theory of the permanent revolution." This is how he allegedly "began a process of blurring the line of revolutionary continuity growing out of the Comintern programme and strategy" (New International, Vol. 1, No. 1, p.50).

But this approach to the question is precisely the best way to blur what is at stake in the discussion. First of all, Trotsky did not begin to claim his pre-1917 positions were correct in 1927: he already defended the continuity of his own position in New Course and Lessons of October. But something new did happen in the 1920s, not in Trotsky's head, but in reality: the defeat of the Second Chinese revolution and the systematisation throughout the Communist International of a stagist line that led to a disastrous subordination of the proletariat to the national bourgeoisie in the course of the democratic revolution. Contrary to Stalinist myths, there is no doubt that Lenin and Trotsky would have stood on the same side of the barricade against such a line.

The clarifications Trotsky made in The Permanent Revolution in 1928 are therefore not a return to the old ultraleft demons of his youth, as suggested by Barnes, but indispensable clarifications that correspond to new practical (the Second Chinese revolution) and theoretical developments (the theory of revolution by stages) that arose after the first four congresses of the Communist International.

In this crucial debate between permanent revolution and revolution by stages, there is no reason why we should sound a retreat or look for some conciliation through an impossible third solution at the very moment when growing sectors of the revolutionary movement, especially in Central America, are more or less explicitly repudiating the Stalinist theory and its Maoist variants in the light of their own experiences.

Already on the basis of the experience of the Cuban revolution, Che Guevara categorically condemned the Stalinist policy in Latin America: "Either socialist revolution or caricature of a revolution!" Comrades Barnes himself quotes the Cuban Communist Party programme in his article:

"This situation, in which the objectives of national liberation and of a democratic nature had to be implement by the working class at the head of the State power, conditioned the close interrelationship between the measures and tasks of the first and the second stages of our Revolution and the uninterrupted character of the transformations leading to the transition from one stage to the other in the context of a single revolutionary process."

He also quotes the intervention made by Jesus Montané in the name of the Cuban delegation at the 1983 International Conference on the Revolutionary Process in Latin America:

"On this continent, we are witnessing an inseparable merger of the class and national struggles, a unique combination of the fight for democracy and for socialism, the fight for anti-imperialist liberation together with urban and rural workers actions against capitalist exploitation.

These conclusions flow from a half-century of experiences on the continent and were foreshadowed by Mella, Mariategui, Farabundo Marti and confirmed by the Cuban revolution, the Chilean defeat, the imperialist intervention in the Dominican Republic, the series of coups in Bolivia, Argentina, Brazil, the revolutionary victory in Nicaragua and the civil war in El Salvador. The Chinese and Vietnamese Communist Parties have drawn similar conclusions from their own experiences on this question.

Today even the general secretary of the Salvadoran Communist Party is forced to take these lessons into account. Indeed, Shafik Handal, who is a major source of quotes in comrade Barnes's article, wrote:

"One can't go to socialism except by the democratic anti-imperialist path, but neither can the democratic anti-imperialist revolution be consummated without going on to socialism.

"To the extent that between these two there is an essential and indissoluble connection," Handal explains, "they are facets of one revolution and not two revolutions ... The democratic anti-imperialist revolution will not appear to us as a separate revolution but rather as the realisation of the tasks of the first phase of the socialist revolution."

We are not discussing at this time either Handal's practice or the totality of his ideas. But while he claims not to know where these ideas came from he does admit that the Latin American Communist Parties worked for years "with the idea of two revolutions," and looked upon the Cuban experiences as a "particular exception." This allegedly is what led them to subordinate themselves to the national, or allegedly national, bourgeoisie, and renounce taking the leadership of the struggle for power.

The fact is, this was one of the key issues at stake in the fight inside the Communist International during the 1920s. The entire history of revolutions since that time, and unfortunately that of the defeats too, confirmed its conclusions. To decide now to transform the Trotsky-Stalin clash of 1927 into a controversy between Lenin and Trotsky before 1917, that is before the practical tests of the Russian revolution and Second Chinese revolution, amounts to nothing less than the creation of a diversion and the "blurring" of those conclusions.

This is why, contrary to comrade Barnes's assertions, there is nothing in the sixth of the Eleven Points of the Left Opposition that can be dispensed with: "Rejection of the formula of the democratic dictatorship of the workers and peasants as a separate regime, distinct from the dictatorship of the proletariat with the support of the peasant masses and oppressed masses in general; rejection of the anti-Marxist theory of the peaceful growing over of the democratic dictatorship into a socialist dictatorship." What is at issue here is the irreconcilable and practical opposition between the theory of the permanent revolution and the Stalinist version of the "democratic dictatorship" as a regime separate and distinct from the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Revolutionaries who are breaking in practice with Stalinist stagist conceptions do not spontaneously think this through in the framework of the ideas of the Permanent Revolution. More often than not they conceive it as a return to Lenin's formulation of the Democratic Dictatorship of the Workers and Peasants. Many reasons explain why the rupture with Stalinism takes this form. It helps to open up debate among revolutionaries. In fact Lenin's position was ambiguous on the transformation of the bourgeois revolution into a socialist revolution, and could lead either to a stagist dynamic or to a dynamic of permanent revolution. The differences that emerged in the Bolshevik party in 1917 illustrate these two possibilities. Our job today is not to set ourselves up as judges of the debate between Lenin and Trotsky before 1917 but rather to clarify it historically in the light of the later lessons of the Russian, Chinese, Cuban and other revolutions.

The difference between Lenin and Trotsky before 1917 can be discussed as much as one wants. This is a historical and theoretical question about which many viewpoints have already been expressed inside the Fourth International. However, the thesis of the sixth point of the Left Opposition is a dividing line between revolutionaries and reformists in the colonial revolution. It is consistent from its first to its last word since there cannot be "a peaceful growing over" of the Stalinist-style democratic dictatorship (as a regime separate and distinct from the dictatorship of the proletariat) into a socialist dictatorship; nor can the building of socialism be undertaken without a revolutionary conquest of power. On the other hand, there can and must be a growing over of the democratic and national tasks of the revolution into socialist tasks, in the framework of a dictatorship of the proletariat.

On this essential point the Cuban, Vietnamese and Nicaraguan revolutions, and negatively the Indonesian disaster and the bourgeois normalisation currently underway in Iran, confirm the immediate relevance of the theses of the permanent revolution: "For countries with a belated bourgeois development, especially for the colonial and semi-colonial countries, the theory of the permanent revolution means that the genuine and complete solution of the democratic and national liberation tasks can only be the dictatorship of the proletariat standing at the head of the oppressed nation, above all the peasant masses." The truth is that just as those who stop making revolutions halfway are digging their own grave, those who in the epoch of the putrefaction of imperialism stop the revolution at its bourgeois democratic "stage" are handing the revolution over to its gravediggers. And now the course of the Nicaraguan revolution since Somoza's overthrow is also verifying this law of the growing over of the democratic revolution into a socialist revolution, a process which is necessary if the democratic conquests themselves are to be consolidated.

At first, fractions of the bourgeoisie may participate in the struggle against a foreign occupation or a military dictatorship. But as soon as the struggle sinks roots through social measures that harm the interests of landowners and more generally of private property, they abandon the fight and turn against the workers and poor peasants. Sandino correctly predicted that only the workers and peasants would carry the struggle against imperialism through to the end. All the victorious revolutions of dominated countries have confirmed that the land question is at the heart of the alliance between the proletariat and peasantry.

"Not only the land question, but also the national question, assign the peasantry which constitutes the overwhelming majority of the population in backward countries, a primary role in the democratic revolution. Without an alliance between the proletariat and peasantry, the tasks of the democratic revolution cannot be solved; they cannot even be posed seriously. But the alliance of these two classes will only be achieved by a relentless struggle against the influence of the liberal national bourgeoisie." This thesis of the "permanent revolution" puts the alliance of the proletariat and peasantry at the very centre of the revolutionary strategy in the dominated countries and categorically gives the lie to the Stalinist slanders concerning an alleged Trotskyist "under-estimation" of the peasantry.

Likewise it is also false that the theory of the permanent revolution advocates in ultraleft fashion the immediate socialisation of all the means of production or that it predetermines the pace for passing from the democratic tasks to the socialist tasks.

What it emphasizes is the necessity for the conquest of political power and establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat which can then serve as the instrument for these later transformations, and make it possible to manoeuvre, to gain time if necessary, and even to organise temporary retreats, as was the case with the New Economic Policy in the USSR.

By contrast, any attempt to manage the bourgeois state apparatus and progressively transform it from within, will lead to a counter-revolutionary bloodbath. This is the heart of the difference between the victorious Cuban revolution and the crushing of the Chilean revolution. "Whatever the initial episodic stages of the revolution in different countries, the revolutionary alliance of the proletariat and peasantry is only conceivable under the political leadership of the proletarian vanguard organised as a Communist Party. This in turn means that the democratic revolution is conceivable only by means of a dictatorship of the proletariat basing itself on an alliance with the peasantry and starting by solving the tasks of the democratic revolution."

On the basis of experience, then, the theory of the permanent revolution establishes the line of march of the revolution, the necessary continuity linking the democratic revolution and socialist revolution, the leading role of the proletariat and the proletarian character of the future revolutionary regime. Contrary to the Stalinists' often repeated accusations, it does not confuse the starting point with the point of arrival. It does not exclude the existence of phases or stages in the framework of an uninterrupted process. Nor does it exclude the possibility of temporary alliances with anti-imperialist or anti-dictatorial factions of the bourgeoisie.

It is true that some groups identified with Trotskyism have often given the theory of the permanent revolution a caricatural, sectarian and ultimatistic interpretation. These "pure socialists" who were mainly preoccupied with not getting their hands dirty and keeping immaculate theory at a safe distance from practice, waited for a chemically pure proletarian revolution and sometimes were not able to recognise the revolution as it was when it really appeared before them. This what happened to the Chinese Trotskyists, or at least to one of their factions, in 1949.[10] This was also what happened to the Lambertist current when the Nicaraguan revolution happened in 1979. And it also happened to minority currents within our own organisation when the Vietnamese revolution happened.

Fortunately, the International as a whole has been able to avoid such a sectarian degeneration. It is a process that must be fiercely fought. It is the product of isolation, of a distorted relation between theory and practice, and of an interpretation of the colonial revolution that reduces it to the schemas of the class struggle in developed capitalist countries. Today, given the magnitude of the social and economic crisis convulsing the dominated countries, any dogmatic failure to undestand the importance of national and democratic demands, of the role of the peasantry, of potential tactical alliances against the dictatorship or imperialism, would doom our sections to political impotence in the face of the real course of the class struggle.

The theory of Permanent Revolution provides us with the necessary historical framework. It does not mean we can dipense with a concrete, case by case analysis of social formations and class relations. Neither does it automatically define a correct strategy and an effective political line towards the conquest of power. Confining ourselves to the reaffirmation of sweeping historical tendencies would lock us into a vicious circle of objectivism (seeing the process of permanent revolution as a sort of natural and inevitable march of history) and sectarianism (towards organisations which have led victorious revolutions in their countries without, for all that, being revolutionary Marxists). If instead of being interested mainly in general characterisations of parties like Chinese, Vietnamese or Yugoslav CPs, we had studied more attentively their concrete politics we would have been in a better position to perceive their contradictions and assimilate those aspects of their experience that were more generally applicable. If the theory of Permanent Revolution becomes nothing more than reminders of great principles and warnings from the sidelines, then concrete politics, revolutionary strategy and their agent (the revolutionary party) tend to be dissolved in a vast objective movement of history. Neither is it sufficient to respond in a liberal and tolerant way to the political and strategic dimension of these problems, for example, with respect to alliances — without saying positively what we would have done in Nicaragua or El Salvador and what we have to do in Peru or Uruguay. Thus the debates between the three FSLN components before the seizure of power, or those which divide the Salvadoran revolutionary organisations today, cannot be resolved by simply referring to the theory of permanent revolution. In each case this theory must be expressed in concrete policies, and this process of concretisation involves a great deal of interpretation — including among revolutionaries.

But blaming the theses of the permanent revolution themselves and Trotsky for the sectarianism of some of his disciples would amount to doing Stalinism a belated and unexpected favour. In his struggle against Stalinist policy, Trotsky traced a general orientation and posted some warning signs. In this framework we have a lot to learn in terms of strategy in the struggle for power (how to combine mass struggles, guerrilla warfare and insurrection), in terms of peasant struggles and tactical alliances with sectors of the bourgeoisie, in terms of economic and institutional transitional measures after the conquest of political power, in terms of forming new revolutionary parties.

But to assimilate these lessons we need not "blur" and soften the main frontal line. What Lenin and Trotsky both shared before 1917 in opposition to the Mensheviks was the conviction that the liberal bourgeoisie was incapable of waging a sustained struggle against the autocracy. Trotsky never thought this forever after forbade alliances with this or that faction of the bourgeoisie on the terrain of action, and on condition that the banners not be confused, that the political and organisational independence of the proletariat be scrupulously defended (contrary to what happened in China at the time of the alliance with the Kuomintang in 1925-1926) and that the mobilisation of the masses not be subordinated to these agreements.

In Nicaragua, with every advance of the revolutionary struggle for the overthrow of Somoza, we saw the opposition bourgeoisie, which had initially joined the Broad Opposition Front, seek to conciliate the dictatorship and imperialism. At that point the initiative and the centre of gravity of the struggle definitely passed to the side of the workers and peasants. The United People's Movement and the Sandinista Front asserted their hegemony within the National Patriotic Front (FPN) set up in early 1979, and the Chamorros and Robelos found themselves in a subordinate position as was subsequently verified by history. As soon as Somoza was overthrown, the Sandinista leadership asserted both its willingness to make compromises in the economic field and its determination to keep the instruments of political and military power in its own hands (formation of the Sandinista people's army and militia, conflicts with the bourgeoisie over the composition of the Council of State and the scheduling of elections).

The overthrow of bourgeois rule and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat does not automatically imply the immediate socialisation of the means of production and the beginning of a planned economy. In dominated countries, the dictatorship of the proletariat begins on the political terrain with the tasks of the "national democratic revolution." The masses involved in this revolution are not always immediately ready for a conscious struggle for socialism. Seizing imperialist properties beginning the land reform and a literacy campaign are often the first tasks on the agenda. However, as soon as the revolution resolutely advances on that path, social differentiations among the peasantry begin to deepen and new showdowns with the bourgeoisie loom in the near future.

There is no general formula that dictates in advance the pace and forms of the growing over of democratic tasks into socialist tasks. As long as revolutionary leadership exists, there is no Chinese wall between the democratic beginning of the revolution and its socialist completion.

Trotsky was quite conscious of the difference between the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat at the political level and its consolidation by means of transformations that bring the economy from continuing production for the market to planned production, and he therefore established a distinction between dictatorship of the proletariat and the socialist dictatorship: "A government based directly on the proletariat and through its intermediary on the revolutionary peasantry, does not yet signify a socialist dictatorship; ...

... the true democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry, that is, the one which actually destroyed the regime of autocracy and serfdom and snatched the land from the feudalists, was accomplished not before October but only after October; it was accomplished, to use Marx's words, in the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat supported by the peasant war — and then, a few months later, began growing into a socialist dictatorship. (P. 230-1, Permanent Revolution, Pathfinder)

When Trotsky refers here to "socialist dictatorship," his intention is not to suggest some alleged socialist relations of production or some alleged socialist mode of production. He is merely establishing a terminological distinction between the conquest of political power (dictatorship of the proletariat) and its consolidation by the institution of the first radical measures expropriating both the urban and rural bourgeoisie. This distinction corresponds to the very nature of proletarian revolution. Unlike the bourgeois revolution, it begins with the conquest of political power which then becomes the instrument for transforming social relations and the material and cultural situation of the proletariat itself. There is therefore no simultaneity between the conquest of power and the social transformations. Quite the contrary, in most cases, there is a time gap between the political establishment of proletarian rule and the social consolidation of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

This is the objective root of the difficulties we have often had in producing an immediate characterisation of revolutionary proletarian power at the moment of its birth. In the case of the October revolution mentioned by Trotsky, the insurrection settled the dual power situation at the political level, under the leadership of an internationalist revolutionary party, and established a dictatorship of the proletariat based on a soviet system but without having yet swept away all elements of dual power in society.

In the later cases of the Chinese, Cuban, and Nicaraguan revolutions, such a soviet system did not exist. And while the parties that led the seizure of power acted as revolutionary parties, they were nevertheless qualitatively different from the Bolshevik leadership of 1917.

But it is precisely because the establishment of workers power begins with the conquest of political power, that subjective factors such as the forms of organisation of the mass movement and the nature of its leadership are initially decisive. This was the source of the many hesitations that occurred in recognising the proletarian character of the Chinese revolution as of 1949, and that of the Vietnamese revolution as of 1975.

The very nature of proletarian revolution and the specificity of each revolution make it impossible to construct a general concept or formula of the transition that would be more precise than the distinction indicated by Trotsky.

There have been two symmetrical attempts to discover a universal concept of the transition from the bourgeois state to the workers state that would encompass all the revolutions that have been victorious to this day; both have run into insurmountable theoretical contradictions. Thus, at the time of their honeymoon, Moreno and Lambert came up with the idea that all the revolutions that had led to the establishment of workers states, except the Russian revolution itself, had been merely "February revolutions" because they had not experienced soviet forms of organisation of power. This attempt leads purely and simply to mixing under a single label workers states (even though bureaucratised) and the bourgeois state which the Russian state still was, army and institutions included, after the February 1917 revolution and before the October insurrection!

On the other hand, the comrades of the SWP majority were tempted to generalise the application of the Workers and Farmers Government concept so that it no longer was a pseudonym for the dictatorship of the proletariat but an intermediate historic stage between the bourgeois state and the workers state, necessary in all revolutions including in the imperialist countries and the United States, and retroactively in the Russian revolution.

The result according to them is that the dictatorship of the proletariat allegedly only emerged in the USSR in June 1918, and not when power was conquered in October 1917.

On this question of the workers and farmers government, comrade Barnes' article signals a cautious retreat. The notion of workers and farmers government is no longer central to it. When it does appear, it does so clearly with the meaning of first step of the dictatorship of the proletariat:

Such a government, emanating from a victorious popular revolution, opens the road to the consolidation of the dictatorship of the proletariat ...

Workers and farmers governments are characterised by a stage in the class struggle where capitalist property relations have not yet been abolished, but where the workers and farmers have conquered political power through a genuine revolution. The main task of proletarian revolutionists in such a government is to organise, mobilise, and raise the class consciousness of the working class and its allies, to lead them through the class struggle to the expropriation of the bourgeoisie and the consolidation of a workers base. (New International, Vol. 1, No. 1, p.35)

Here, the workers and farmers government is clearly defined as the product of a victorious revolution, opening the way to the consolidation of the workers state or dictatorship of the proletariat, that is as the beginning of this very dictatorship of the proletariat. Comrade Barnes himself confirms this a few lines later: "We see the workers and farmers government as the first stage of the dictatorship of the proletariat" (New International, Vol. 1, No. 1, p.75).

It is true that the transition from the dictatorship of the proletariat to the socialist dictatorship (to use Trotsky's very formulas) or from the conquest of political power to the transformation of property relations can proceed relatively more slowly in a scarcely industrialised country and in certain international circumstances. Conversely, in industrialised dependent countries, and all the more so in imperialist countries, the democratic and socialist tasks are intimately interconnected and follow each other in close succession.

It is now clear that the nub of the issue is the question of permanent revolution and not that of the workers and farmers government which is merely a partial aspect of the former. But on this question, the dividing line between our revolutionary heritage and the pall of Stalinist reaction is not being "blurred" by Trotsky but by comrade Barnes himself.

4) Upward or downward revision of the political revolution?

We have already pointed out that the theory of permanent revolution also concerns the strategic perspective of extending the revolution in counterposition to the Stalinist thesis of building socialism in one country. On an international scale, this extension of the revolution also signifies the overthrow of the ruling bureaucracy in China and the USSR, and several other states.

The apparatus of the bureaucratically degenerated and deformed workers states has become an instrument of bureaucratic violence against the working class which remains an exploited class deprived of its political power.

The bureaucratic management of the planned economy inexorably leads to wastefulness and the smothering of productive forces.

These states remain workers states insofar as production is organised on the basis of collective ownership of the means of production, labour power is not a commodity in the full sense of the term, and a monopoly of foreign trade enables the state to control the influence of the world market on the economy. The bourgeoisie has been expropriated, capitalism abolished, and the essential elements of a planned economy exist.

In this sense and this sense only do we uphold the need to defend the gains of the workers states, even though bureaucratised, against any attempt at capitalist restoration. But the defence of the workers states and the extension of the revolution imply a ruthless struggle against the bureaucracy which is the chief saboteur of the foundations of the workers state.

The anti-bureaucratic political revolution is not a mere reform or democratisation of the bureaucratic apparatuses, a sort of revolution without a revolution. It is a genuine revolution whose goal is to overthrow the bureaucracy without restoring capitalism. It implies an uprising of the oppressed masses against the totalitarian dictatorship of the bureaucracy.

The entire experience of mass movements in the bureaucratised workers states, from the East Berlin uprising of 1953, to the workers struggles in Poland, and including the Hungarian uprising of 1956, and the "Prague spring", confirms this line of march.

The Polish experience which has unfolded over the last three years constitutes both a resounding confirmation of the general programme of political revolution and an enrichment of its strategy and tactics.

Right from the 1980 negotiations in Gdansk, the workers disproved the bureaucracy's claim to be the representative and embodiment of the working class. By setting the elected representatives of the strikers against those of the bureaucratic state apparatus, they tore the mask off the usurpers. The most elementary economic demands very rapidly become charged with a directly political content and pass from challenges to bureaucratic privileges to a questioning of the choices of bureaucratic management and to the conclusion that socialism is not only the statisation of the means of production but also their socialisation through a system of workers self-management and democratic planning of society's development.

Democratic demands such as freedom of information, of organisation, or trade union independence from the state, likewise become charged with a concrete class content and lead to a challenge to the bureaucracy's monopoly on political power. Free elections, the right for several parties to exist are not just political freedoms but the necessary conditions for actual democratic planning and a real mobilisation of the masses.

Finally, the overthrow of the bureaucratic dictatorship implies the destruction of the coercive apparatus of the state which the bureaucracy has shaped over the years to suit its own needs.

Just as the bureaucracy cannot be identified with the working class, so the bureaucratised workers state cannot be identified with socialism. We categorically reject the sort of blackmail which asserts that opposition to the bureaucracy's arbitrary rule would endanger the building of socialism itself.

And the fact is, in his very long article on Trotsky's contribution to "our revolutionary heritage," comrade Barnes exclusively emphasises the defence of the USSR while keeping quiet about the anti-bureaucratic struggle and its programme: "As we learned from Trotsky, the unconditional defence of the conquests of the Russian revolution and of every subsequent workers state has been shown to be vital to the extension of the world socialist revolution and to the regeneration of communism" (New International, Vol. 1, No. 1, p.86)

When he does quote In Defense of Marxism, he is guilty of a flagrant misinterpretation. In the passage referred to, Trotsky writes: "We must not lose sight for a single moment of the fact that the question of overthrowing the Soviet bureaucracy is for us subordinate to the question of the preservation of state property in the means of production in the USSR; that the question of preserving state property in the means of production in the USSR is for us subordinate to the question of the world proletarian revolution" (In Defense of Marxism, p. 21, Pathfinder, 1973).

This sentence has all the appearance of a vicious circle: the overthrow of the bureaucracy is subordinated to the preservation of state ownership which is itself subordinated to the world proletarian revolution which requires the overthrow of the bureacuracy that is undermining the foundations of the workers state ... Yet, in the last analysis, the prime mover is the interests of the world proletariat as a whole. And the bureaucracy opposes them on two counts: because it opposes the extension of the revolution and because it smothers the revolutionary energy of decisive contingents of the proletariat in countries where it rules.

The pages of In Defense of Marxism that precede the quote selected by comrade Barnes leave no room for doubt on this topic:

What do we defend in the USSR? Not that in which it resembles the capitalist countries but precisely that in which it differs from them ... In the USSR the overthrow of the bureaucracy is indispensable for the preservation of state property. Only in this sense do we stand for the defence of the USSR...

... Defence of the USSR does not at all mean rapprochement with the Kremlin bureaucracy, the acceptance of its politics, or a conciliation with the politics of her allies. In this question, as in all others, we remain completely on the ground of the international class struggle...

As a matter of fact, we defend the USSR as we defend the colonies, as we solve all our problems, not by supporting some imperialist governments against others, but by the method of international class struggle in the colonies as well as in the metropolitan centres ...

The defence of the USSR is related to the world socialist revolution as a tactical task is related to a strategic one. A tactic is subordinated to a strategic goal and in no case can be in contradiction to the latter. (In Defense of Marxism, Pathfinder, 1973, pp. 15-18)

Such a counterposition would unavoidably tend to subordinate the interests of the world revolution to those of the bureaucratic dictatorships.

The existence of workers states, even bureaucratised ones, can work to the advantage of ongoing revolutions and the bureaucracy can sometimes be a conjunctural ally for them. But the sort of "realism" that would sacrifice the rights and interests of the workers living in bureaucratised states would be shortsighted and illusory. The bureaucracy always drives a hard bargain and asks for a political price before extending conditional support to this or that struggle. This was verified in the course of the Soviet-Yugoslav crisis, of the Sino-Soviet crisis, of the Cuban missiles crisis, of the Vietnam war and more recently of the war in the Middle East.

Such support, subordinated to the bureaucracy's own diplomatic interests, can never be a substitute for the internationalist solidarity and independent mobilisation of the masses

In contradistinction to the American comrades, comrade Hoffman and his tendency find our characterisation of the bureaucratised workers states inadequate.[11] Hoffman rejects both the "state capitalist" thesis and the thesis that portrays the bureaucracy as a new class destined to universal expansion; he asserts that the bureaucracy is not merely a caste but an actual new class, although a "non-fundamental" and parasitic class.

If that is all there is to it, comrade Hoffman's announcements of a theoretical revolution have given birth to a mere conceptual reform and one that hardly clarifies the problem. A parasitic class, but "parasitic" on whom? On the proletariat? In that case, this "new class" is as like the caste Hoffman just dismissed as two peas in a pod. Moreover, in what way would this change represent an advance for our characterisation of the bureaucratised workers states as such? What is their class nature? Hoffman now baptizes them "bureaucratic collectivist states." All right. One could likewise define the Communist Party as a bureaucratic collectivist party but this still would not tell us anything about their class nature.

If power in these "bureaucratic collectivist states" is still exclusively in the hands of the bureaucracy, henceforward defined as a "non-fundamental class" parasitic on the proletariat, then, however paradoxical this may sound, the proletariat although politically expropriated and oppressed, nevertheless, remains the socially dominant class. This takes us back to our starting point: bureaucratically degenerated workers states.

However, Hoffman contends that his theoretical innovation is necessary for a more precise redefinition of the tasks involved in the defence of the USSR and the new problem posed by the conflicts, including the armed conflicts, between bureaucratised workers states.

But his conclusions on the first point are rather close to the classics: "Does the term bureaucratic counter-revolution mean that we place an equal sign between the bureaucratic collectivist states and the imperialist states? No! ... We are therefore not neutral in conflicts between imperialist states and bureaucratic collectivist states." The problem then becomes that which we have already raised of the relation between the defence of the bureaucratised workers states and the struggle for the anti-bureaucratic revolution.

Hoffman argues that his approach enables him to understand the possibility of a form of Soviet political expansionism which, unlike imperialist expansionism, is not fundamentally motivated by economic plunder. This bureaucratic expansionism derives from the very fragility of the "non-fundamental class" and its rule. It allegedly compensates this fragility caused by the lack of any autonomous popular mobilisation, by a forward flight into bureaucratic militarism and the establishment of a diplomatic alliance system.

Yet Trotsky had no need of the concept of a "non-fundamental class" to explain that the bureaucracy was capable of launching reactionary military adventures: "The Kremlin participates in a new division of Poland; the Kremlin lays hands upon the Baltic states; the Kremlin orients towards the Balkans, Persia, and Afghanistan. In other words, the Kremlin continues the policy of Czarist imperialism" (In Defense of Marxism, Pathfinder, 1973, page 26). But this does not mean that we should "identify the policy of the Bonapartist bureaucracy with the policy of monopoly capitalism on the basis that both the one and the other use military force to achieve expansionist ends." The bureaucracy's policy can have reactionary and disastrous consequences for the workers movement but it corresponds to other mechanisms and other driving forces than those of imperialist expansion.[12]

Finally, Hoffman claims that his thesis of the "new non-fundamental class" can provide a firm anchorage for attempts to deal with the new question of conflicts between workers states (Yugoslavia-USSR in 1948, USSR-China beginning in 1960, and leading up to the Vietnam-Cambodia and China-Vietnam military confrontations). It allegedly makes it possible to locate the qualitative leap from the bureaucratic caste to the new non-fundamental class, and in parallel fashion, from the "bureaucratised proletarian state" to the "bureaucratic collectivist state."

So far, this is nothing very new. Trotsky always analysed bureaucratisation as a process that encompassed gradations and qualitative transformations. The degree of bureaucratic crystallisation and of the bureaucracy's autonomy from the proletariat on which it is a parasite was not the same in 1924, when Thermidor began, as in 1938, after the purges, the trials and the victory of the bureaucratic counter-revolution. From the standpoint of tasks, this difference is substantial enough to warrant moving from a line of reform and democratisation of the workers state to a line of political revolution.

Likewise, the Yugoslav leadership and the Chinese leadership in the period that immediately followed their seizure of power, were not exact replicas of the consolidated Stalinist bureaucracy, in spite of their bureaucratic deformations. Their link with the masses was not broken off instantaneously. This is one of the reasons we gave critical support to China and Yugoslavia in their conflicts with the USSR, and later to Vietnam in its conflict with the normalised China of Hua Kuo Feng and Teng Hsiao Ping.

Comrade Hoffman's and his tendency's proposed innovations are therefore of no aid in advancing our theoretical clarity and our clarity on tasks. On the other hand, they concede ground to those who, faced with the anti-Marxist offensive unleashed in the capitalist countries, would like to tone down our defence of the workers states.

So the answer is no, our analysis of the bureaucracy and of the tasks of the political revolution needs no revision, either upwards or downwards.

5) Immediate relevance and unity of our fundamental programme

None of the major points in our programme is superfluous or outdated. The programme needs revision neither on the permanent revolution nor on political revolution.

The campist course progressively endorsed by the SWP majority comrades reflects both a lack of confidence in the role of the working class of the imperialist metropolises and a defensive reflex to the indications of a new Cold War. Their loss of confidence is also reflected in the attempt to extend the concept of workers and farmers government and make it into a necessary transitional stage, even in the United States, in the downgrading of the fight for soviet democracy even though it had been central in the first four congresses of the Communist International, and by the attempt to turn the relation between the party and the masses in a revolution upside down so that the party becomes responsible for making the revolution and only later for mobilising and "educating" the masses.

This course has been confirmed in the evolution of the debate on socialist democracy at the January 1984 USec meeting. The SWP comrades now seem to want to limt the recognition of the right to party pluralism to the bureaucratically degenerated workers states where the political revolution is on the agenda, rather than accepting it as a basic right in any socialist democracy. This logic can lead even to a practical and political questioning of the rights of tendency and faction in revolutionary organisations, for these rights would have no sense if they did not extend to the right to split, in other words to the possibility of founding a new party.

Yet the course of the world class struggle has emphasized the dialectical unity of the three sectors of the world revolution. This unity is the result of the major trends of our epoch, whether economic (growing internationalisation of production and capital), social (internationalisation of the division of labour), military (pact and alliance systems bolstered by the weight of nuclear weaponry), political (internationalisation of local conflicts: Malvinas, Central America, Middle-East, Grenada) or linked to "global responsibilities" claimed by the United States and the Soviet Union in world affairs.

Long before these trends had worked themselves out and as early as the mid-nineteenth century, the workers movement had laid the foundations of a first international organisation of its own. However, it is entering the present situation in a state of extreme dispersion while the bourgeoisie, despite its contradictions, is striving to build the political, financial, diplomatic, and military instruments of an international policy.

Not only does the dynamic of the world revolution emphasize the need, and more tragic than ever, lack of a mass revolutionary International. It also emphasizes the living and immediate relevance of the revolutionary Marxist programme, which links together the socialist dynamic of the revolution in dominated countries, the socialist tasks of the proletariat in the imperialist countries, and the tasks of the political revolution against the bureaucracy ruling in the USSR, China, and Eastern Europe. It is the only programme that can help to break the ossifying logic of the division of the world into camps and avert the dangers of nuclear world war.

Of course, not all elements of this programme have the same practical bearing, at the same time, in the different sectors of the world revolution. Nevertheless, it cannot be dismembered or confined to the tasks of the permanent revolution in the dominated countries or those of the political revolution in the bureaucratised states. The growing interdependence of the three sectors and the international impact of local conflicts mean that the fate of the revolution in Central America is not unrelated to that of the Polish workers, and that any revolution attempting to consolidate will be faced with the necessity of diplomatic alliances with their inevitable price and constraints.

Anyone who seriously sets out now to build the Fourth International in the perspective of rebuilding a mass revolutionary International cannot do so with any solidity on the basis of a truncated or discounted programmatic platform, but only by standing on a programme that corresponds in its main lines to the objective needs of the proletariat in all three sectors of the world revolution.

II. Turning towards the Castroist leadership or positioning ourselves in the overall recomposition process of the international workers' movement and vanguard?

Since the Eleventh World Congress, but without ever submitting a clear resolution on this topic to the vote, the comrades of the United States SWP leadership have asserted in many articles and documents that their perspective for building the international boiled down to two key ideas: the turn to industry and the turn to the Castroist leadership.

1) "Turning towards the Castroist current"?

The different conceptions of the turn to industry can be discussed. At least it is a concrete problem; we know what we are talking about.

On the other hand we were driven to ask several times, but all in vain, what the "turn" toward the Castroist current or leadership means concretely. Does it mean intensifying our solidarity activities with the Central American and Cuban revolutions and establishing a dialogue with their leaderships as far as possible? Does it mean "turning" programmatically towards these currents and then, what are the implications? Or does it mean "turning" organisationally towards these currents and then, what concrete perspectives and practical initiatives should be adopted to reach out to them?

Since the American comrades will not provide us with any precise answers, we have to base ourselves on their approach. In the successive texts they have written, they characterised the Cuban leadership as revolutionary, then as revolutionary Marxist and ended up comparing it to the Bolshevik leadership under Lenin and Trotsky.

The 1981 IEC resolution considered the Cuban leadership to be revolutionary insofar as it had thrown imperialism out of its country and overthrown capitalism. And that it remained revolutionary since that time insofar as it never stopped helping to extend the revolution in some countries. This is a capital fact.

We have found little problem in grasping it, especially because the emergence of this leadership was part of the broader historical process of crisis of Stalinism. Unlike the hopeless sectarians, we do not believe that there is nothing in the international workers movement between the reformists and Stalinists, and us. When Yugoslav, Chinese, and Vietnamese CP leaderships led the seizure of power in their respective countries, they were acting as revolutionary leaderships, despite the bureaucratic deformations of their theory and practice — "revolutionary centrist" if you will, but revolutionary.

At this very moment, the international development of the class struggle, the advances of the revolution, the establishment of new workers states, are fostering a general trend towards a recomposition of the workers movement and its vanguard. In this context, currents can emerge that no longer vacillate between reformism and revolution, but between revolutionary internationalism and the Soviet bureaucracy; or in yet more complex fashion, between revolution, reformism, the Soviet bureaucracy and the Chinese bureaucracy.

These vacillations have powerful material roots linked to the weight of the bureaucratised workers states. But this does not mean that, outside of the Fourth International, no organisations exist that are struggling resolutely and honestly for the victory of the proletarian revolution in their country. The Sandinistas did not suddenly become revolutionary the day after their victory. They already were before then, and there certainly exist future Sandinistas in several countries today, whether we know of them or not.

Compared to other leaderships that have overthrown capitalism in their country, or to revolutionary organisations that are struggling for power, the Cuban leadership displays several highly significant particularities. It has taken power. It has kept it for 25 years. Moreover, unlike the Chinese and Vietnamese leaderships, it was not of Stalinist origin. This is one of the reasons this leadership, on the basis of an original experience of mass mobilisation, went further in explicitly challenging the Stalinist strategic framework and putting the permanent revolution on the agenda in Latin America. Not only did it never adopt the theory of building socialism in one country but it explicitly opposed the stagist strategies officially advocated by Moscow and it sought in practice to extend the revolution.

But does that warrant calling it a revolutionary Marxist leadership and comparing it to the leadership of the Bolshevik party? The point is not to devise some moral or psychological standards of good will and good intentions. Nor is it to downgrade the role of this leadership and its merits. Rather the point is to define the scope and limits of this role on the basis of political criteria.

As soon as Lenin had taken note of the failure of the Second International, he put the creation of a Third International on the agenda and began to lay the groundwork for it. This was not the course followed by the Cuban leadership. It can be argued that the obstacles in the path of a new mass revolutionary international are far greater now than in 1914. If the Cuban leadership were to pose this problem, it would immediately face a conflict with the Soviet bureaucracy at a time when it needs its economic and military support. So the motivations of the Cuban leadership are understandable, but the fact that the problem has not been posed corresponds to an actual political decision that goes beyond a mere tactical concession on an organisational question.

The Cuban leadership combines internationalist positions like helping the extension of the revolution in the Caribbean and Central America, with a type of anti-imperialism that reduces the international class struggle to a struggle between camps or blocs, to the point of supporting the bureaucracy against the Czechoslovak and Polish workers all in the name of not "weakening the socialist camp." Similarly this leadership is ready to support revolutionaries in countries where it can perceive success in the short- or medium-term, but in countries where it does not expect rapid advances the needs of state diplomacy tend to override internationalist solidarity.

This policy cannot be reduced to tactical errors. It directly affects an entire and decisive sector of the world revolution. Nor can it be reduced to tactical manoeuvres or to the mere juxtaposition of a revolutionary line for dominated countries, a reactionary line for the bureaucratised workers states and a sceptical line on the potential of the proletariat of the imperialist countries. Quite the opposite, it is a global line, with its own consistency, that inserts a regional revolutionary commitment into an alliance system dominated by the weight of the Soviet bureaucracy.

For all these reasons, a fusion with the Castroist current is not on the agenda on the international level if it is meant as a concrete perspective and not as a metaphor designed to cover unconditional adaptation to its position.

Nor is fusion with the Castroist current a concrete perspective for the building of sections, country by country, in Latin America. Cuba constitutes a central political factor in the continent and the Cuban leadership plays an active role there. The organisations under its influence share a common respect for its history and the will to be inspired by its experience. They have learned a lot from the Cuban revolution but they have also had to overcome the initial weaknesses of focoism and resolve new problems on their own. Each one of them is shaped by its own experience. This is true of the Sandinista Front and of the Salvadoran revolutionaries.

Beyond their common definition in relation to the example of the Cuban revolution, these organisations often develop differences, sometimes unfortunately even leading to violence, on the response to new tactical or strategic questions. This was shown by the FSLN split before 1978, by the crisis in the FPL leadership in El Salvador, and the split in the NJM in Grenada. Conversely, the unfolding revolutionary experience in Central America, the political contributions and identity of the different political organisations operating in its framework can provide the Cuban leadership with new material for reflection and face it with new political questions.

Finally, this leadership has derived strength from its rich experience in dealing with its own revolution and collaborating with other revolutionary organisations. But its experience in mobilising and organising the workers movement in highly industrialised dominated countries where the conquest of class political independence is the central task, such as Argentina, Brazil and Mexico, remains limited. When confronted with tasks of this sort, the Casroist leadership intervenes as a significant, but not central, political factor; this is demonstrated by the formation and trajectory of the Workers Party (PT) in Brazil.[13]

This is why we cannot say that a homogeneous "Castroist current" exists. We can develop a practical convergence with revolutionary organisations influenced by the Cuban leadership, look for ways to collaborate with them in action, and establish relations and discussions based on different programmes and positions which should not be hidden. Starting with these differences we can learn from each other and enrich each other, but this will certainly not happen if we keep quiet about the problems which these organisations themselves are raising.

2) An overall recomposition process of the workers' movement

The emergence and future evolution of the Castroist current are in fact part and parcel of a broader process of reorganisation of the workers movement and its vanguard on an international scale.

Since the Sino-Soviet conflict and the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia, what had been the international communist movement has been experiencing a steadily worsening crisis of dislocation. Beginning in 1969, the Soviet bureaucracy had to give up holding world conferences that only revealed the increasing contradictions and tensions dividing its fraternal parties. Since the 1976 East Berlin conference, it has even avoided calling new conferences limited to European parties. The tendency towards dispersal is winning out, even though the evolution is neither homogeneous nor linear.

A broad spectrum of positions exists, ranging from traditionally pro-Soviet parties like the Argentine CP or the Portuguese CP, to parties like the Mexican, Italian, or Spanish CP. At the same time as some communist parties are emphasizing the gap between them and Moscow, currents that are reasserting their identification with the Kremlin are appearing in their midst; this is the case with the CP of Gallego in the Spanish state for instance. Moreover, various revolutionary nationalist or revolutionary organisations have lined up with the international policy of the USSR, through the medium of Cuban or Vietnamese influence. This was the case with the Chilean MIR beginning in 1978.

In countries where they have managed to retain significant forces, the parties of Maoist origin have often withdrawn into a purely national existence and adopted policies ranging from rightist neo-Stalinist (often underlaid by an identification with Albania) to a quest for revolutionary paths that would imply a radical critical re-examination of the stagist schemas, alliance policy and history of the international workers movement. More generally, in Asia, the trauma of the conflicts between Vietnam and Cambodia, and then between China and Vietnam, has forced communist parties, whether of pro-Soviet or pro-Chinese origin, to rethink their historical and strategic references.

A new debate on the terrible 1965 defeat and Sino-Soviet policy has broken out among the Indonesian exile community linked to the Indonesian Communist party. In Thailand the failure of the line defended by the Thai Communist Party explains to a large extent the downturn in the mass movement, the disorientation of different generations of militants and the deepgoing crisis of the communist movement. But it has also stimulated an unprecedented amount of political and theoretical rethinking among militants who have lived through the 1973-1980 experiences. In the Philippines on the other hand there is a combined rise of socio-economic and democratic struggles and a dynamic communist movement. Also in that country the evaluation of the regional context and the experience of the ongoing struggles is causing a positive re-orientation and is encouraging fundamental strategic discussions.

In South Africa the growth of the industrial working class has given birth to independent non-racial mass trade unions. Some of the leaderships of these unions have begun a strategic rethinking about a class-based alternative to the apartheid regime that runs counter, for the moment, to the African National Congress (ANC) and South African Communist Party line.

In Western Europe, the decline of the mass communist parties is general. "Eurocommunism" was a belated attempt to manage this insoluble contradiction: either the communist parties tighten their priority links with the USSR and therefore have to pay a share of the cost of each major crisis of the bureaucracy, the price of Prague and the price of Gdansk; or they widen their distance from Moscow to burrow deeper into their own national state apparatus and their living space is consequently reduced because there really is no room for a second social democracy. They know they will lose in either case and therefore try to hedge their bets and avoid a final decision, while striving to keep control of the key sectors of the workers and trade union movement because this is what makes them a worthwhile partner for both their own bourgeoisie and the Soviet bureaucracy. The massive losses and splits of the Spanish Communist Party, along with the erosion of the French Communist Party, are the symptoms of the historical changes at work in the European workers movement.

Neo-Stalinist currents that identify fidelity to the USSR with a more militant past and with a firmer line against austerity policies and the imperialist war drive, can re-emerge out of this crisis.

Until now, social democracy has been the beneficiary of the decline of the West European communist parties. It experienced particularly spectacular electoral successes in France in 1981, in Greece and Spain in 1982, in Portugal in 1983. It won the post of head of government in Italy. It came back to power in Sweden. By contrast, in the northern European countries where social democracy directly managed the first consequences of the crisis, it is showing some signs of erosion: this is especially true in Great Britain, but also in Germany, Austria, and the Netherlands. Its electoral success in southern Europe is the expression of a first political protest of the working class and popular layers against the social effects of the economic crisis, as well as of their attachment to parliamentary institutions, particularly in the three countries that lived under dictatorships until the mid-1970s.

Even in those countries where it has emerged as a hegemonic force on the electoral level, this has been reflected neither in an organic and activist strengthening of the social democratic parties nor in an increase of their organised influence in the trade union movement. The French and Spanish Socialist Parties in power remain giants with feet of clay: there is an enormous gap between the millions of Socialist voters and the ridiculous number of members (100,000 to 200,000).

Their fragility has deep causes. In several countries, having for a long time participated in the government and managed the bourgeois state, social democracy no longer appears as an instrument for struggle and mobilisation to the masses of workers. In opposition, it can channel the protests against the effects of the economic crisis as well as the rejection of militarisation and American hegemony and the reputation of the Eastern bureaucratic dictatorships. But as soon as it comes to power, social democracy resumes its role as the loyal manager of capital, and the faithful ally of European imperialism, as illustrated by the interventions of Schmidt, Gonzales, Mitterrand, and Soares. They have followed a bourgeois policy of avowed austerity.

Underlying the electoral recovery of certain socialist parties and the maintained influence of certain communist parties (particularly the Italian Communist Party but also the Greek and Portuguese Communist Parties), a general trend towards the weakening of the reformist apparatuses' control over the bulk of the working class can be detected. The majority reformist parties are experiencing a shrinking of their activist base and trade union roots. In countries like France and Spain, the de-unionisation trend has reached considerable proportions. These phenomena can reflect the demoralisation of certain sectors of workers but there is no mechanical connection between the evolution of trade union membership and the state of workers' militancy. Important layers of the working class often remain outside, or on the sidelines of trade-union organisations (women, youth, immigrants). These are the contradictory forms the process of recomposition of the workers movement is taking before the decisive tests and the emergence of a credible revolutionary pole of attraction.

In Latin America, the Socialist International is actively defending the interests of the European imperialisms by trying to play the role of a mediator between American imperialism and the popular forces. These efforts will not easily lead to the implantation of genuine social democratic parties on the continent. For a local social democratic bureaucracy to emerge and consolidate, it would have to enjoy a long period of the parliamentary and trade union freedoms that have nurtured its growth. Moreover, the distinctive anti-imperialist image which social democracy is trying to acquire is constantly undermined by its practical activity, whether it be its lukewarm solidarity with Nicaragua or even, in the case of Mario Soares, its open support of the American invasion of Grenada in spite of the fact that the NJM was an official member of the Socialist International. This is why the Socialist International's policy in Latin America has more often taken the form of alliances with liberal (Colombia) or populist (Brazil, Mexico) factions of the local bourgeoisies.

Populist nationalism too, after a period of expansion begun in the late 1930s in several Latin American countries, and in the 1950s in the Arab countries affected by the impact of Nasserism and the Algerian revolution, has now entered a period of decay. The dominated bourgeoisies were confronted with a new challenge when the economic crisis began to worsen. Nothing leads one to believe that they might be capable of a new anti-imperialist renaissance in either the economic or the political arena. The first results of the crisis in Latin America have been a dizzying increase of their external debt and a growing dependence on imperialism while poverty, economic crisis, and urban crisis are shaking up the traditional populist formations like the APRA in Peru, the Argentine Peronist movement, the MNR in Bolivia, labourism in Brazil, and to a lesser extent the PRI in Mexico. This decline of the large populist organisations is still slowed down by the absence of clear class struggle and revolutionary alternatives, but they have, nevertheless, lost their initial impetus long ago and undergone deep transformations. Thus, in Argentina, the failure of the armed organisations in the early 1970s and the role of the Communist Party under the dictatorship made it possible for Peronism to survive even though its advanced state of decomposition and discredit initially benefited bourgeois radicalism on the electoral plane.

Nevertheless, it cannot be excluded that the intensification and severity of the economic crisis along with the outrageous social cost of the imperialist dictates, will provoke populist revivals, even with the participation of limited sectors of the bourgeoisie.

In the Arab countries, the populist hopes born of Nasserism have been disappointed both by the social achievements of the nationalist regimes and their powerlessness in the face of Zionism and imperialism, and their attitude towards the Palestinian national movement. Their military defeats in the 1967 and 1973 wars with Israel led them to pursue a new course characterised by the "infitah" and the return of Egypt into the imperialist orbit under Sadat, and the attempts of the Chadli regime to follow the same path in Algeria even though this is more difficult there because of the weakness of the national bourgeoisie.

Due to the lack of a credible revolutionary alternative on the international level, and given the role of the USSR and China in the region, this decline of Arab populism has so far not been reflected in the emergence of strong class struggle currents. Rather, it has aided the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in some countries; this current can be the initial vessel for national and popular aspirations and at the same time be used by the reactionary interests of the most traditional sectors of society.

Failing world-shaking events powerful enough to upset the relationship of forces between the classes and cause a general realignment of political forces, the recomposition of the international workers movement will therefore remain slow, uneven and extremely differentiated.

3) Building the Fourth International, preparing the conditions for a mass revolutionary International

The present stage of building the Fourth International should therefore be situated within this overall process characterised by the emergence of a broad spectrum of forces breaking to varying degrees with reformism, Stalinism, and nationalist populism. These currents are capable of rediscovering a revolutionary practice on the basis of their own experience, but they do not immediately pose the question of the programme of world revolution and the rebuilding of a revolutionary International.

On the other hand, the Fourth International has been marked by the particular conditions in which it was formed, following accumulated defeats of the workers movement, and of its many-years existence as a minority. It will not be transformed on its own into a mass International, unless major events bring about a qualitative change of the relationship of forces established after World War Two.

The time now is neither to abstractly proclaim a mass International nor to search out shortcuts towards that end. We stand now merely at the beginning of profound and lasting transformations in the workers movement. We should approach them by a combination of building the Fourth International as it is and collaborating with the vanguard forces evolving in the different countries and continents. This is the best way to prepare the formation of a genuine mass revolutionary International.

The fact is, it is possible under the present conditions to win new activist forces over to revolutionary Marxism, to enrich our own experience, and to transform the practice of our own sections. At the same time, possible areas of convergence with other revolutionary organisations of diverse origins are beginning to emerge. They signify that common work and even fusions on the national level are possible and should be put on the agenda even though these regroupments do not yet have any international equivalent.

At the national level, a rapprochement with other forces can take various forms, ranging from systematic united action to the establishment of stable liaison committees and unifications. In cases of fusions with revolutionary organisations or mass leftward-moving centrist currents, the united organisation's affiliation to the Fourth International should not constitute a principled precondition. On the other hand, it is indispensable that the united organisations be governed by a democratic centralism that allows the discussion on the political issues not resolved at the time of fusion to continue in the light of subsequent common practice.

At the regional level, we seek to collaborate with other revolutionary currents in the framework of solidarity campaigns, mass initiatives and election campaigns where relevant. On the basis of a relationship of trust verified in practice, we can consider holding regional conferences open to these currents around precisely defined agendas and clearly determined goals.

One of the key conditions making such collaboration possible both at the national and international level is that it provide a better instrument to turn the broad unorganised masses and the masses influenced by the reformist majority organisations, and not become an additional obstacle to this work.

Our policy towards organisations identified with Trotskyism is part of the same overall approach. In a certain number of countries, these organisations represent activist forces that cannot be underestimated. They too are profiting from the radicalisation of the vanguard and channeling new generations of militants turning towards revolutionary Marxism. They argue for programmatic positions that lead them to converge with our positions on some key problems for the world revolution, especially the defence of the workers states, support for the political revolution and the need for an International.

In countries where such organisations exist, we must follow the possibilities for rapprochement through the practical tests of the class struggle, on the basis of a common understanding of the events and tasks, and keep up a sustained public exchange with these organisations.

The Eleventh World Congress went further in this direction and outlined the perspective of "unification of the Trotskyist movement." At the same time the factions led by N. Moreno and P. Lambert jointly took the initiative of a splitting operation against the Fourth International on the basis of a position of hostility to the Nicaraguan revolution. In December 1980, they jointly constituted the International Committee, which flew apart no later than October 1981, thereby ridiculing the pretensions of its promoters who had claimed the foundation of the I.C. was nothing less than the most important event since the foundation of the Third International!

The lessons of this experience are clear. The existence of common historical and programmatic references, however important, cannot be the main criterion for a unification process. On the national level, such a process can take as its starting point a practical convergence in day to day action that is then deepened and consolidated by a serious programmatic discussion. It can also take as its starting point a key programmatic convergence and use it as an instrument to bring closer together the current activity of the two organisations. In all cases, programmatic and practical convergences are both necessary to verify whether "a common understanding of events and tasks" exists, and serve as the foundation for a viable united organisation.

The differences that emerged as the Nicaraguan revolution developed have demonstrated that the disagreements between organisations identified as Trotskyists that arose at the time of the Cuban revolution had not been overcome. Moreover in none of the countries where the organisations affiliated to the International Committee, the International Trotskyist League, The Militant, or any other regroupment, as well as the sections of the Fourth International have substantial forces, have real convergences developed in practice: neither in France nor Peru, nor Brazil, nor Britain.

A tendency has surfaced inside the French section whose platform consists mainly of "asking the Twelfth World Congress to resume the battle for the unification of the Trotskyist movement adopted at the previous congress". But since then, four years have gone by, full of events that cannot be overlooked.[14]

The Eleventh World Congress's statement on the split characterised the split orchestrated by Moreno and Lambert as an unprincipled split. The reason was that a difference can be corrected in a few months, in the light of experience and with the help of a discussion, even if it is as severe as the one which erupted over the Nicaraguan revolution. An organisation can make a mistake without thereby ceasing to be revolutionary. This is even truer for small organisations whose limited size and connections only make possible incomplete and belated information. Only the major tests of the class struggle can reveal or verify qualitative transformations. This was Lenin's method in dealing with the degeneration of the Second International, and Trotsky's with that of the Third. We should take great care to stick to such a method given that the implantation of our sections is too limited for us to have rapid and reliable information and an extensive verification of our judgements.

But the 1979 split confirmed something even more serious, more deeply ingrained and more lasting than the differences over Nicaragua, namely Moreno's and Lambert's very conception of an International in which every political, local or circumstantial difference can become a new programmatic frontier between revisionism and orthodoxy, a new pretext for splits and excommunications. The only possible product of such a conception is a monolithic and sectarian international faction, incapable of maintaining any real democracy on either the international or the national planes. It systematically destroys all previous gains and turns the building of the International into the ceaseless labours of Sisyphus. It fosters organisational methods that often have nothing to envy in those of the Stalinists.

The conditions for the unification of the forces identified with Trotskyism are still far from being met on the international level. They could only be on the basis of a common approach to party building in the difference key countries and a common project of building a mass revolutionary International.

II

III. What sort of International?

At the present time the Fourth International is the only organically organised international regroupment of revolutionary organisations. Its battle is part and parcel of the struggle for the rebuilding of a mass revolutionary International which cannot be reduced to the simple extension of its own forces. This objective can only be achieved after deepgoing transformations inside the international workers movement under the impact of major events.

To prepare for these changes we try to build right now an international organisation united by the same programme and with a political line based on the interests and needs of the world proletariat as a whole and not the particular or conjunctural interests of one or another of its components.

As opposed to the first three internationals, the Fourth was founded in a context of reaction, when the workers movement was on the retreat after defeats at the hands of Nazism and the bureaucratic counter-revolution. The Fourth International's struggle in defense of the internationalist heritage of the Third International was for a long time isolated and always that of a minority. This struggle was prolonged a lot longer than its founders had envisaged.

This existence as a minority current is due, first of all, to objective factors. These objective reasons are the consequences of the world war, of the temporary consolidation of the Stalinist bureaucracy in the USSR and of the low level of activity of the proletariat in the two decisive countries, the United States and the Soviet Union.

1) What overall perspectives?

Such a long existence as a minority international revolutionary organisation in the workers movement is unprecedented. The consequence has been a big distortion between theory and practice, between analytical activity and effective intervention and between discussion and party building. It has favoured political and organisational deformations both in the International and in its sections. This type of existence has produced vacillations between, on the one hand, dogmatic and sectarian crystallisation, the reproduction of artificial particularities, a monolithic internal regime and, on the other hand, the search for political and organisational shortcuts, political impressionism and liberal organisational practices.

While the objective situation sets limits to the possible development of the International, these deformations have caused us to miss a number of opportunities on a national level, in the various continents, to the extent that the present strength of the International and its sections is far from having reached what it could and should have been.

The shortfall is not, strictly speaking, just numerical. Often winning a few hundred new members allows us to cross the threshold beyond which a revolutionary organisation begins to be able to act politically, take initiatives, bring about political agreements that modify, even slightly, the political situation. In turn, this advance can improve the type of organisation we are building, its functioning, its concerns, its style of work and reflexes, the quality of its leadership.

The International accumulated forces and extended itself geographically at the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s. But the effects of the crisis on the European workers movement, the stagnation and regression of certain important sections and the absence of the International in the development of the revolution in Central America and the negative role other forces claiming to be Trotskyists played there — all this contributed to the perspectives of building the International being frankly questioned.

Each major period in the life of the International has been dominated by a perspective of an overall breakthrough in the short or medium term.

At the time of its foundation this project was built around the idea that the Second World War would result in the rise of the European revolution and in particular of the German revolution and in the overthrow of the Stalinist bureaucracy by the masses led by a powerful section in the Soviet Union. The war was expected to shake up the international workers movement in a comparable way to what happened at the end of the First World War. The end of the Second World War was indeed followed by major events such as the Yugoslav and Chinese revolutions, and the formation of bureaucratically deformed workers states in Eastern Europe, but without the hoped-for effects on the workers movement.

At the end of the 1940s a change of perspective was therefore necessary. The majority of the International tried to come to terms with the situation by conceiving the period as an intermediary one prior to the break up of reformism and Stalinism (at first through the march towards a third world war) with the emergence of mass centrist currents inside the traditional workers organisations.

Finally, under the effects of the open crisis of Stalinism and of the Cuban revolution, the 1963 reunification congress drew up again a party building model based on the dialectic of the world revolution and the balanced interaction of its three sectors. In 1968 with the combination of the French general strike, the Prague spring and the Tet offensive in Vietnam, this model led to hopes for rapid success and imminent changes of the relationship of forces inside the workers movement in our favour as well as for the perspective of winning new developing vanguards escaping from the control of the reformist and Stalinist apparatuses.

Between the Ninth and Tenth World Congresses (1969-1974), the International certainly went through a period of growth. But while it was true that May 1968 opened up a rise in struggles in the European capitalist countries, these struggles converted a social relationship of forces into new rights and gains rather than taking the form of a showdown for the conquest of power. The subjective conditions which were lacking for a crisis like that of 1968 to place the question of power concretely on the agenda cannot be limited to the absence of a revolutionary party. More generally, there was the absence of a working class vanguard organised in the trade union movement, the loss of certain traditions of struggle and organisation during the previous period. While 1968 revealed the force and objectively revolutionary potential of the proletariat accumulated during the long post-war economic boom, the mid-1970s were marked by a profound change in the situation.

Attempts to deny this change in the name of simple "continuity" of the period opened in 1968 would be puerile or blind. But to better measure its real significance and limits, it is necessary to have a better appreciation of the 1968 to 1975 situation. Overestimating those years and what was then on the agenda fosters a tendency to define, in contrast, the turn of 1974-76 as a sweeping generalised downturn, whereas it is something quite different.

It is not very useful to seek out what different people said after 1968. It is sufficient to recognise that many documents of the International and sections' leaderships saw 1968 as evidence of an immediately revolutionary situation and envisaged the possibility of synchronised revolutionary crises ending up in the short term in dual power situations in several European countries. True, the 1968 general strike temporarily took the initiative away from the bourgeoisie (who only re-established its authority with the open collaboration of the reformist bureaucracies) and raised the question of power in conditions where the means to resolve such a key question did not yet exist.

From the point of view of building the party the oft-repeated statement that "the question of power is posed" involved a gaping contradiction in relation to the state of development and organisation of the working class vanguard. Left-wing splits in the traditional parties are still a marginal phenomenon in the working class and opposition currents in the trade union are only embryonic at best. Consequently there are two possible temptations for resolving the contradiction. Either bring the subjective factor in line with the objective tasks of the hour with a voluntarist and ultra-leftist mad dash forward. Or bank on the spontaneous development of the situation to resolve the crisis of the subjective factor.

The situation opened by 1968 expressed a longlasting change in the social relationship of forces between the classes, as well as in the relations between the masses and the apparatuses. It inaugurated a new wave of workers struggles favouring an initial accumulation of forces and experiences for the revolutionary nucleus. This initial implantation and assimilation of the key lessons of revolutionary Marxism helped us face up to, and come to grips with, the 1974-76 change in the situation. But the illusions inherited from previous years, the already visible gap between hopes and reality, meant that most European sections suffered a crisis of adaptation and reorientation and needed to programmatically re-arm themselves.

The tide of the Portuguese revolution had turned at the end of 1975 due to the responsibility of the reformist and Stalinist leaderships. The transition from Francoism in Spain, despite a wave of struggles in Spring 1974, did not produce a revolutionary crisis. The effects of the recession began to weigh on the working class, structural unemployment developed and social-economic struggles were increasingly linked to an overall political perspective. This meant that minority revolutionary organisations found themselves marginalised and unbalanced, especially when they did not have a clear united front approach. This step is indispensable, whatever the specific party-building policy adopted, because it starts from the fact that one cannot go round the organised workers movement in the imperialist countries. A series of centrist organisations formed during the 1960s did not survive this turn of events. Finally, the impact of the victory of the Vietnamese revolution was quickly counterbalanced by the crimes of the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia and the effects of the conflict between Cambodia, Vietnam and China.

Consequently, the model of a simultaneous convergence of the three sectors of the world revolution, which had served since 1963 as the perspective for building the International, has been subjected to questioning. Revolutionary processes in the three sectors of the world revolution have turned out to be more uneven and their convergence more difficult than had been envisaged at the end of the 1960s. Quite recent events confirm this point:

• The anti-bureaucratic revolution in Poland is the most advanced process of political revolution we have seen up to now. It generally confirms the programme of the political revolution but at the same time it raises new problems. It proves that, given the existence of state ownership of the means of production, proletarian mobilisation can very rapidly take on a mass character and acquire a political significance in the confrontation with the bureaucracy. But the rise of the political revolution does not in itself resolve the problem of the formation of a vanguard, the only thing permitting the Polish movement to go beyond the results obtained. The limits of the Polish revolution and the fact that the question of power has not been resolved has had specific consequences on the workers movement of the imperialist countries. It has led many advanced workers to lose sight of the extremely positive effects of the Polish mass movement. While being repelled by the unmasked face of 'really existing socialism' they have taken from this experience only those elements of ideological confusion.

• Up to now the colonial revolution has not developed in the most industrialised dominated countries. It may take off in the coming years due to the depth of the crisis, but the revolutionary processes in Indochina, Central America, or Grenada will not be able to exert a direct influence or attraction over the proletariat of the more industrialised countries, whatever the sympathy they might evoke.

• Finally, exposed to the consequences of the economic crisis and disoriented by the class collaborationist policies of its traditional organisations, the working class in the imperialist countries is looking for new directions and for new forms of struggle. These will be found and forged only through large-scale experiences and struggles, and a serious reorganisation of the forces of the workers movement will take time. This intermediary situation, where the working class is struggling in most cases on the defensive for the safeguard of its gains, feeds doubts about its revolutionary capabilities, particularly among the vanguard militants of the dominated countries that are affected much more severely by the crisis, and facilitates an acceptance of the bureaucracy as an inevitable and permanent phenomenon in the workers movement.

While there are explosive situation in the three sectors of the world revolution particularly in the dominated countries (and there will be in coming years), the dialectic between them, their combination is not automatic. That is why it is important to define as lucidly as possible where we are and to critically appropriate our heritage. It is the condition for working out our real possibilities and defining accessible objectives for the future.

The social force accumulated by the proletariat throughout the long period of the postwar boom has not been fundamentally affected. The world relationship of forces established by the victories of the Cuban and Vietnamese revolutions has not been reversed by the beginning of the imperialist counteroffensive. The economic crisis and political events since the middle of the 1970s however, opens up a new situation for the reorganisation of the social and political forces in the three sectors of the world revolution.

The crisis of the political leadership of imperialism and the bureaucracy is shown up more starkly and broadly. But the crisis of revolutionary leadership of the proletariat internationally also makes itself felt just as sharply.

Even if it continues to have decisive weight compared to the other imperialist countries (particularly politically and militarily), American imperialism, after its defeat in Vietnam, has lost the capacity to impose overall political solutions for the big world problems. This is shown in the crisis of the international monetary system as well as in the accentuation of inter-imperialist competition and contradictions. This crisis also highlights the weakness of the bourgeois political leadership on a national level: collapse of the majority bourgeois coalitions in Spain and Portugal (going as far as the dissolution of the UCD in the first case), responsible for administering the crisis, and shake up or fall of military dictatorships in Latin America or the Phillipines.

At the same time, unlike in the 1930s, the contradiction and limits of bureaucratic management of the planned economies are stripped bare by the crisis of underproduction in the Eastern European countries.

None of the attempts to define a new international share out of zones of interest (between three to five powers) have got anywhere. Both in the imperialist centres and the bureaucratised workers states centrifugal tendencies have the upper hand.

The function and future of the Fourth International does not lie in any short-term miracle solution, nor in the fusion with the Castroist current, nor the unification of the Trotskyist movement nor in a return to generalised entrism. It does not depend on staking everything on a general breakthrough around one country nor the fusion with whole sections of the reformist parties nor on the sudden emergence of a new vanguard directly created in a dual power situation. The real perspective is a much longer and more complex process of reconstitution of a vanguard on an international level. Nothing in the situation today leads us to predict a sudden, great leap forward between the Fourth International as it is and a mass international. It is rather more probable that we have a prolonged battle ahead of us, with a multitude of particular national and regional cases which will tend to put into question the united framework of an international. This is the battle we have to prepare for.

Once we do not bank on a brusque and imminent metamorphosis, the intermediary forms and mediations along the road to a mass International will be decisive. For example, the experience of the Central American revolution and to an even greater extent the future experiences of the revolutionary crises in other Latin American countries, disparages the theory of the single party. Pluralism, including among revolutionary forces will become increasingly accepted. It stimulates currents and organisations which agree with such pluralism to look for new forms of coordination and collaboration which can take the form of conferences or fronts without necessarily tending to come to a common organisational framework. We must be ready, not only to take our place in such intiatives but to launch them ourselves. If such approaches prove to be possible or necessary in different countries there is all the more reason for a similar approach to be developed for building the International.

Trotsky took this approach as early as 1933 with the initiative of a Bloc of Four. At that time he did not envisage an International limited to revolutionary Marxists but a broader international of which they would be a decisive component. In reasserting such an approach today we come up against: a dispersal of the vanguard that cannot be compared to the earlier period; references to the heritage of the Third International are very much more diffuse; the very necessity of an International is no longer a widely supported theoretical/political gain; and finally the broad outline of the program condensed in the "Eleven Points of the Left Opposition," relates in an uneven and fragmented way, to present reality because of the specific experience in each sector of the world revolution. Thus, currents in the dominated countries which assimilate through their own history a perspective of permament revolution do not at the same time automatically adopt a position in support of the political revolution in the bureaucratised states.

Less than ever can we see the passage from today's Fourth International to the mass revolutionary International as a nice straight road, as the linear growth of an International that already exists in miniaturised version. Movement in that direction will mean all sorts of intermediary initiatives and stages. In order to intervene in this recomposition and to orientate it we have to be able to count on our own forces — which are modest but real enough. Whatever the tactical mediations we envisage — fusions and regroupments, entrist operations or interventions in trade union opposition currents — their effectiveness will be determined by the political and organisational solidity of our sections. Accumulating members, forming teams and networks of cadres, implanting ourselves in the key sectors of the working class and modifying our social composition, are in all circumstances the conditions for the success of bold organisational initiatives.

The Fourth International certainly has a lot to do with a programme but just as much as this programme it has to do with the reality, activity and social implantation of its sections.

Today it is grappling with a new stage and new possibilities of building itself with resources, experience, cadres and an implantation which is substantially greater than at the end of the 1960s. This political and human capital can produce good results provided we can lead and come to grips with a real process of change in the International, particularly by the transformation of the social composition of the sections and by a re-definition of its mechanisms of functioning and centralisation.

The sections of the Fourth International have to be re-armed on the Leninist conception of party building. This political weakness is at the root of the "organisational errors" made by many sections in building leaderships, forming cadres, in the internal life of the party, the need for a solid backbone of workers, whatever the tactic of party building adopted. The party will not be spontaneous fruit of radicalisation. Building the party must be considered as a political question in its own right.

A whole series of problems that have come up concerning the building of sections in the present period — including in the form of self-critical balance sheets — will continue to be discussed after the world congress in the national and international leadership structures, particularly in the PB's meetings which have proved to be very useful over the last years. The appendices to this report gives an overview of the problems that have been discussed in these meetings — the August PB's meeting in Europe and the September one in Latin America.

2) The turn to industry and proletarianisation

The general resolution of the Eleventh World Congress made the implantation of the sections in the industrial working class an organisational priority for the sections: "The immediate objective of the Fourth International is therefore to recruit and form proletarian cadres through a deeper and deeper involvement in the class struggle. That must be focussed on the need to carry out a decisive turn to industry, to follow a proletarian orientation."

This turn to industry, as a decisive link in an overall proletarianisation policy, is not itself and on its now a line for building the sections but an organisational measure necessary for correcting deformations linked to the specific conditions of development of the sections, particularly in the imperialist countries, since the end of the 1960s. In this sense it is a bridge to the next stage of party building.

The necessity for this turn flows from the acknowledged social composition of the big majority of sections and on the possibilities opened up by the process of reorganisation of the workers movement, whatever might be the tactical choices of party building, (fusions, entrist operations, fraction intervention in the traditional parties).

Although the social composition of the sections has shifted in the course of the last 10 years from youth to wage earners (factory and office workers) the proportion of industrial workers in the key sectors of public and private industry, transport and telecommunications remains low. In general there are few stable numerically concentrated groups of militants in the same production unit. The spontaneous development of the class composition of the sections tends to reproduce the initial disequilibriums indeed to accentuate the imbalance between the white-collar and industrial workers. Finally, the weight of women in the sections is too weak, both from the point of view of the their proportion as well as in terms of the presence of working women, capable of playing a role in the development of a women's movement linked to the working class.

Over and beyond the uneveness in development between the sections, these facts are the sign of an abnormal situation. The emphasis placed on the need for a turn towards implantation in the industrial proletariat therefore is a response to several problems. It aims to correct this imbalance in our implantation which tends to reproduce itself or even to get worse with the spontaneous growth of the sections.

It aims to bring more adequately into alignment the proletarian programmatic definition of the section and their real social base. In particular conditions a minority organisation can remain proletarian essentially from the point of view of its programmatic references. But in the long term the weakness of social roots in the key sectors of the proletariat would certainly produce both political and organisational deformations.

Finally, an implantation in the main sectors of industrial production improves the possibilites of party building whatever the tactical conjunctural choices that may be made. There would be nothing more incorrect than to counterpose an entrist tactic to the proletarianisation efforts and vice versa or again to counterpose the turn to the building of trade union oppositions. In all cases the ability to influence the trajectory of radicalising currents in the workers movement and to recruit the best militants out of them will depend on the presence, activity, and authority in action of revolutionary Marxist militants.

Within the framework of an overall effort at proletarianising our sections we emphasise the turn to the industrial proletariat and particularly getting comrades hired in the big factories, in order to correct a flagrant weakness. That does not in any way imply a theoretical revision — in a restrictive sense — of the definition of the proletariat. Most office workers in commerce, the services, the health sector, banks and administration in the developed capitalist counties are part of the proletariat. But the industrial proletariat concentrated in the main production centres play a decisive strategic role inside the ranks of the proletariat which like all classes is itself differentiated.

Certain leaderships of the sections, after an initial effort, are tempted to relax their effots or even to abandon the turn. We must on the contrary reaffirm the proletarianisation drive. In a number of sections it is still insufficient in relation to the needs and possibilities, despite the effects of the economic crisis. To make further progress it is useful to distinguish the objective difficulties from the mistaken conception we have had since the Eleventh World Congress decision. This is what the report by USec Bureau to the May 1982 IEC began to do:

Looking back with hindsight we can say that the majority defending the industrial turn at the World Congress presented a series of fundamental arguments for the turn and formed an enthusiastic united front for this decision. But at the same time we have to admit that it didn't succeed in raising the profound discussion of how to carry it through under different circumstances and with the given tradition and characteristics in different parts of our movement. The discussion and argumentation stayed on a quite general level. It succeeded in giving a real impulse to our movement, but had a lack of precision in itself rather understandable at that early stage. This helped to give the decisions taken and the perspectives outlined a voluntarist twist when later translated into national plans in some of the sections underestimating the amount of education and preparation necessary and overestimating the speed with which the industrial turn could be carried through, thus giving unrealistic goals for some sections that had to be corrected over time.[15]

In light of the experiences we have already had it is possible to place the turn to industry in an overall, clearer perspective. It is a long term party building axis requiring prolonged effort and is consistent with a strategic perspective in which the industrial proletariat plays a central role and not a short-term gamble about the conjuncture.

It is a political/organisational project and not a moral imperative. Rooting ourselves in industry is not an objective in itself but the means to strengthen an intervention in the struggles and organisations of the working class. We want to accumulate forces making our sections active, working class political vanguard organisations, distinct from both propagandist groups which say what should be done without having the means themselves to act and from simply militant trade union fractions. Collective implantation inside the workplaces breaks with a de facto conception of party building limited to a spontaneous growth and good propaganda for the united front.

The role of political leadership at all levels is decisive for the proletarianisation and the turn — to politically lead these moves, to situate them within a political line which militants can use to intervene effectively and also to transform the leadership teams themselves. The leading nuclei of the sections, given their origins and experience, often must go through a process of social transformation, parallel to the whole of the sections. Mastering their involvement in the turn should mean we can ensure both a transition and a continuity, the integration of leaders in the turn and the integration into the leaderships of comrades who have made the turn or have been recruited as a result of the turn.

This process is very important for helping us to improve our leadership methods, the follow through of a particular orientation, and the necessary permament interaction between the definition of the line, its practical results and the necessary corrections to it. Building up a solid network of intermediary leaderships town and sector leaderships is a fundamental condition for this control and correction of central orientations being carried out systematically.

Progress in the proletarianisation project must be shown with concrete facts and figures. But the quantitative criteria adopted in the report given to the Eleventh World Congress (that is, the absolute majority of membership in industry) does not best express the solidity of new implantation or the quality of the intervention. Such a quantitative objective can be attained by a determined effort at getting comrades hired but also by an absolute loss of membership in the non-industrial sectors. It is applied in a blanket way to sections which are at different stages of party building and tends to cover over the specific problems they are facing. It can in certain cases introduce an endless race for the percentage, if the initial results of the turn are not sufficient for producing a higher regular rate of recruitment in industry than in other layers. Consequently it can encourage workerist criteria tending to reduce party building just to its industrial component. The other social sectors then become simple reservoirs for the turn and not fully-fledged areas of work for building a revolution party.

To measure the progress of the turn it would thus be better to combine statistical data with other criteria more significant from the point of view of the quality and stability of the implantation such as, for example, the creation and consolidation of active cells in the big industrial centres, the development of trade union fractions for each branch of industry, the development of the party in the key industrial regions. The aim continues to be that the industrial implantation becomes the centre of gravity of the sections. The weight that the implantation in industry will have in the orientation and initiatives of the party, in its internal political life and the concerns of its leadership is not independent from the relative weight of workers in the membership as a whole. Thus the social centre of gravity of our sections has to shift qualitatively and quantitatively. While we reject any short cuts in building our organisations, the effort to proletarianise the sections constitutes the axis for building — if not we run the risk of getting bogged down and allowing the present social composition to reproduce itself.

Just continually reaffirming the need for the turn can become an abstract and routinist moralist battle. It can even become transformed into a theme of activity as such, making the organisation seen weird in the eyes of the workers we want to recruit. Within the framework of an ongoing effort of the proletarianisation project, the turn as such must be paced out in waves, the relaunching of new waves being based on political success in campaigns and struggles, permitting new layers of the membership to be convinced of the effectiveness of the turn.

More generally, while the turn to industry represents the corner stone of the proletarianisation efforts for the sections, the latter cannot be limited to getting comrades hired in industry. It involves a coherent series of measures: recruitment policies, a system of education, a redefinition of internal functioning, the conscious development of a long-term network of leaderships, adapting the system of press and the structures of intervention, a particular attention given to the immigrant workers in the countries where they represent a significant part of the working class.

Initially envisaged for the imperialist countries, the turn to industry was progressively generalised onto a world scale without enough attention being paid to the specific problems that can be posed in the colonial and semi-colonial countries. In these countries social differences between the proletarian or semiproletarian masses and the petty bourgeois layers or between skilled industrial proletariat and the exploited plebian masses of the big towns, are more striking than in the imperialist countries. Situations can vary a great deal from country to country.

But for organisations that originally came out of the student movement or the intelligensia, the first problem they face is that of a 'turn to the people' — within which the turn to industry is only one element.

In fact the changes in the international division of labour over the last 25 years and the effects of uneven and combined development have in some cases thoroughly shaken up the societies of these countries. For example in the semi-industrialised countries the growth and concentration of a new working class has been accompanied by a rapid growth of both "unregistered" sectors — peripheral to industry and services — employing millions of temporary workers without legal status or trade union membership and plebian layers subject to permanent unemployment or underemployment. These sectors of the masses can be decisive for building a revolutionary party whose role is to be the "caudillo of the nation" (Trotsky), in other words, the force which leads and brings together all the oppressed and exploited of the country.

These economic and social transformations have other consequences. There is thus a structural, not just conjunctural, relationship between, on the one hand recent industrial development, the urban explosion and on the other, the agrarian crisis and the ruin of the peasant's world. So that in many cases the potential for mass struggles in the cities is closely connected to whether there is mobilisation and resistance in the countryside. Thus the Mexican PRT comrades directly link demands for radical urban reform to proposals for a radical land reform.

That is why building a revolutionary party with real implantation in these countries implies not only rooting ourselves in the industrial proletariat but also intervening and building up experience in the poor neighbourhoods and the shantytowns as well as in the countryside.

While the industrial working class is itself very heterogenous and does not form a social pole of attraction as powerful as the working class in the imperialist countries, nevertheless it constitutes the indispensable backbone for the building of an independent workers movement able to attract and organise other oppressed layers. The relative weakness of the traditional reformist or populist apparatuses means it is possible to directly win workers to a vanguard organisation. The obstacle to such recruitment is often more sociological (ability of the organisation to integrate and aid these militants) than political.

But it is still true that, even for small-sized groups in the process of formation, selected projects of getting concentrated groups of comrades hired can be an indispensable lever for speeding up the transformation of the sections, their recruitment and the concerns of the leaderships.

Finally, we also have had cases in these countries of organisations having an initial proletarian and trade union implantation but whose problem was to extend their intervention, particularly among the peasantry, in order to acquire the status of genuine revolutionary political parties. No simple recipe can resolve in advance the tactical choices to be made case by case in function of the strength and solidity of the sections.

However, it is important that they are attentive to these problems and are ready to set up specific organisational forms or political movements having a mass character: for unemployed, peasants, shantytown dwellers, etc., which the trade union movement occasionally has neither the possibility nor the will to organize.

At the Eleventh World Congress we adopted a resolution that outlined our basic programmatic positions and strategic line of march for the struggle for women's liberation. It also explained the particular difficulties faced by women comrades in our own organisations, and the steps necessary to begin to overcome them.

This text was prepared on the basis of a number of years' experience by the sections, particularly in the advanced capitalist countries, or work and recruitment in the women's liberation movement.

The women's movement as it was then constituted — primarily women-only groups based mainly among white collar women workers and students — has declined and fragmented in most of the advanced capitalist countries. At the same time there has been an increased ideological offensive by the bourgeoisie aimed at reasserting in the context of the crisis, that women's place is in the home and not of right to be in the work force.

Our lack of implantation in those sectors hardest hit by this offensive — working class women, immigrant women — made it more difficult for us to participate in the initial struggles women have led against these attacks.

10) This situation makes it more vital than ever that the fight against women's oppression is integrated into all aspects of our work, and particularly into our intervention in workers struggles and the consistent work of building trade union oppositions. The weakness of our implantation in these sectors of women is part and parcel of our overall weakness of implantation. Thus the measures we take to overcome the general problem must be accompanied by a particular effort to implant ourselves among these sectors of women.

At the same time as the objective situation changed the insufficiency of the internal measures outlined in the resolution at the Eleventh World Congress was put to the test. The inadequate attention given to political education and the integration of women comrades in the leaderships, although obviously not inseparable from the decline of the women's liberation movement, does have a certain autonomy from it.

The basic analyses of the 11th World Congress still hold good, even if the women's movement has changed a lot since then. During the 1970s the women's movement was mainly composed of intellectuals and women workers in the better-paid layers of the white-collar proletariat. The central concern of the movement, which was at the forefront in the advanced capitalist countries, was the right to choose for their own bodies. In some countries it was possible to win a liberalisation of the abortion laws. But the women's movement of this period found it very difficult to reach out to women workers. In general, the movement did not succeed in linking up in an ongoing way with the struggles that emerged on the questions of equal pay, women's role in trade unions, etc.

Towards the mid-1970s, after the first big upsurge, the women's movement went into crisis because, among other reasons, it could not provide a perspective for the mass of women in this new situation. The weakness of the Marxist-feminist current is a partial explanation for this.

Since then, although it has still not achieved a real effectiveness either on the question of demands or in organisation, the women's movement has entered a new phase. Using the crisis as an excuse, the bourgeoisie has launched a new offensive aimed at re-establishing the traditional role of women in the home and refusing women the right to (waged ...) work. In this context the bourgeoisie emphasises a reactionary family policy, promotes child-bearing and attacks on abortion rights. In the name of encouraging compatibility between family and work, women become the first victims of flexible and precarious work. This pressure is strongest for young and immigrant women.

The women's movement of the 1970s succeeded through its activity and the growth of a feminist culture (press, theory, art, etc) in encouraging the development of a feminist consciousness in the workers movement and among women workers. Without exception, women play a big role in all social, wage and mass struggles. Whether within the organisations of the workers movement or in the German ecology movement of the "Greens", women are coming forward in the leadership and demanding their rights. In this they are fighting for the specific demands of women, but at the same time are at the forefront of the struggle in all progressive struggles. New layers are joining the fight, for example housewives, most often in liaison with workers' struggle for jobs, the struggle of the British miners' wives being a good example, as well as the immigrant women's movement.

Women, and women's self-organisation, thus constitute an important factor in the recomposition going on in the workforce and its vanguard. This is true in all three sectors of the world revolution, even if the starting point and the form of the radicalisation is different each time.

For these reasons, it is more important than ever to integrate the struggle against women's oppression into all aspects of our work, particularly our intervention into labour disputes and building trade union opposition tendencies. The weakness of our implantation in the sectors most affected by the bourgeoisie's new offensive, such a women workers or immigrants has proved a handicap to this up to this point. The measures that we will take to root our organisation more deeply in the proletariat must include efforts to link us to these sectors. However, the struggle against women's oppression is not reducible to an aspect of the turn to industry. Our participation in and initiatives leading to mass autonomous action by women and a thoroughgoing feminisation of all our campaigns and our internal life are equally a part of this.

Finally, we are also called upon in the terrain of theoretical analysis. Against the old and new reformism of the women's movement, we must take the offensive in putting forward our feminist, revolutionary Marxist responses.

The insufficient attention paid to the education of women comrades and their integration into the leadership has internal roots, even if it can be linked to the decline of the women's liberation movement. The sections and their leadership must today take the measures outlined in the last World Congress resolution, to ensure that the potential and capacity of women comrades are used to the full in leading the organisations and areas of work, and in making special efforts to recruit women.

3) The youth organisations

The turn to industry requires complementary and increased attention being paid to intervention among youth and in building youth organisations. The resolution adopted by the May 1982 IEC[16] emphasized the specific role of the youth radicalisation and the vital necessity for the future of the sections to win new generations of revolutionaries bringing their own experience to the building of the party. The resolution consequently insists on the perspective of building real youth organisations, organisationally independent of the sections once the sections themselves are stabilised and have established their centre of gravity in the working class.

In the present period these organisations are inevitably vanguard organisations and not mass organisations. Their political basis is not a complete political programme or a summary of the Fourth International's programme. It consists rather in a platform for action responding to the burning problems facing youth today: the struggle against racism and the effects of austerity policy, the struggle against imperialism and militarism, campaigns against repression and in solidarity with the liberation struggles of oppressed peoples, solidarity with the antibureaucratic struggles in Eastern Europe, the struggle for women's liberation, etc.

These youth organisations should be really organisationally independent from the sections, turned to militant action and education and not small youth parties, a miniaturised version of the section. It is traditional to say in the workers movement that youth organisations allow new generations, who do not have the weight of past defeats around their necks, to go through their own experiences, to commit and correct their errors. But we should add that this also means that they are sometimes right when the "adult" sections are wrong and can shake the latter out of their routines.

We need to build organisations that are above all geared to action and function around central campaigns. But they should not just be campaign fractions. Stabilising membership and recruitment implies diversifying beyond campaigns and having real areas of work and a sustained educational effort.

The line of proletarianisation adopted by the sections must be expressed in a specific way in the youth organisations. It is not a question of mechanically copying the measures taken in the sections. Getting jobs in industry presupposes a level of consciousness and long term commitment to building the party which is not automatically the case for young people freshly recruited out of campaigns. To turn towards working class youth the youth organisations must first of all define their priorities of intervention among working class youth at work or in technical training and make a methodical effort to orient the professional careers of their own militants, bringing about a movement to making the turn especially among youth who are already members of the party.

Forming youth organisations is a choice which implies heavy responsibilities for the sections. It does not just mean relieving the party of its youth sector or formally granting autonomy to a youth sector which remains under the more of less attentive tutelage of the section. The aim is to create real youth organisations which have close relations of dialogue and cooperation with the section on an organisation-to-organisation basis. This obliges the youth organisation to deal itself with the fundamental problems of youth and to work out its political line.

Fraternal links between the youth organisations and the Fourth International and its sections only have any practical (and not administrative) sense if they correspond to a real experience of trust and collaboration. Without that, such a definition would at best correspond to a formal programmatic agreement unrelated to the consciousness and real activity of the youth organisation and at worst a pure and simple manipulation.

There is a specific problem regarding the explosive situation for young people who are particularly affected by the consequences of the crisis in the dominated countries. Up to now none of the sections in these countries have yet responded by forming a youth organisation. But initial experiences of intervention in the youth movements have been made. These should be the subject of a specific discussion in order to draw the peliminary lessons and work out perspectives for future work.

4) What sort of centralisation and functioning for the International?

The necessity for a democratic centralist-based International flows from the internationalisation of the productive forces and of the class struggle. This internationalisation is qualitatively superior in the imperialist epoch, the epoch of wars and revolutions, to a century ago.

However, workers' economic and political struggles basically still develop within the framework of national states. There is no automatic or spontaneous convergence of struggles to common positions on an international scale. In these conditions, the absence of a conscious internationalist preparation, education and orientation will inevitably lead to deep divisions between the workers of different countries when faced with the actions of a class enemy who is more and more centralised.

Building the Fourth International at the present stage fulfills the irreplacable function of preparing and educating militants and sectors of the vanguard whom we influence in the priority of international solidarity and unity of action over any "national" considerations once the interests of the proletariat of several countries are concretely at stake. Any lack of such internationalist principles opens the way to "national communist" deformations and to possible conflicts between the workers of different countries.

The forms of functioning and centralisation of the International are not, however, based on timeless principles. They must be defined in terms of the present stage of party building and the tasks which flow from them. This International is not a miniature version of a future mass International equipped with all its structures and functions but an instrument necessary for its construction.

Undertaking to build the Fourth International as it is, without waiting, means categorically rejecting the idea according to which an International will be the natural product of developments in the class struggle and of the spontaneous convergence of revolutionary forces on a national or regional level. The latter approach would in practice result in abandoning an international point of view for diplomatic relations between national organisations. This has been generally verified in the collapse of the best intentioned centrist organisations, both in the 1930s with the London Bureau and at the beginning of the 1970s in Europe. But already today building an International and not a simple coordination of national groups does not mechanically imply adopting illusory and formal forms of centralisation which in practice mitigate against the indispensable dialectic between strategic elaboration and practical experience in each country.

Democratic centralisation of the International above all consists in working out a common general line on the big questions and the main events of the international class struggle through world congresses and normally elected bodies. The mechanism of internal discussion should aim at an effective synthesis of the experience of the International through the mediation of its sections. Consequently it decides its political positions through congresses and does not merely organise conferences in which the sections exchange pre-established positions on the big international questions. This is also why there can be no imperative mandating of delegates by sections for the world congress or for members elected to the leading bodies of the International.

Our own experience and the history of the Third International has taught us that the centralism which regulates an International — particularly a small one like ours — cannot be mechanical reproduction of the democratic centralism of a national section involved in a struggle for the overthrow of the bourgeois state in its country. Democratic centralism on an international level includes respect for the sovereignty of the sections over the definition of their national political line, over tactics, over the choice of their leaderships and over the organisation of their internal debates — all this within the framework of the statutes which regulate the life of the International as a whole.

In this sense the International is not an organisaion of directly affiliated individual members. It is based on the political and organisational reality of its sections "which constitute the basic organisational units of the International".

Once these broad points are outlined there remains an area of practical difficulties and of interpretation. Thus, the SWP leadership comrades are now pulling explicitly in a direction which would gut the very notion of an International of any meaning. Inversely, comrade Hoffman and his tendency denounce the laxism and polycentrism of the International without bringing any concrete answers regarding its forms of functioning.

Indeed in his report to the February 1982 SWP Plenum comrade Barnes gives a very particular interpretation of the resolution at the last world congress:

Our view of international democratic centralism is summed up in two paragraphs in the resolution adopted at the 1979 World Congress. These are important paragraphs. Without them, we would not have been able to agree to the political resolution for the last World Congress that dissolved the old factional lines. These two paragraphs meant that we had agreed on the dissolution of factions in the International.

Here's what they say:

"To advance party building, the Fourth International abides by the norms of democratic centralism both nationally and internationally, with the right to form tendencies or factions guaranteed as was the tradition in the Bolshevik Party in Lenin's time.

"On this point the statutes of the Fourth International include two general provisions on the mode of operation of democratic centralism.

"(1) Decisions taken by a majority of delegates at a democratically organised world congress, the highest body of the Fourth International, are binding on all sections. Decisions taken by the International Executive Committee, which is elected by the delegates to serve as the highest body until the next congress, can be appealed but remain in effect until the appeal is heard and decided on;

"(2) The members of national sections have the right to elect their own leaderships. Democratically organised congresses and plenary meetings of elected national committees constitute the highest bodies of national sections. They have the right to determine political line on all questions nationally, and to interpret and determine for all members of the section the national application of decisions made by the Fourth International."

Notice the word "nationally" in the last sentence. It's an adverb, not an adjective. It doesn't say that the sections have the right to determine political line on all national questions. It says they have the right to determine political line on all questions nationally.[17] (our emphasis)

Comrade Barnes' interpretation is to say the least unilateral and mistaken. It is a radical contradiction of point 1) of the resolution he refers to. Even if his grammatical interpretation of the difference between an adverb and an adjective is correct the last sentence nevertheless is still contradictory since it affirms at one and the same time the sovereignty of the sections over all questions (including international ones) and the duty of sections to interpret for their countries the decisions taken by the leading bodies of the International. Now the word "interpret" does not mean "contradict" and no grammatical sophistication can change that. The contradiction is even more blatant since the statutes of the International — unanimously adopted — explicitly state that Congress decisions must be carried out by all sections. Up to now, cde Barnes has not asked for the statutes to be revised. In fact, behind this quarrel is a deeper, more substantial contradiction which is not evident in the documents but exists in reality.

The International exists as a world organisation with its congresses, its statutes, its elected leaderships. If comrade Barnes were consistent, all that would be in his eyes no more than a useless ceremony. What is the good of elected congresses and leaderships if the sections determine their line in any case on all questions independently of the positions adopted by the International?

At the same time, the International endeavours to respect the sovereignty of the sections in the working out of their intervention in their countries and in the organisation of their internal life. As the sections develop and become more active, so too there are more and more ways in which national and international questions combine in their intervention. Just to take one example, at the last world congress the line of unifying the Trotskyist movement was an international position, but in France or Brazil it became a tactical question of national party building (which in the case of France was opposed by the majority of the section).

This type of contradiction, linked to our present stage of party building cannot be resolved by an formal device. On the contrary we have to look for the framework and norms of functioning allowing us to overcome it through common agreement. Once they have accepted the statutes, participate in world congresses and elect the leadership bodies the International's legitimacy and authority, which cannot be limited to the sum of its sections and a confrontation between positions pre-established at a national level, must be recognised by the sections and leaderships. The latter can make their positions public when they are not in agreement with the International when it is a case of international events directly involving the working people of several countries.

The limits we have in political centralisation come up even more strongly in our organisational centralisation. It would be absurd to think the International can be more centralised and "directive" on organisational matters than on its general political line. For example, that it could tolerate on the one hand a great diversity of positions in its ranks on questions as important as Cuba, Poland, and Indochina, and then define on the other hand universally obligatory party building tactics like the turn to industry or the unification of the Trotskyist movement.

Recognising the sovereignty of sections in the election of their own leaderships and in the organisation of their internal life implies the corollary that sections refrain from public attacks against the line and activity of other sections. Finally, the international application of tendency and faction rights, recognised by the statutes raises a particular problem, to the extent where it tends to come into contradiction with the principle of sovereignty of sections in the organisation of their internal debates. This contradiction, which increasingly sharpens in proportion to the growth and proletarianisation of the sections, can be partially resolved by a rigorous definition of the international discussion periods and of their form (access to internal bulletins, distribution of documents, trips for representatives of tendencies). On the other hand the contradiction would be worsened by a form of debate that is the heritage (which has not been overcome) of another period of party building when the International was essentially limited to a network of propaganda groups.

The growth and transformation of the International should logically lead to more frequent, regular World Congresses with more limited agendas (focused on the big questions of the day and not a periodic debate of general programmatic refoundation every five years.) Thus a dialectic of effective centralisation — in line with our present resources — could be set up based on the activity and experiences of the sections.

An adjustment of the International's functioning along these lines would impose other corrections, particularly concerning the criteria for recognising new sections. Up to now programmatic agreement in practice was the exclusive criterion, independent of any political and organisational criteria.

This overestimation of general ideological and programmatic criteria has occasionally led to the recognition of groups without the minimum guarantees of stability and activity. Such procedure can in certain cases discredit the project of the International by identifying it with purely propagandistic circles. In the worst of cases it can even lead to creating supplementary obstacles for the building of sections rooted in the masses by conferring on groups, which have not proved themselves, a power of veto over the International's relations with other revolutionary organisations of the country concerned.

This conclusion does not imply any contempt of underestimation of small organisations. Furthermore the problem is not principally a numerical one. In certain difficult circumstances (i.e., illegality) small organisations have shown greater proof of their solidity, the stability of their leaderships and the effectiveness of their intervention than numerically bigger organisations in easier conditions.

But it is an illusion to think that recognition as a section is the first of best aid the International can give to a group in formation. Within the limits of our present resources, political and material aid can be more concrete and effective, without automatically implying or presupposing granting the status of a section. Recognition of new sections by the World Congress should take into account a whole series of political and organisational considerations, such as the real activity, the existence of a regular press, criteria of functioning and minimal implantation. A common aceptance of such criteria would be a proof of maturity on the part of the International as well as the organisations turning towards it. This is more important than the geographical multiplication of groups, which, in some limited cases, have in part a formal existence.

This particular question, tied up with the progressive uneven and combined transformation of the International and its sections, was masked by the factional situation of the early seventies. Then it was confused with the circumstantial problems raised by the division of certain sections, obscuring in this way the political significance a real transitional status of sympathising group could have.

5) What system of leaderships in the International? The credibility of the International is based on its capacity to come to grips with its own growth and to invest its general programmatic references into the concrete experience of building its own sections. If its leading bodies restrict themselves to a role of defence and illustration of the programmatic heritage without being capable of intervening in the problems the sections come up against in their development, the centrifugal tensions inherent in the uneven development of the sections will accentuate. Intervening does not mean laying down a line or giving recipes, but first of all dialogue and collaboration. Indeed the International and its leaders are above all the product of its sections and of their experience. They also reflect the limits of this experience.

Consequently we have to conceive of the International leadership as a genuine network of structures and cadres, based on the reality of the sections and not as a central repository of the programmatic identity of the International. Forming cadres of the International is a conscious, long term task. There is no model of identikit picture of the "political cadre". Cadres are the product of specific stages of party building. Building up a network of leadership teams must aim at integrating the most advanced experiences of the sections, which are themselves in constant evolution, and the experiences and respective qualities of different generations of militants.

With this objective in mind we must set up a leadership system which internationalises the practice the sections' leaderships, by associating them closely in the responsibilities of the whole of the International and by ensuring a controlled rotation of certain central tasks.

As concerns the organisation of the leading bodies the sytem of leadership should be based on the existence of an International Executive Committee, both representative of the reality and the diversity of the International and sufficiently small to be able to really meet once or twice a year to discuss the key events of the world situation. The Secretariat must be a real political executive body made up of comrades directly involved, to varying degrees, full or part-time, in the work of building the International. For the latter to be able to meet frequently and rapidly if necessary, its size should be around 20 members.

We also need a Bureau formed by the USec to ensure a full time presence of the executive and to direct the production of our press, prepare IEC and USec metings, coordinate the tasks of members of these bodies, maintain correspondence with the sections and centralise education.

Since the last world congress the International's press has been consolidated and extended. Its great weakness remains the irregularity and distribution of Spanish Inprecor.

Regarding education, setting up an international cadre school has been the most important initiative. This school must be a pivot of a system of formation for section leaderships which in the long term aims at the education and homogenisation of an international nucleus of cadres and the creation of a collective memory of our experience. It should also produce education and research material which must result in a publishing project linked to the school. Such an overall project can only be brought to fruition if it is relayed in the sections by a planned policy of using this school for the formation of their own leadership nuclei.

Once the regular leading bodies of the International are consolidated it is possible and necessary to steadily create a tradition of educational and working meetings, leadership meetings on a regional or continental basis (or meetings dealing with a particular theme). This has got under way on a European and Latin American scale and we can begin this with the Arab countries. In addition a limited effort has to be made on another level to coordinated the work of the youth organisations and, as far as possible, the campaigns.

Experience shows that it is possible to make progress in the centralisation of coordination of central political campaigns (Central America, Poland, antiwar) and to strengthen our still insufficient traditions of defence campaigns against repression. These campaigns can draw in either the whole of the International or more limited geographical regions. On the other hand our implantation is still quantitively and qualitatively insufficient for an ongoing centralisation of our intervention by sector or industrial branch (this does not rule out conjunctural meetings.)

Fixing the priorities for the coming years in these terms means deliberately deciding to change a whole way of working — where the big questions discussed in the leading bodies of the International and the problems of political line and party building faced by the sections remain on different levels and hardly ever come together. This situation perpetuates and increases the juxtaposition between the International's disproportionate analytical function (as "deposit-holder" of the principles) and the often empirical practice of the sections. The lessons of this practice are often not drawn nor used.

It is not just a case of homogenising the experience of the leaderships of the sections but also of collectivising it, so that it can be assimilated by the International itself. In this way the International can become useful not only as the guardian of the tradition but also increasingly as a relevant political instrument capable of effectively helping the sections.

[1] See the review Quatrième Internationale No 10, Inprecor, 120; IIDB Vol. XVIII, No.3; International Viewpoint Special Supplement No. 32 1983

[2] IIDB, Vol. XVIII, No. 6

[3] IIDB, Vol. XX, No. 2

[4] These criticisms of the anti-militarist policy of the LCR were made by Cindy Jaquith in her greetings for the SWP at the December 1981 LCR congress. She did not discuss them previously with the leadership of the French section. The French section proposed a written discussion on this point and sent a dossier to the SWP comrades. (See IIDB Vol. XVIII, No 1) There has been no answer to that proposal. The January 1982 USec dealt with the public attacks of the SWP (US) leadership against the Mexican PRT. Finally, the October 1983 USec heard a report from cde Dunder that a report given by Larry Seigle to the August SWP plenum about the Australian SWP was a full-scale attack on the work of the Australian section. Once again there had been no previous contact or discussion with the leadership of the section.

[5] Quoted in the Segur report, IIDB Vol XVIII No. 6

[6] IIDB, Vol. XX, No. 2

[7] Tendency platform of Hoffman and others, IIDB Vol. XIX No. 1

[8] IIDB, Vol. XIX, No. 4

[9] Cf. Eleven Points of the Left Opposition, Trotsky

[10] See Wang's document, IIDB, Vol. XIX, No. 3

[11] Quotations from the contribution submitted for publication in the IIDB in the name of this international tendency

[12] Cannon incidentally certainly understood the different significance of border conflicts and large-scale wars: "... in our opinion Stalin could take the path of Napoleonic conquest, not merely against small border states, but against the greatest imperialist powers, on one condition: that the Soviet bureaucracy in reality represents a new triumphant class which is in harmony with its economic system and secure in its position at home, etc. That if such is really the case, we certainly must revise everything said on the subject of the bureaucracy up to now, and admit at the same time that the regenerating revolution in the Soviet Union, along with the proletarian revolution in the West, must be crossed off for a long time to come." Struggle for a Proletarian Party, Pathfinder p. 104

[13] See Appendix on Latin America IIDB Vol XX No 8.

[14] See Matti et al. tendency platform (not published yet in English), in BIDI 7

[15] See Frej's report to the 1982 IEC in IIDB Vol. XVIII, No. 7

[16] Published in International Viewpoint No. 10, May 7, 1982

[17] Report adopted by the SWP (US) National Committee March 1982 published in Internal Information Bulletin (SWP) No. 1 in 1982: "Defending the Organisational Principles of a Proletarian Party!"