Manifesto of the Second World Congress of the Fourth International to the Exploited of the Whole World Issuing body: Second World Congress of the Fourth International (Paris, 2–21 April 1948)
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AGAINST WALL STREET AND THE KREMLIN FOR THE PROGRAMME OF THE "COMMUNIST MANIFESTO" FOR THE WORLD SOCIALIST REVOLUTION (1 May 1948)
Manifesto of the Second Congress of the Fourth International to the exploited of the whole world
On the hundredth anniversary of the Communist Manifesto, the World Congress of the Fourth International, meeting in Paris with the representatives of its thirty-five sections, considers it necessary to reaffirm, on the basis of the conceptions, aims and tendencies of communism, its answers to the problems now confronting the revolutionary vanguard and humanity as a whole.
Having passed through two world wars, an economic crisis without precedent, and the terrible experience of dictatorial regimes, humanity again finds itself faced with the threat of economic catastrophe and general conflagration.
THE DECAY OF CAPITALISM
The present situation is the inexorable outcome of capitalist society. With unequalled lucidity, the authors of the Communist Manifesto described, a century ago, the laws of motion of capitalism. They laid bare its tendency toward the unlimited expansion of production, its need to remould the whole earth in its own image. Today capitalist production has penetrated the most remote regions of the globe. It has released miraculous productive forces. It has ceaselessly revolutionised its own technique of labour, substituting the internal combustion engine and electricity for steam, and disintegrating matter to satisfy its insatiable need for energy.
Capitalism has achieved this progress from crisis to crisis, through the mechanism of its own contradictions. Having begun by devouring the previous modes of production, the industrial bourgeoisie continued its forward march by constantly devouring the weakest of its own kind.
Having run through the entire cycle of its existence, capitalism has begun to negate the very principles that presided over its birth. Combining trusts and konzerns into veritable monopolies, industrialists and bankers eliminate, on the scale of a country or a group of countries, free competition in a whole series of branches of production. Where its feverish drive once seemed free of every fetter, capitalist expansion now imposes artificial limits on production. Having reached its natural limit with the creation of the world market, it turns back against the bourgeoisie itself with all its explosive dynamism. Thus begins the decline of this system foretold by the authors of the Manifesto.
Economic crises follow one another at an ever more accelerated rate, paralysing the life of nations, reducing entire social strata to complete ruin. Social crises shake every country, undermine every form of government, and precipitate peoples into revolutions, counter-revolutions and civil wars.
Immense technical advances are withheld from collective use or diverted exclusively to destructive ends. The leaps forward that production still periodically makes enrich the few but impoverish the great majority of humanity. The perfecting of the world-wide division of labour leads to the fragmentation of the world market. The whole course of historical evolution changes direction. Instead of bringing civilisation to backward peoples, capitalism in its decay destroys the political conquests that marked its apogee in the most advanced countries. From a fetter on human progress, the bourgeoisie becomes the motor of reaction in every field.
PLANETARY WAR
War sums up all the destructive and barbarous traits of capitalism in its decline and carries them to their paroxysm. It conditions and dominates all human activity today.
Technique, science, production, politics, literature are put ever more exclusively at its service.
From the world character of capitalist production and its crisis flows today the planetary character of imperialist war. The war of 1914-1918 was still essentially a European war. Of the Second World War, which left intact the three Americas as well as large parts of Africa and Asia, Trotsky could say in 1938 that the South Pole would remain excluded as a theatre of operations. It is deeply significant that the strategic preparation of a third world war already involves a fierce struggle for the domination of the Antarctic continent. It would spare no people on any continent, would leave no capital untouched, would tolerate no island of civilisation. The unleashed forces of destruction would sweep away in a few years what centuries of labour have built, and would cover the globe with smoking ruins.
The whole of humanity is struck with terror at the speed with which the military alliances of the next carnage are already being woven, even before the last war has been formally closed by a peace treaty. This terror crystallises particularly around the atomic bomb. Just as war seems to escape all human control and seems to follow its own sinister logic independent of the action of politicians, so the incalculable implications of the atomic bomb escape the plans of scientists as much as those of diplomats, upsetting the calculations of generals as much as those of the sharks of the Stock Exchange. Never has man found himself more stupefied before his own product; never has the worker been more dominated by so fearsome a commodity; never has living labour been more crushed by dead labour. But at the same time that it drives the contradictions of capitalism toward the complete collapse of human civilisation, atomic energy allows a glimpse, in a society guided by the proletariat, of the prospect of the flowering of an epoch of peace and well-being within an extremely short time.
Faced with this permanent menace, which establishes the sovereign reign of fear over all men, petty-bourgeois intellectuals and scholars seek a palliative in "world government." For some, this is simply a theoretical justification for the thirst for power of Wall Street. Others sincerely strive to master by a magic formula the destructive forces that the decline of capitalism has ceaselessly unleashed. Neither the one nor the other grasps in the least the chain that binds planetary war to capitalist decay.
Only war production is today capable of creating new outlets for capital choking in its own world market. War is nothing other than the specific mechanism by which the decadent bourgeoisie tries to overcome its own contradictions. Far from succeeding, it can only ceaselessly provoke new contradictions in its effort to eliminate the old ones. Far from suppressing competition, the monopolies give it a more exacerbated character, both in the struggle between the monopolists themselves and in that between the middle entrepreneurs who are equally crushed. Far from limiting international conflicts, the epoch of the Four, the Three, or the Two Great Powers exacerbates conflicts between the dominant powers as well as those that oppose the weakened powers. To eliminate Germany and Japan as independent powers, American imperialism had to allow the rise of the USSR and the reappearance of France and China, previously eliminated. To fight the USSR effectively, it will tomorrow be forced to restore a measure of independence to Germany and Japan. This is not a matter of the errors of a Roosevelt or the Machiavellianism of a MacArthur, but of the expression of the most fundamental laws of the capitalist movement. The hypothesis of the survival of a single world power such as the United States would leave the globe definitively ruined, a prey to the interminable convulsions of national and colonial conflicts. The "war to end war," proposed today by Burnham just as it was led yesterday by Wilson, does not lead to the Pax Americana but to general chaos.
Just as capitalism was incapable of controlling the productive forces at the moment of its supreme apogee, so it shows itself incapable of controlling the forces of destruction at the moment of its profound decline. In the course of these two stages, it digs its own grave and creates its own gravedigger: the proletariat. The revolutionary struggle of the latter is the struggle to give conscious direction to society against the blind forces that ineluctably drag the bourgeois world toward planetary wars. The fate of capitalism is already decided, the knell has already sounded for it. But so that it may not disappear in atomic dust, it must collapse in the world communist revolution.
THE TOTALITARIANISATION OF CAPITALISM
For more than a century, capitalism has expressed the most brutal negation of every direct bond between men. Its domination has propelled itself through the sole mechanism of the laws of production. The state was the dearer to the capitalists the less it interfered with the free functioning of these laws. All servitudes and all freedoms found themselves simultaneously suppressed and realised in the sole freedom of trade, the worst of all human servitudes.
But the same mechanism of the laws of capitalist production, which allowed the bourgeoisie to deny the bonds between men as long as its commodities played a revolutionary role, has forced it to make desperate efforts to try to modify the play of these laws once it became a fetter on the development of the productive forces. Born under the sign of "laissez-faire," capital now clings to the most parasitic dirigisme. Having come to power in a fierce struggle against absolutism, it leads today to the establishment of the totalitarian state.
Reduced to the narrow margin between collapse and prosperity that has characterised its fate for four decades, terrified by the constantly renewed threats of revolutionary upheaval, ceaselessly experiencing in their balance sheets the repercussions of the disintegrating forces of their economy, the monopolists are inevitably led to subject every sphere of social activity to their rigid administration. The state, whose progressive effacement the liberal advocates of capitalism celebrated a century ago, becomes a monstrous machine that controls men before their birth and coins money from their corpses after their death. Liberal parliamentarism and imperialist democracy give way to the epoch of totalitarian dictatorship.
By means of the increasingly hypertrophied machine of the bourgeois state, the monopolists subject the whole of economic life to their regulation. Through forced cartelisation, the state distribution of raw materials, state control of credit and the nationalisation of certain loss-making sectors of industry, they impose their own arbitrary will on the whole of the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie. Through the incorporation of the trade unions into the state, the procedure of compulsory arbitration, the limitation or total suspension of the right to strike, the building of company unions through corruption, informing or terror, they try to muzzle the workers' movement when they do not succeed in breaking it. Through an education subordinated to their interests and their most charitable ally, the Church, they try to prevent the development of class consciousness among workers' children and to mould their sentiments according to their own sordid interests. Advertising, the press, the cinema and the radio have become gigantic institutions for the formation of public opinion, that is to say, of deception and corruption at the will of the monopolists. The latter no longer content themselves with enrolling the doctor, the lawyer, the poet and the scientist among the wage-earners; they further dictate to them their own conception of public health, of law, of literature and of science, stifling cultural life under the weight of their social conservatism. Ascending capitalism reduced human values to exchange values; decadent capitalism crushes them beneath the coarse boot of its totalitarian gendarmes.
The totalitarian character of contemporary capitalism first appeared in finished form in the fascist dictatorship. Organising the ruined, pauperised and desperate middle classes, and using all the undigested prejudices of history, German monopoly capitalism built a barbarous state that perfected the mechanism for the cold-blooded murder of seven million prisoners in its concentration camps. But the "war to eliminate fascism" has itself led, as the Fourth International had predicted, to the introduction of totalitarian methods into the last of the democratic countries. The incapacity of the Labour Party to resolve the social crisis in Great Britain through its wretched reforms is already driving thousands of petty bourgeois into the arms of fascist demagogues. Under the leadership of Attlee, Bevin and Morrison, the British state, so proud of its liberalism for domestic consumption, purges scientists suspected of communist sympathies. The ever-deeper penetration of military chiefs into all leading political posts in the United States, the intimate fusion of the "Sixty Families" and the "Brass Hats" in the diplomatic apparatus, anti-communist hysteria, spy-mania, the reactionary offensive of the Church even within the trade unions — all these phenomena mark the progress of the totalitarianisation of the bourgeois state in the United States. In every country of the world, what remains of bourgeois democracy takes on an ever more worm-eaten and rotten form, one that invites generals and adventurers in the service of big capital to deliver it the final blow.
The totalitarianisation of capitalism is the clearest expression of the fact that social contradictions are henceforth incompatible with the "normal" realisation of capitalist profit. Far from being a new stage of capitalist stabilisation, it is the most violent manifestation of the agony of this system. Beneath its leaden slab, all the forces of capitalist decomposition continue to gnaw at it at an accelerated pace. The regime stumbles from social explosion to international conflagration. The supreme stage of capitalist organisation proves to be, more and more, the organisation of a bloody chaos that ever again places the communist revolution on the order of the day.
GERMANY AND CHINA, A WARNING TO ALL!
It is in the mirror of Germany and China that humanity can see what its fate would be were the capitalist regime to continue.
Germany today has ceased to be a political, economic and social entity. Amputated of five provinces, its trunk is divided into four zones of occupation. Its cities are in ruins, its fields exhausted, its inhabitants, by the millions, driven onto the roads by hunger or fear. Its economic structure is broken, its national wealth destroyed or alienated, its labour force pauperised, its trade paralysed.
Yet barely twenty years ago, despite a lost war and a crushed revolution, Germany still possessed the most powerful industry, the most rationalised agriculture, the most skilled labour force and the most intense trade on the European continent. On three occasions, the German proletariat had clearly manifested its will to take the destiny of the nation into its own hands. Its conquest of power would have permitted the peaceful association of German technique with Russian economic potential. The barriers opposing the constructive use of its enormous productive power would have burst. Directed essentially toward the satisfaction of Europe's human needs, this power would have opened for the old continent an epoch of peace and well-being. But at every trial, an incapable or treacherous workers' leadership squandered in vain the magnificent fighting energy of the German working masses. Exhausted after fifteen years of fruitless effort, they were finally handed over without a fight to the Nazi dictatorship. The bourgeoisie then organised the powerful German economic potential for the satisfaction of its own predatory aims and gave it a formidable explosive force that ended by burying Germany beneath its ruins, after having convulsed the whole of Europe and sown devastation in every country.
China has been struggling for two decades in the convulsions of an aborted revolution. To the innumerable victims of the cataclysms of nature are added the millions of victims of the cataclysms of society. Wars, civil wars, insurrections, punitive expeditions never cease to ravage this vast country. The old handicrafts fall ever more into ruin, but modern industry no longer manages to advance. Usury devours revolts, but capital is lacking to build roads. Inflation ruins the cities, but landless and breadless peasants continue to flock to them by the thousands. The state is offered to the highest bidder, and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek exploits the national economy as though it were a family business. Wherever one looks, one sees nothing but decomposition, ruin and stagnation.
In the crucible in which the new Chinese society was being formed, under the shock of imperialist penetration, a young industrial proletariat also came into being, one that rapidly achieved communist consciousness. Relying on the will to emancipation of tens of millions of poor peasants, it obtained a remarkable historic opportunity to overthrow the whole worm-eaten superstructure of Chinese society, simultaneously breaking the domination of foreign imperialism and of the national bourgeoisie. By unifying the country and ensuring a rational and planned exploitation of its immense natural riches, the victorious Chinese revolution would have been the signal for revolt throughout the whole colonial world, and would have sounded the knell of imperialism in every country. The Second World War and its monstrous results would thus have been spared humanity. But the Stalinist leadership led the Chinese revolution, so rich in promise, to defeat, and thereby condemned the country to pass through an epoch of interminable convulsions amid the decomposition of the living forces of the nation.
Germany and China are terrible examples of the destructive forces released by decadent capitalism. Just as it precipitates the most advanced nations from the heights of civilisation into the most sordid barbarism, so it simultaneously bars the road of progress to the still-backward nations. During the ascent of the bourgeoisie, the most advanced country showed the backward countries their own future. Today Germany and China announce the future fate of entire continents if society does not free itself from the yoke of the decadent bourgeoisie.
THE PROSPECTS OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
If all the decomposing tendencies of contemporary society seem to be concentrated in Germany, the whole power of resistance of decadent capitalism is concentrated in the United States. The American bourgeoisie has emerged immensely enriched from the two world wars that impoverished the old European continent. The ruin of the nations of Europe has resulted in an unprecedented boom in Yankee industry, agriculture and finance. The United States today holds two-thirds of the gold and capital invested in the world; half of world trade passes through its ports. The Yankee dollar dominates every stock exchange, the Yankee aeroplane every sky, the Yankee fleet the seven seas. From Nanking to Paris, and from Athens to Rio, governments maintain themselves only thanks to American credits. The bankers of the United States divide up Latin America among themselves, while American oil companies buy the sheikhs of Arabia. American military instructors direct the armed forces of Turkey and Greenland, and American commercial travellers determine food rations in Rome or Tokyo. The Pope and the Labour government, the Franco dictatorship and Australian democracy alike vie for the good graces of Wall Street and the blessing of the White House. American films, dances, books and tinned goods today determine the style of life in every country.
But if the power and wealth of the United States are paid for by the stagnation and decay of the rest of the capitalist world, this decay in turn irrevocably condemns the domination of the United States to its ruin. The American bourgeoisie is today threatened with suffocating in its own riches in the midst of a world dying of need. The whole earth no longer suffices as a market for American industry. Its domination now extending over five continents, Wall Street is shaken by every tremor felt in any corner of the globe. It is hard to believe that less than ten years ago the American bourgeoisie was still seriously debating the question of isolationism. Today, Italian elections, disturbances in Palestine and strikes in Japan become vital questions for American imperialism. Just as monopoly capitalism tends increasingly to totalitarianly embrace the life of nations, so the dominant imperialism strives ever more to Americanise the world. "One world or none": this remark of a politician means, in reality, nothing other than the ultimate transformation of the world crisis into an American crisis.
American economy, politics and culture already show every precursory sign of the coming crisis. The terrible burden of public debt devours the reserves of the nation. Inflation, speculation, productive investment are all seized by that furious fever which always precedes the most resounding crashes. Soon the fall in profits will brake production all the more violently for its unparalleled prior boom. On the other hand, the crisis of the two-party system, the slow politicisation of the labour movement, the growing hold of the Catholic Church, and the atmosphere charged with pro-fascist tension (chauvinism, anti-communism, exacerbated racism) foretell a complete upheaval of the traditional data of American politics over the next ten years. Scarcely emerged from their provincialism, the American imperialists find themselves faced with the task of protecting capital on five continents. Their enormous wealth in no way compensates for their evident lack of political experience. British imperialism could base its world supremacy on its economic power alone. Today American imperialism is forced to raise mercenary armies in every country. In its ascending period, English capitalism was able to corrupt its own labour movement with the crumbs of its world profits. In the period of capitalist decline, Yankee imperialism cannot establish its world domination without extreme militarisation of its own country and the muzzling of its own proletariat. That is why the world thrust of American imperialism serves at the same time to educate the American proletariat in world politics. The forces released by the American crisis will oppose Wall Street's imperialist policy directly. The American proletariat will find itself, for the first time, face to face with its communist destiny.
The American bourgeoisie has been able to concentrate the most powerful industry in the world between New York and California only by simultaneously constituting a very numerous and highly skilled proletariat there. To make up for the historic delay of its labour movement, the proletariat of the United States today stands before the prospect of a tumultuous development. Under the lash of the great crisis of 1929, working-class consciousness advanced with a formidable bound and reached the highest level of trade-union consciousness. Based on the magnificent rise of the CIO, the American trade-union movement became the most powerful ever known in capitalist society. Under the lash of the next economic crisis, the consciousness of American workers will make a new leap forward and will reach the level of political class consciousness. The politicisation of the American labour movement will be the most explosive and most threatening process capitalism has known since the Russian Revolution. It is already inscribed in the whole evolution of American capitalism. To prepare boldly to take its lead, that is the duty of the American Trotskyists. The absence among the masses of any powerful tradition of reformism and Stalinism gives them an exceptional chance of success. The country that today concentrates within itself the whole capitalist movement will tomorrow carry the revolutionary movement to its highest expression. The commitments of American imperialism throughout the world will tomorrow make the American revolution the true signal and motor force of the world revolution.
THE USSR AND THE DEGENERATION OF THE OCTOBER REVOLUTION
Facing American imperialism today stands only a single state: the Soviet Union, whose riches are withdrawn from its control and whose citizens are withdrawn from its exploitation. In the place of the old worm-eaten empire of the tsars there now rises the second power in the world. Let anyone who still wishes today for a historical justification of the October Revolution compare the fate of Russia with that of China! The history of these thirty years has demonstrated the extraordinary solidity of the new social relations that issued from that revolution, in comparison with the uncontrollable centrifugal forces accumulated in every capitalist country. The superiority of the planned economy no longer expresses itself only in terms of steel, coal and concrete, as Trotsky said; it has also asserted itself on the field of battle, against the whole concentrated capitalist power of Europe.
But history has shown at the same time that, within the framework of these social relations superior to those of capitalism, degeneration and reaction have reached a monstrous level that no one could have foreseen. Every sphere of Soviet life is today gangrened by bureaucracy. Its waste, its parasitism, its embezzlements burden collectivised production with an ever more unbearable weight, ceaselessly reducing the rate of accumulation. Its greed and its parvenu appetites accumulate, day by day, greater social inequality and the concentration of privileges in the hands of a small minority. To the growing social tension, the Bonapartist dictatorship responds with the most barbarous police terror, chaining the workers to the factory, crushing peasant resistance in blood, liquidating important strata of the bureaucracy itself in massive purges. Faced with the misery and stupefaction of the masses, the bureaucracy has revived all the customs banished by the revolution. Where October taught Spartan equality, revolutionary devotion and self-abnegation in the service of the community, the bureaucracy has made triumphant titles, uniforms, epaulettes and a sordid spirit of gain. For proletarian internationalism, it has substituted an infamous mixture of Great-Russian chauvinism and mystical pan-Slavism. Thus the terrible results of the defeats of the world proletariat have asserted themselves in Russia as well.
The totalitarianisation of capitalism and the totalitarian dictatorship of Stalinism are not identical phenomena; their material base and their class nature are different. But both express, in symmetrical fashion, the price humanity must pay for the delay of the international communist revolution.
The theory of "socialism in one country" has cruelly avenged itself on Stalin. The petty-bourgeois conservatism of the Soviet bureaucracy first led it to strangle the revolution in Europe with its own hands, at the price of an ephemeral modus vivendi with the world bourgeoisie. It then led it, with implacable logic, to extend its domination beyond the frontiers of Russia in order to find a temporary solution to its economic difficulties and a no less ephemeral protection against imperialist encirclement.
Through its policy in the countries it has subjected to its influence, the bureaucracy manifests its contradictory nature. Unable to share its privileges with the bourgeoisie, it eliminated the bourgeoisie from control of the state and the economy. The measures undertaken in these countries, the nationalisations and the agrarian reforms, are dictated not in the least by love of socialism but by the bureaucracy's will to consolidate its exclusive control over the economic and political life of the countries of the "buffer zone" so as to secure its own privileges. But once its aims are achieved, it invariably turns against the masses in order to bind their movements and their organisations and to exert absolute control over them as well.
Having seized, in the countries of the "buffer zone," a portion of the key industries and encouraged the nationalisation of large-scale industry, the Kremlin strives to extract from them the maximum resources for its own needs, without regard for the interests of the masses. Faced with a stiffening of resistance from the national bourgeoisies, it resorts to a limited mobilisation of the masses, combined with a consistent police action to overcome it. The political regime of these countries thus takes on a Bonapartist form, alternating between blows to the right against the weakening resistance of the bourgeoisie and blows to the left against the hesitant efforts of the proletariat to defend its standard of living and its elementary freedoms.
Faced with the effects of the expansion of the bureaucracy, myopic petty-bourgeois "theoreticians," having long since lost all faith in the proletarian revolution, marvel at the "successes" of "Stalinist realism." Have not the nationalisations extended to the whole of Eastern Europe? Others, mortally frightened by the "strengthening" of Stalinism, see in it the representative of a monstrous new exploiting society launched on the road to world domination. The hysteria of the one and of the other harmonises strangely with Stalinist propaganda, both judging with the most vulgar impressionism. Stalin's "socialist conquests" in Eastern Europe were, in reality, conceded to him by world imperialism at Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam. In exchange for these "conquests," Stalin betrayed the insurrectionary movement of August 1942 in India, ordered the disarming of the Greek partisans, handed over the mass movement of France to de Gaulle, restored to power the tottering bourgeoisie in every country of Western Europe, and helped crush the German proletariat. Through his infamous practices of industrial dismantling, plunder, terror and deportation, he succeeded in provoking, within the world labour movement itself, profound feelings of hostility toward the Soviet Union — something Hitler had never been able to achieve. Such is the impressive balance sheet of Stalinist "victories."
Thus, on an infinitely enlarged scale, Stalinist policy is leading the USSR into the same impasse as in 1939. Incapable of relying on the revolutionary combativity of the masses, the bureaucracy has recourse to a policy of expansion and power that aggravates the general conditions of the new, inevitable trial of strength with imperialism, and favours the unification of the imperialist forces under the aegis of Washington. Stalin has used the respite he has just won to cover himself with the most abominable crimes. Whatever his subsequent successes, he is running blindly to his ruin.
As long as it remains locked within the dilemma of a choice between the Stalinist bureaucracy and American imperialism, as long as it does not take its stand on the ground of the struggle for the socialist revolution, the whole world will have before it not a prospect of recovery and development, but on the contrary a prospect of decomposition and accelerating decay.
THE SOCIALIST UNITED STATES OF EUROPE
For forty years, the history of Europe has been the history of the revolt of the productive forces against the boundaries of the national state. The two world wars have been nothing but a desperate effort by the imperialist powers to "organise" this revolt to their own profit.
In 1918, French imperialism possessed neither the industrial potential nor the political dynamism necessary to take this organisation into its own hands. Its Versailles system "organised" Europe with the materials of traditional diplomacy: peace treaties, military alliances and financial credits. From the first economic catastrophe, this system collapsed without a trace.
Then German imperialism, relying on a superior technique and productive potential, unleashed the second imperialist war with the aim of organising the Old Continent — not only politically but also militarily and economically — in accordance with its own needs. Despite lightning military successes, the "New European Order" collapsed even more rapidly than the old Versailles system. Its organisation was nothing but a gigantic enterprise of plunder and destruction, sucking out the whole economic substance of the European peoples for the benefit of its insatiable war machine.
Today American imperialism, driven by the implacable logic of its dominant position, strives in its own way to solve the old problem. The political and economic organisation it pursues (the Marshall Plan and the Western Union) seems nevertheless to be of a different nature from that of the previous would-be masters. Instead of taking, Yankee imperialism seems to give. In place of a society of crushed satellites, it seems to want to build a corporation of grateful creditors. This is what makes it possible to gather, under the sign of a "United States of Europe" made in the USA, cunning adventurers of the Churchill type and petty bourgeois of the Guy Mollet type, hoping that American manna will allow them to preserve, a little longer, the memory of old Europe.
In reality, the organisation of Europe under the aegis of Washington does not correspond to aims fundamentally different from those of French and German imperialism, and it will inevitably collapse for analogous reasons. Yankee imperialism genuinely desires to knock down tariff barriers, put finances in order and stabilise currencies. But it tends toward this solely in order to "organise" the purchasing power of its customers and the solvency of its debtors. At the same time, it is forced to organise the shrinking of their markets and the increase of their debts. No conference will save it from the contradictions of this policy. The Europe of the Marshall Plan, like the Europe of Versailles and the Europe of Hitler, will be nothing other than a pauperised and powerless Europe, overhung by a slab of dollars. Threatened with asphyxiation when its credits are cut off, the European bourgeoisie today accepts every American condition, just as in 1940 it accepted the ridiculous proclamations of Hitler backed by the Wehrmacht. But from the very first day the dollars run short, or when the American crisis breaks out, each bourgeoisie will desperately seek its own salvation, and the "unions" will dissolve even more quickly than they were formed.
Just as the unity of the modern nation was achieved under the victorious impetus of a revolutionary class, the unity of the continent, now placed on the order of the day by the level attained by human technique, can only be the fruit of a new and triumphant social revolution. Just as it was necessary to sweep away absolutism and all semi-feudal survivals to make bourgeois France one and indivisible, so it will be necessary to sweep away the bourgeois state and its economy based on profit in order to create a united socialist Europe.
It is a matter of drawing up a single plan for the reconstruction of the Old Continent, one that rationally unites Silesian coal, Lorraine ore, Catalan tin and Romanian oil. It is a matter of joining the steel mills of the Ruhr to Czech mechanical construction and Swiss precision industry, in one and the same effort to endow the whole of Europe with the most modern technique. It is a matter of electrifying the Polish countryside, irrigating southern Italy and rationalising French agriculture so that bread is no longer lacking in Vienna, Berlin or Madrid. This plan must be drawn up with a view to satisfying the needs of the masses, not to building a new war machine. It is necessary not only to suppress capitalist profit, but also the parasitism of the bureaucracies and the crushing burden of the hypertrophied states. It is necessary to rely on the creative power of the masses, not to do violence to them through hunger or terrorise them with the machine gun. That is why the only true European planning — one that will organise production and well-being instead of organising misery, plunder or indebtedness — will be planning elaborated, carried out and verified by the masses organised in thousands of workers' councils covering the whole continent. That is why the unity of Europe is inconceivable without the effective exercise of power by the workers and poor peasants. A Europe thus unified by the revolutionary action of the proletariat will allow every nationality the free flowering of its cultural individuality. It will at one stroke liberate all the colonial peoples and will thus open, in history, the epoch of free collaboration between continents. It will accelerate the constructive use of atomic energy and will show the labouring masses of the Soviet Union and of the United States a positive alternative to the policy of armament that leads to war. It will offer the proletariat of these two countries a concrete plan for the harmonious development of the world economy, and by its very example it will undermine the power of the imperialist bourgeoisie as much as that of the Stalinist bureaucracy. That is why concrete, patient and relentless explanation and agitation for the programme of the Socialist United States of Europe are today counterposed by the Fourth International to the Marshall Plan, to the "defence of national industry," and to all the panaceas and charlatan formulas with which the bourgeoisie at bay, the demoralised petty bourgeoisie and the corrupt Stalinist bureaucracy vainly strive to heal the festering wounds of the European economy and politics.
STORM OVER THE COLONIAL WORLD
If the shaking of the old imperialist powers favours the outbreak of emancipatory movements in the colonies, the development of the colonial revolutions in turn accelerates the decomposition of the imperialist systems and of the bourgeois "democracy" that rests upon them. The immense upheavals provoked by the Second World War, the accelerated industrialisation of Manchuria, India and the Middle East, the irreparable collapse of the prestige of the "master races," the anguish, hunger and exasperated hatred of millions of coolies are shattering the edifice of colonialist exploitation that, for four centuries, based European capitalist wealth and progress on the frenzied exploitation of three-quarters of humanity.
Shaken to the very foundations of their own metropolitan society by the onset of the colonial revolution, the old imperialist powers tend to transform the form of their domination in order to preserve the essence of its content, that is, super-profits and strategic control. Trusteeship, "equality within the French or Dutch Union," the granting of dominion status or even the proclamation of independence for Iraq or Burma, the partition of Palestine and of India, are merely successive lines of retrenchment for colonialist reaction. It continues to hold peoples indirectly under its thumb through a thousand ties of economic or military servitude. In order to demonstrate in fact how far their traditional civilising mission persists beneath its new "liberal" form, the imperialist exploiters engage in brutal repression (Vietnam) or in cynical provocations ("police actions" in Indonesia, the Jewish-Arab conflict, etc.). The road of abandoning direct colonial domination is marked out with as many murders, famines and bloody chaos as the road of its penetration.
In a period of disintegration of the colonial systems, the native bourgeoisie, marked from birth with all the stigmata of the degeneration of its system, strives to reach a favourable association with imperialism. Exercising today the function of proxy for its imperialist masters, it comes into permanent collision with the struggle of the colonial masses in defence of their daily interests. It finds itself torn between the desire to seize new privileges and the fear of losing the old ones. This is what gives its actions a character at once particularly rapacious and abject. Crawling before the corrupt royal clique and periodically selling out its country to the City, the Egyptian bourgeoisie dreams no less of subjugating the Sudan, Libya and even Eritrea. Having wretchedly capitulated before the Muslim princes and landowners, the Indian bourgeoisie thinks no less of conquering the markets of the Far East.
Amid the shocks that have shaken the colonial empires, only American imperialism has been able to reap profits without losing pledges. The colonial bourgeoisies loosen their ties with the metropoles only to fall under the thumb of Yankee imperialism. But at the same time Washington rightly fears the inevitable social catastrophes that the final collapse of the colonial empires would unleash in the metropolitan countries. The American bourgeoisie knows itself incapable of supplying, in a minimum of time, the material and human framework needed to replace the colonial apparatus while at the same time keeping the states of old Europe standing. Using in turn economic blackmail, military pressure or the organs of the UN, it strives to intensify the penetration of its capital while at the same time using the native bourgeoisie to break the momentum of the masses, and supporting colonialist attempts to preserve the framework of the old empires. In the case of Indonesia and of the Sudan, American imperialism has consciously played the role of defender of colonialism. Better than anyone, it understands that imperialist domination over today's world is indivisible, and that any local collapse risks becoming the starting point for the collapse of the whole system.
All the more contemptible are the arguments of all the philistines who refuse their support to the colonies' movements of emancipation on the pretext that their independence would mean submission to American imperialism or to the Soviet bureaucracy. The most sacred duty of the proletariat of every metropolitan country is to support, totally and unconditionally, every movement of revolt in the colonies. Every occasion must be used to denounce before public opinion the crimes the "democrats" commit daily in the countries in revolt, to call on the workers to boycott expeditions and wars of conquest, to disintegrate the imperialist army through intelligent propaganda for fraternisation with the colonial masses, and to wrest from the bourgeoisie a halt to hostilities and reprisals. The complete abandonment by imperialism of all its colonial positions can only be the result of a simultaneous revolutionary struggle in the metropoles and in the colonies. The Fourth International can affirm today that several of its sections (France, Holland, Great Britain) have been the only workers' organisations to carry on such agitation. At the same time, it has shown that revolutionaries in the metropoles are ready to help, without reservation or any paternalism, the advanced workers and students of the colonial countries to build Bolshevik organisations themselves, in their own countries.
The Stalinist parties yesterday, during the "anti-fascist war," buried the struggle for colonial independence. In the present stage, the reversal of their policy leads them to total capitulation before petty-bourgeois nationalism. The sections of the Fourth International, by contrast, have pursued, always and everywhere in the colonial countries, an intransigent struggle against colonialist oppression while maintaining the total independence, in organisation, policy and ideology, of the colonial proletariat from its own bourgeoisie. In India, in Vietnam, in Egypt, they are to be found everywhere in the front lines of the masses' anti-imperialist actions. For the same reason, they are the only consistent defenders of the interests of colonial workers. Their policy draws its inspiration from the theory of the permanent revolution, verified by four decades of revolutionary struggles. Boldly making its own the demands of the bourgeois national revolution, the proletariat places itself at the head of all the exploited masses and leads them into battle to resolve the agrarian question, drive out the imperialists, expropriate foreign capital and win revolutionary political democracy. It can only carry this struggle through to the end on condition that it also eliminates its own "national" leeches, expropriates native capital, and passes on to socialist planning on the basis of workers' power. The revolutionary conquest of power by the proletariat is thus the sole strategic aim of the Fourth International, in the colonial countries as in the metropolitan countries. Failing this conquest, or the international extension of the revolution that it implies, the various bourgeois (India), petty-bourgeois (Indonesia) or Stalinist (Vietnam) cliques that seize the leadership of the movement, and that are forced to break the revolutionary energy of the masses, can only lead the colonial revolutions into the impasse of powerless guerrilla warfare, alternating with rotten compromises with imperialism.
The rise of the labour movement in the ascending period of capitalism was confined almost exclusively to Europe. Lenin was the first to understand the vital importance of the colonial countries within the framework of a world strategy of the proletarian revolution. But even before the task of building revolutionary parties in the colonies could be resolved by the Third International, the degeneration of its Stalinist leadership transformed them into bureaucratic apparatuses and a serious obstacle to the communist maturation of colonial workers. It falls to the Fourth International to build the first true revolutionary workers' parties in the colonial countries. This task, similar to the one the Communist Manifesto proclaimed for Europe, it can fulfil by relying on the entire past experience of the revolutionary movement. Its mission is to spare the colonial proletariat the painful defeats that the workers of Europe were unable to avoid. That is why it is the first organisation to have boldly proclaimed the primacy of the colonial countries in the world revolutionary struggle. That is why it is the first International that has effectively united within its leadership the most qualified representatives of the young colonial proletariat. For the same reason its ideas are spreading today with astonishing speed, over iron curtains, jungles and oceans, from black Africa to Japan and from Korea to Egypt. Registering its first successes among these three-quarters of humanity, its most exploited part, the Fourth International is preparing, on this soil virgin of working-class defeats, the most radical upheavals history has known to this day.
FOR THE UNITED STATES OF LATIN AMERICA
The immense territories of Latin America were, for four centuries, the favourite prey of international brigands and the most important source of their riches. After the Spain of the conquistadors, it was the England of Manchester that discovered its gold mines in the form of an unlimited market and a cheap source of supply of foodstuffs and raw materials. Then American imperialism submerged the continent with its brokers, its banks, its oil prospectors and its rubber planters. Having eliminated its German and Japanese competitors and forced its English partner to entrench itself in Argentina, Yankee imperialism today reigns as absolute master over the Latin American peoples. Through conferences on "good neighbourliness" or "defence of the Western hemisphere," through the standardisation of armaments or skilfully distributed credits, Wall Street and the State Department play with the semi-dictators (Brazil) or the authentic "democrats" (Chile) as they please. Through their diplomatic agents and their servants in the AFL bureaucracy, they intervene brutally in the labour movement, buying journalists, deputies and "statesmen" wholesale, organising the hunt for communists and forcibly splitting the trade unions.
Locked within narrow national frameworks that do not permit the constitution of a national market, lacking a sufficient demographic base, tied to the landowners through large-scale foreign trade and to foreign capital through the banks, the wretched, backward bourgeoisie of the Latin American countries has been incapable of resolving any problem whatsoever. It has not managed to integrate into the capitalist production circuit the large communities of Indians and Blacks who form so many backward islands across the whole continent. It has not been able to tear these countries away from the servitude of monoculture, which exposes them to the worst shocks of world economic crises. It has not managed to offer any serious opposition to imperialism, and for a century it has furnished it, in various political cliques, with a thousand and one servile agents. It has not succeeded in unifying, into a single Latin American nation, these various countries of a common language and complementary economies, whose division and mutual quarrels are so many elements of the enslavement of the peoples and the strengthening of international capital.
In all the Latin American countries, the weight of the proletariat far exceeds that of the national bourgeoisie. Condemned to an often intolerable existence (miners, agricultural workers), these proletarians periodically rise up in revolutionary movements of a fierce and desperate violence. Frightened by the elementary force of the mass movement, the bourgeoisie invariably finds itself forced to establish dictatorial regimes, after democratic interludes (Cárdenas, APRA, Betancourt) during which it often uses the labour movement as a means of blackmail and pressure against foreign imperialism. Between this weak and heterogeneous but rapacious bourgeoisie, foreign imperialism, a broad layer of petty bourgeois, and the young proletariat growing in numbers and confidence, the state most often manoeuvres in a Bonapartist form sui generis.
It falls to the young Latin American proletariat to resolve the historic problems the bourgeoisie has failed to master. The Bolivian revolution, the great strikes of Chile and Brazil, the rise of the labour movement in Venezuela, the recent bloody days of Bogotá, have proved that the labouring masses of Latin America are no longer prepared to remain the eternal victims of capitalist horse-trading. Putting forward its candidacy for power, the Latin American proletariat will take the lead of the national anti-imperialist movement and will rally around its programme of national and social emancipation the impoverished urban petty bourgeoisie and the peasants ready to free themselves from the great landowners. Its revolutionary vanguard will learn, from every social crisis in a given country, from every conflict between the masses and imperialism, to boldly raise the programme of the Socialist Soviet United States of Latin America. The duty of the American [US] proletariat is to assist it with all its strength. At the very moment when Yankee imperialism reaches out its hand toward world domination, the base of its power in Latin America will be shaken. Before the workers of the United States confront it in decisive battles, it will receive the most unforeseen blows from the workers south of the Rio Grande.
THE REFORMIST "SOLUTIONS"
If humanity still lives under the sign of the destruction and terror unleashed by the explosion of the productive forces, if it has not yet arrived at the solution of its tasks, this is not the fault of the proletariat and the labouring masses, who on several occasions have gone on the assault against the old system of exploitation and have furnished the most eloquent proofs of devotion, sacrifice, self-abnegation and initiative. The responsibility for this rests solely with the treacherous leaderships of the working class.
It was social democracy which, in 1914, passed into the service of the bourgeoisie, and which in 1918 ensured the crushing of the German revolution; it is social democracy which has since shown itself, in Léon Blum's own words, the "loyal manager" of capitalism. And it is likewise Stalinism which, having decomposed the parties of the Third International, has led them, through a whole series of turns, to methods of class collaboration — sometimes cruder, sometimes more refined, but always as pernicious and as perfidious as those of social democracy.
Even today, both of them, on the pretext of avoiding the "needless costs" of the proletarian revolution, offer respectively the reformist solutions of the "third force" and of "new democracy," which could only lead the labouring masses to new catastrophes.
THE "THIRD FORCE"
Caught between the simultaneous pressure of world imperialism and the Stalinist bureaucracy, the sorry heroes of social democracy distinguish themselves by the traditional panic of frightened petty bourgeois. In words, this panic expresses itself in a demarcation from the two powers that today dispute the world between them. In fact, speeches and articles in favour of a third force are nothing but an artificial fog concealing the effective engagement of the reformist leaders on one or other of the sides present. The Mochs and the Van Ackers break strikes for the benefit of the employers; the Flerlingers and the Cyrankiewiczes are the accomplices of the Stalinists in suppressing the last workers' freedoms. This fundamental contradiction of the "third force" has already blown apart the dreary "information committee" of the socialist parties. Today, Washington and Moscow each have "their" socialists, just as monarchs had "their" Jesuits and medieval princes their court jesters.
Just as war today takes on an ever more totalitarian form, so the process of preparation for war increasingly involves the establishment of absolute control over the labour movement. American imperialism achieves its ends by relying at once on the Pope and on social democracy. Under its generous protection, the walking wounded of the labour movement also "regroup," united by the same blind fear of Stalin and the same de facto acceptance of Yankee domination as the "lesser evil." While the panic of the petty bourgeois reinforces Washington's ideological front, less delicate specialists organise propaganda for the Marshall Plan, have the "reds" expelled from the factories and from public administration, and break trade-union unity. Social democracy can, however, only accomplish its tasks because the still greater crimes of the Stalinists periodically drive new layers of workers back toward it. Faced with Stalinist bureaucratism and corruption, the reformists represent in no way a more "democratic" variety of betrayal, but only a layer of bureaucrats more intimately integrated into the apparatus of the national bourgeoisie.
As in 1919, the social-democratic leaders today try to dam up the instinctively revolutionary thrust of the masses with the myth of "economic democracy." This time actively supported by the Stalinist chiefs, they explain to the workers that revolution was unnecessary, since one could occupy the Ministry of Economic Affairs, nationalise the coal mines — with lavish compensation! — establish co-management committees, and carry out other structural reforms by parliamentary law. After Hilferding, who wanted to write soviets into Germany's bourgeois constitution, Bevin and Morrison now proclaim the progress of a "socialist" economy within the framework of the British Empire.
After the First World War, capitalism was still able, in a few historically favoured countries, to grant the forty-eight-hour week and social legislation to the workers in order to divert them from the revolutionary path. Today, the champions of "economic democracy" take it upon themselves to make the workers accept the cynical super-exploitation on which the whole economic recovery in Europe is based. The policy of the Labour government is the clearest expression of this contemporary mission of the workers' bureaucracy: to permit the reconstruction, with the sweat of the workers, of capital previously destroyed with their blood.
The shameful policy of complete integration of the reformist leaders into the campaigns of reconstruction and of ideological and material rearmament of big capital cannot but provoke, again and again, the discontent and revolt of the socialist working-class rank and file, especially of the youth. Today Stalinism is incapable of attracting these layers of workers, who find themselves in search of a new pole of attraction. Remaining firmly attached to their programme, which alone is capable of offering a new path to the young working-class generations, the parties of the Fourth International approach these currents breaking away from social democracy without prejudice or sectarianism. Through active collaboration and patient, fraternal education, they will lead them, through their own experience, to overcome all the contradictions of centrism and to adhere to the organisation and principles of Bolshevik-Leninism.
THE "NEW DEMOCRACY"
The powerful revolutionary wave that coincided, in Europe and in Asia, with the end of the Second World War brought the Stalinist parties to the height of their power. As in all previous revolutionary movements, the masses flowed first toward the parties which, by their traditions, their past activity and their cadres solidly rooted in their class, corresponded best to the radicalisation of the broad labouring layers. Transformed at a single stroke into governmental parties in fifteen countries, the Stalinist organisations are just as responsible for the liquidation of this first post-war revolutionary wave as social democracy is for the liquidation of the revolutionary movements after 1918. Reformist betrayal was then carried out under the cover of "economic democracy"; Stalinist betrayal was carried out in 1945 under the cover of "new democracy."
The defence of the "bastions" won within the framework of imperialist democracy — in reality the privileges of the workers' bureaucracy — such is the immediate end in whose name the historic goal of the proletariat has been abandoned by the reformists. The defence of the "Russian bastion" — in reality the privileges of the Soviet bureaucracy — such is the end in whose name Stalinism has abandoned the pursuit of the world communist revolution. But experience always confirms that abandoning the final goal invariably leads to the loss of the very "bastions" one claims to defend. Nor is this a matter of "incomprehension" on the part of leaders faced with the obvious lessons of history, but truly a matter of the defence of their own specific interests. Just as the function of reformism is to reconcile the existence of the workers' bureaucracy with that of the national bourgeoisie, so the function of the Stalinist bureaucracy is to reconcile the existence of the Soviet bureaucracy with that of world imperialism.
The practice of Soviet expansion gives to the theory of "new democracy" the form of a justification for all the crimes committed by the Kremlin in the countries it dominates. The application of the theory of "new democracy" to the countries outside the Soviet sphere of influence merely completes its fundamental function. The open abandonment of the Leninist strategy of the conquest of power, and its replacement by compromises or by adventures aimed at seizing the "levers of command of the bourgeois state," openly express the reduction of the world proletariat, in the spirit of the Stalinist bureaucracy, to the role of a manoeuvring mass for Soviet diplomacy, the Soviet army and Soviet espionage.
Against the background of this general orientation, the Stalinist parties are less than ever capable of arriving at a consistent political line. As in the past, their tactics oscillate constantly between the flattest opportunism and the most frightening adventurism, often combining traits of both extremes. Yesterday they dissolved the Comintern; today they reconstitute the Cominform. Yesterday it was a matter of "producing first"; today it is a matter of sabotaging the Marshall Plan. Yesterday the strike was denounced as "the weapon of the trusts"; today movements are bureaucratically provoked. Through all these turns that disorient and stun the working class, the Stalinist leaders express one and the same desire to reach a favourable compromise with world imperialism, one and the same sovereign contempt for the proletarians, their sentiments, their interests and their consciousness.
The strength of Stalinism within the working class results from a combination of the material power of its apparatus with the revolutionary tradition it still represents in the eyes of broad masses. As Engels noted a century ago, tradition constitutes history's greatest force of inertia. To wrest the leadership of the working class from Stalinism, it is necessary to begin where social democracy and the Communist Party once began, in order to build powerful workers' organisations. A new generation of revolutionary working-class cadres must be educated, one that, through multiple and successive experiences of struggle, will succeed in taking root in the working class and winning its respect and confidence. It is a matter of building a real party which, through activity that becomes ever more universal, will end by appearing, in every mass movement, as the real alternative to a now-bankrupt leadership. It is by relying firmly on its revolutionary programme, by orienting itself toward the most exploited layers, and by keeping its full confidence in the profoundly revolutionary combativity of the proletariat, that the Fourth International will in the end break through the obstacle of Stalinism within the labour movement.
THE SELECTION OF THE NEW REVOLUTIONARY LEADERSHIP
The terrible crisis for which humanity has been paying, for thirty years, the price of the delay of the communist revolutions — the wars, the counter-revolutions, the totalitarian dictatorships, exterminated nations, civilisation dragged toward decay — this whole tragic epoch in no way reflects an organic incapacity of the proletariat to become conscious of its historic mission. On the contrary, from the civil war in Russia to the civil war in Spain, from the insurrection of Canton to that of Athens, millions of proletarians have proven in action a revolutionary élan, combativity and devotion without equal in history. All the qualities that flow from the specific function of the proletariat in capitalist society — its capacity suddenly to release an enormous creative energy, its keen sense of freely accepted discipline, its profound selflessness, which most clearly expresses its deepest historic interests — have already been inscribed on the most moving pages of the history of the twentieth century. The analyses and predictions of the Communist Manifesto on this score have not merely been confirmed; they have become the dominant reality of our time.
But facing the spontaneously revolutionary thrust of the proletariat there stands today a bourgeois society each step of whose decline unleashes a new defensive reflex on the part of classes condemned to disappear. Faced with the army, the police, the spies, the scabs, the press, the radio, the school and the Church — so many ramparts around the threatened citadels of capital — the spontaneous attacks carried out in scattered order by the proletariat are inevitably condemned to bloody failure. Against the centralised and scientifically rationalised leadership of the counter-revolution, which for decades has directed every capitalist country, whatever its political regime, the proletariat can only win if it in turn selects a leadership more qualified still: that of its own class party. The crisis of humanity is today the crisis of revolutionary leadership, because the instinctively revolutionary movement of the proletariat still corresponds to the openly counter-revolutionary character of its leadership.
That the proletariat has not managed, in three decades, to select an adequate world leadership — a task that the young European bourgeoisie, infinitely more educated and better prepared, only resolved in its own time after two centuries of groping — can only strike with astonishment those who have lost all sense of proportion in their judgment of history. Possessed of incomparable wealth and experience, the bourgeoisie succeeded, better than the ruling classes before it, in making its own ideology and its own morality the dominant ideology and morality of the epoch. In the ascending period of capitalism, successive workers' leaderships gradually won meagre reforms for the proletariat and substantial privileges for themselves; one after another they raised themselves above their own class and thus became the principal agents for transmitting bourgeois ideology within the labour movement. It was only when the decline of the regime precipitated the first powerful revolutionary waves, in Europe and in Asia, that the material conditions for the selection of a true revolutionary leadership, free of the ideological influence of the ruling class, began to be given. But, for want of an adequate leadership, these first waves were inevitably condemned to defeat. The selection of the revolutionary leadership has, ever since, taken place under the weight of these defeats. The Russian Bolshevik party, the only one that had succeeded in leading the workers to the conquest of power, itself became the first victim of the absence of a true Bolshevik International. To build such an organisation under the eminently difficult conditions of a period of decline — such is the historic mission of the Fourth International.
The world general staff of the proletariat must assimilate the programme of the communist revolution in its entirety. It must fertilise it with a matured revolutionary experience that makes it capable of facing every sudden turn of the situation. It must cause it to penetrate the broadest working masses, by means of an organisation genuinely bound to the class. These three tasks are only very laboriously resolved in a period such as the one that saw the birth of the Fourth International. The programme of the revolution is only definitively assimilated through the struggles of the masses. Political experience is only acquired in the course of a whole historical period of many-sided activity. The workers' organisation can only be built through uninterrupted molecular work in the factories and working-class neighbourhoods. Now, the conditions of decadent capitalism shatter, again and again, with unprecedented brutality, the continuity of revolutionary ideas, generations and organisations. That is why the selection of a true world leadership proves to be so long and so arduous a task; that is why it must be undertaken consciously, and consciously planned and carried out.
Such is the dialectic of history: the very same objective conditions that make the building of a world party of the socialist revolution so difficult are, at the same time, the only conditions that make its building possible. Thanks to the epoch in which it was formed, the Fourth International is free of reformist illusions, of parliamentary cretinism, of fatalism, of adventurism, of naive faith turning into disenchanted pessimism — free, in short, of so many of the sentiments and ideas that have formed and broken previous generations of revolutionaries. The Fourth International has overcome the contradictions between the national origin of its worker militants and the world mission of the proletarian movement; it is the first organisation to have begun to produce a genuine international leadership. The Fourth International is the first world organisation of the proletariat to combine a complete revolutionary programme with the lived experience of past revolutionary movements. That is why the proletarian defeats of the past will appear, on the historical scale, as the inevitable conditions for the formation of a scientific technique of revolution, just as epidemics have been the necessary conditions for the development of a scientific technique of healing. That is why the tragic period we are living through will prove, with the passage of time, to be nothing but a detour of history for the forging of the adequate instrument of humanity's emancipation.
THE STRUGGLE FOR THE TRANSITIONAL PROGRAMME
The experience necessary to become the real revolutionary leadership of the proletariat is acquired by the cadres of the Fourth International only through tireless and organised participation in every struggle and every mass movement — the true school of the strategy of the class struggle. For this participation, the Fourth International is armed with its Transitional Programme, the sum of the teachings of all past workers' struggles.
The activity of the Fourth International aims first to express clearly and consciously the deep but confused aspirations of the exploited masses. Whether they rise against the ravages of inflation or unemployment, whether the weight of wars or national oppression seems unbearable to them, whether they demand peace, more bread or more freedom, the Fourth International stands at their side, stimulating their critical spirit, steering their discontent onto the path of socialist consciousness, educating, organising and leading the exploited so that they may pass from a latent revolt against the effects of the regime to an open revolt against the cause of their ills: decadent capitalism.
Facing every concern or every demand of the masses, the Fourth International raises appropriate slogans to mobilise them with a view to resolving the problems that stir them.
That is why the Fourth International fights with all its strength against scepticism, fatalism and passivity as the worst brakes on the development of the class consciousness of the proletariat. That is why it explains again and again that every decision on the vital questions confronting the working class depends, in the last analysis, on the living clash between the classes, in which the proletariat can win victory in the factory as much as in the street.
Today capitalism can only survive by ceaselessly increasing the burden of misery that crushes the labouring masses. Deflation and inflation; price policy and tax policy; export campaigns and consumption restrictions; insufficient provisioning and overproduction — in every country, under a thousand different successive forms, this is one and the same attack on the purchasing power of the masses. To guarantee a vital minimum, based on the consumption needs of working-class families, through a system of a sliding scale of wages, salaries, benefits, pensions and social insurance — such is the immediate objective the sections of the Fourth International propose to the workers' struggles. The example of Japan, Korea, Italy, France and the United States has clearly demonstrated that this slogan has already been assimilated by millions of workers, who have launched grandiose strikes to wrest its achievement.
Amid the general under-consumption of three-quarters of humanity, signs of capitalist plethora already appear everywhere. Still a secondary threat today, unemployment will tomorrow weigh as the principal burden on the proletariat. Constantly warning the masses of the crisis that is inevitably approaching, the Fourth International calls on the workers to struggle for the forced reopening of closed enterprises and for their restarting under workers' management, for the progressive reduction of working hours without reduction of total wages, for a halt to layoffs and for the sharing of existing work among all workers, to whom the vital minimum remains guaranteed.
However, the questions of prices, wages, profits, turnover and the number of employees depend on the whole economic life of the country. If they genuinely wish to tackle the problem of purchasing power and full employment, the workers cannot leave it to the employers or their government to determine the cost-of-living index or the terms of hiring and firing. That is why none of the preceding slogans has any value unless it is linked to that of workers' control. The sections of the Fourth International lose no opportunity to awaken the workers' distrust of the good faith and competence of the capitalists and their state. Workers must be able to open the account books; they must be able to grasp on the spot the real functioning of the capitalist economy; they must be able to cast a glance over the whole mechanism of exploitation, over the parasitism and sordid waste that explain their own deprivations. It is only on this condition that the struggle for immediate economic objectives effectively becomes a bridge toward the revolutionary mobilisation of the proletariat against capitalism.
After the experience of the great economic crisis, of mass unemployment, of the black market, the great mass of workers understands today that no degree of economic security is compatible with the maintenance of private ownership of the means of production. The domination of the economy of every nation by a narrow group of monopolists has today become a commonplace. However, in the face of the experiences of bourgeois nationalisations, first of all those of England and France, it is necessary to explain again that the revolutionary demand for the expropriation of the banks and key industries is fundamentally different from the wretched reformist patch-work of decadent capitalism. To demand that nationalisations be carried out without any compensation whatsoever, except to small shareholders; to demand workers' control in the nationalised enterprises; to demand the gathering of all expropriated industries within the framework of a reconstruction plan drawn up and carried out by workers' committees; and to link the struggle for these nationalisations to the struggle for a workers' and peasants' government — this is to counterpose to the bourgeoisie's tenacious will to maintain its domination in a modified form, the programme of the communist and revolutionary transformation of society.
The epoch of decadent capitalism is likewise the epoch of the constant pauperisation of the middle classes. Carefully distinguishing between the exploiting and the exploited layers of the urban or peasant petty bourgeoisie, the sections of the Fourth International raise the appropriate slogans to cement, in action, the union of the labouring masses against big capital. In contrast to the Stalinist and reformist parties, for whom "alliance" with the middle classes is a cheap pretext for abandoning the revolutionary proletarian programme in order to ally themselves with leaders and parties that in fact betray the interests of the petty bourgeoisie, the sections of the Fourth International rely on the deep discontent of the particularly hard-hit middle layers (civil servants on starvation wages, landless peasants, artisans crushed by taxes, ruined small shopkeepers, etc.) in order to guide their desire for social upheaval onto the socialist path. This is the surest means of averting, in countries such as Italy, Japan or France, the development of new semi-fascist organisations feeding on the despair of the middle classes.
Every economic, trade-union and social question is today a political question. Everything the proletariat can wrest from the employers by strike action is systematically taken from it again by the government, which, whatever its form, remains the real board of directors of the ruling class. That is why, against the government of the bourgeoisie — whether a reactionary government or a coalition government of "workers'" leaders with bourgeois parties — the Fourth International counterposes the government of workers and peasants.
To tireless propaganda for this slogan is added, at moments of violent governmental crisis or generalised working-class combat, precise agitation addressed to the parties that claim to represent the working class and in which the masses still place their confidence. To these parties the Fourth International addresses the call: "Break with the bourgeoisie! Take all power!" — so as to apply a genuine workers' programme with the support of the mobilised masses and under their control.
It is not enough, however, for the "workers'" parties alone to be in government for this to truly constitute a workers' government. What is further needed is a genuinely anti-capitalist programme, the revolutionary mobilisation of the masses, overflowing the framework of bourgeois legality. Here the question of the state arises. British, Scandinavian or Australian Labour ministers have only the illusion of power. Real power remains in the hands of the administrative bureaucracy, at the orders of the all-powerful monopolists. Governments change, but the police, the generals, the judges and the senior civil servants — the whole bureaucracy in the service of the bourgeoisie — remain immovable. This obstacle can only be broken by the creation of the real power of the masses organised in factory, neighbourhood and village committees.
The cost of this state bureaucracy, with its military budgets, its waste and its frauds, weighs ever more heavily on the bled-white national economies and is the principal source of the inflation that devours the incomes of ordinary people. Taking up the incomparable example of revolutionary agitation set by Lenin, the Fourth International ceaselessly denounces the oppressive, exploiting and parasitic character of the bourgeois state. Starting from a thousand concrete incidents, it constantly counterposes to it the cheap state, the state in which the bureaucratic machine has been totally smashed and in which executive functions pass into the hands of the whole labouring population: the proletarian state, the state of the councils, the state of the Commune and of the October Revolution.
RECONSTRUCTING THE UNITY OF THE PROLETARIAN FRONT
After the great French strikes of 1947, the Italian elections of 1948 definitively confirmed that, at the present stage, the unity of the proletarian front can no longer be established around either of the two traditional leaderships of the working class. Sudden turns and cynical manoeuvres have definitively alienated from Stalinism a far from negligible part of the working-class vanguard. Their work as strike-breakers and organisers of scab unions henceforth renders the reformist chiefs incapable of exerting any further influence over the mass of combative Communist workers.
The two workers' bureaucracies carry into the proletariat the dividing line of the two blocs of international powers. Deliberately ignoring the mass of Communist workers, the reformist chiefs treat those who follow the Stalinist parties as the agents of a "totalitarian dictatorship." The Stalinist chiefs, for their part, cast the social-democratic workers, together with the fascists, into the camp of the "American party."
Just as no workers' offensive will be possible tomorrow without unity of action among the workers, so a victorious defence of the proletariat against the attacks the bourgeoisie is now launching against its purchasing power and its working-class freedoms is impossible without the re-establishment of the unity of the proletarian front. A century ago, the Communist Manifesto proclaimed that the communists have no interests separate from those of their class. Today the Fourth International, world party of the socialist revolution, constitutes the sole force calling on the workers to reconstitute, in action, the unity of their class front.
The trade unions are today the first target of those who, within the labour movement, represent interests foreign to those of the proletariat. The slogan "One employer, one union" remains the touchstone of the Fourth International's trade-union tactics. To divide the unions is always, in the final analysis, to facilitate the manoeuvres and provocations of the employers. But it is by no means enough to wage a consistent struggle against trade-union division. In most cases this is merely one particular aspect of a still deeper and more dangerous phenomenon: desertion from the unions. On the other hand, trade-union unity has meaning for the proletariat only insofar as it makes unity of action more achievable. But the trade-union bureaucracy wants to establish ever more total control over the labour movement and to accelerate the integration of the trade-union apparatus into the apparatus of the bourgeois state. Finally, this same bureaucracy, whose policy of betrayal sows demoralisation and constitutes the worst element of desertion from the unions, tries completely to stifle democracy within the unions, in practice depriving the most combative militants of the means of expressing their ideas to the union membership as a whole. That is why the sections of the Fourth International wage one and the same struggle for trade-union unity based on a dynamic programme of demands, capable of widening the union's radius of action to the broad unorganised masses; for the strictest maintenance of the independence of the unions from the state; and for the relentless defence of trade-union democracy.
On the other hand, the tendency toward the limitation and suppression of workers' freedoms is now asserting itself everywhere in the capitalist world. MacArthur suppresses the general strike in Japan, while Schuman and Moch promulgate repressive laws in France, and the Taft-Hartley Act draws the noose of class justice around the American trade unions. The survival of the capitalist regime is becoming, everywhere in the world, ever more incompatible with the maintenance of democratic freedoms, even the most elementary ones.
In this situation, the Fourth International calls on the workers to achieve broad unity of action around every democratic demand that corresponds to a real need of the labouring population. To give these demands their fullest form and to wage the most consistent struggle for them means today to mobilise the masses for the socialist revolution. Especially in Germany and other occupied countries, the struggle for the withdrawal of all occupying troops, for the establishment of the unity of the country and against every annexation and reparation; the struggle against censorship and the barely veiled military dictatorship; the struggle for genuinely free elections, for the convening of a Constituent Assembly, for the recall of elected representatives at the will of the electors; the struggle for the free provision to all workers' organisations of premises, printing facilities, radio, etc. — these struggles constitute milestones on the road of the proletarian revolution, provided they are conducted in the spirit of proletarian internationalism and constantly linked to propaganda for the international fraternisation of workers and soldiers, and to the struggle for the Socialist United States of Europe.
Finally, at a time when the memory of the fascist dictatorship is still fresh in the minds of workers in most countries of Europe, they follow with growing anxiety the signs of a revival of fascist (Italy) or semi-fascist (France) activity. The Fourth International constantly reminds the workers of the painful lessons of the working-class defeats in Germany, Austria and Spain in the face of fascist attacks. It constantly propagates the constitution of the united front of all workers' organisations to bar the road to de Gaulle, Mosley, Almirante and other candidate-executioners in the service of big capital. To united-front committees at the base must correspond constant propaganda, starting from daily events, for the constitution of the united front between the organisations that claim to represent the proletariat. The building of a workers' militia based on the factories, the unions and the neighbourhood committees must constantly be counterposed to the legalist cretinism of the treacherous leaders who servilely repeat the errors of their predecessors by demanding that the bourgeois state disarm the fascist bands. But above all it is necessary to follow attentively every spontaneous initiative of the masses in the anti-fascist struggle, initiatives which are taking their boldest forms especially in Italy. Only when the revolutionary vanguard has learned to take up these initiatives, to broaden them and to propagate them tirelessly, will a real, intimate integration be established between its conscious struggle and the spontaneous thrust of the workers, and will it effectively win the confidence of its own class.
FOR A NEW REVOLUTIONARY YOUTH INTERNATIONAL
After the First World War, it was from the ranks of the socialist youth, following the glorious example of its great international leader, Karl Liebknecht, that most of the cadres of the young Communist parties in Europe emerged. After the Second World War, it is once again within the ranks of the socialist youth of several countries that the first breaks with the treacherous leaderships, and the first searches for a new revolutionary International, are taking place. That youth should be the driving force of every revolutionary movement is by no means a merely empirical observation. The conditions of existence under decadent capitalism weigh most heavily on the young generations of manual and intellectual workers, who find themselves, from the very moment they enter life, cut off from all hope for the future. The bureaucratic sterilisation and the stifling atmosphere of intrigue and hypocrisy that now dominate the old workers' organisations likewise drive the most gifted and most devoted layers of the youth, most devoted to their class, into violent revolt. It is no accident that the Fourth International, itself born of an opposition partly issuing from the youth, is today an organisation composed, in its great majority, of young workers and students in every country. This is at the same time the surest pledge of its future development.
The bourgeois youth organisations (Catholic, semi-fascist) and those that claim to represent the working class (reformist and Stalinist) multiply their efforts with a view to bringing about a systematic depoliticisation of young workers. The disgust inevitably provoked by the policy of capitulation and compromise of the traditional organisations also tends to work in the same direction. That is why the Fourth International systematically raises the exploited youth to a political understanding of their wretched fate. The education of young revolutionary cadres is the indispensable condition for the emancipatory struggle of the proletarian youth to be centred on class objectives.
The Fourth International completely rejects any condescending attitude toward young workers and their problems. It adopts neither protective airs nor professorial lectures. It begins by itself applying the principle it never ceases to proclaim: that the emancipation of the working youth, like that of the proletariat in general, can only be the work of the young workers themselves. That is why the Fourth International fully recognises the right of the revolutionary youth to have its own class organisation, whose activity is centred first of all on the problems of the labouring youth itself: the struggle for the right to work and to education, for the right to life and to leisure. The revolutionary politics of youth, and the organisations that embody it, occupy a place of the first importance in the struggle against militarism, imperialism and war — a struggle which is itself one of the central revolutionary tasks of our epoch.
But at the same time as it fully recognises this right to a specific organisation, policy and programme of the revolutionary youth, the Fourth International calls on the labouring youth to understand that its own problems form an integral part of the general problems now confronting humanity. In the factory as in the barracks, on the building sites as at the university, working-class youth comes up against enemies who are those of the proletariat and the labouring masses as a whole: monopoly capitalism and its increasingly totalitarian state. That is why the revolutionary youth organisation cannot act independently of the revolutionary organisation of the proletariat, but only in intimate collaboration with it. That is why the new revolutionary youth International that must be built can only be built on the granite foundation of the programme of the Fourth International.
FOR THE OVERTHROW OF THE STALINIST BUREAUCRACY! FOR THE DEFENCE OF THE CONQUESTS OF OCTOBER AGAINST IMPERIALISM!
Faced with the unprecedented degeneration of the Soviet Union, a number of disappointed revolutionaries identify the Stalinist dictatorship with what remains of the conquests of October, and thereby withdraw from the defence of these conquests. On the other hand, all the "fellow travellers" who, only yesterday, were singing the praises of the "victorious Red Army" when it was a matter of "finishing the anti-fascist war," suddenly become conscious again of Stalinist barbarism the moment it clashes with the interests of their own bourgeoisie. The militants of the Fourth International, who were the first within the labour movement to denounce everything monstrous and reactionary in the Stalinist regime, are also the only ones who, against both these currents, genuinely wage the struggle against Stalin within the rigorous framework of a defence of the interests of the Russian proletariat and of the world proletariat.
The war that Washington is preparing against the USSR has no purpose whatsoever of introducing political democracy or respect for human rights there. On the contrary, faced with the fierce resistance that Soviet workers and peasants would offer it were it to occupy Soviet territory, Yankee imperialism would establish there a regime of terror similar to Hitler's.
An imperialist war that did not liberate the workers from totalitarian dictatorship would allow them still less to advance along the road to socialism. Imperialism could, at most, combine its pursuit of capitalist profit with the waste of the bureaucracy. Far from thoroughly cleansing the edifice of planning and eliminating the rot of the profiteers, it would bring the whole edifice crashing down under the blows of its commodities and its capital.
The violent elimination of the bureaucratic regime is today an urgent task of the Russian working class; otherwise what remains of the conquests of October risks being smothered beneath the weight of its parasitism. This is precisely why the Russian workers cannot entrust this task to imperialism, and will defend against it, relentlessly, what remains of the conquests of October, without for a single instant relaxing their revolutionary struggle for the overthrow of the Stalinist Bonapartist clique.
Through his reactionary policy in the countries occupied by the Russian army, Stalin defends above all the privileges of the bureaucracy. Just as this bureaucracy undermines the foundations of the workers' state in the USSR, so its counter-revolutionary policy outside the USSR constitutes a permanent threat to these same conquests. The Fourth International defends what remains of October by the sole means of the revolutionary class struggle. Everything that weakens the proletariat within and outside the USSR, everything that confuses its thought or lowers its consciousness, is a direct blow to the revolutionary defence of the USSR. That is why to defend the conquests of October today means to struggle against the reactionary Stalinist bureaucracy, against the oppression, plunder and occupation of the countries of the "buffer zone," against secret treaties and horse-trading over the backs of peoples. The only form of defence of the USSR that the Fourth International propagates is the revolutionary struggle of each proletariat against its own bourgeoisie, the struggle to break every obstacle to the socialist revolution, even when these obstacles are constituted by the Russian occupation troops themselves.
The war, the defence of the Soviet state, the pressing needs of reconstruction have certainly, in the absence of a powerful revolutionary pole, led advanced workers to accept the bureaucracy as an inevitable lesser evil. On the other hand, the partisan struggles, the military victories and contact with the advanced countries of Europe have also undoubtedly sharpened the critical spirit of Soviet workers, their hatred of the parasites responsible for the waste, and their will to take the management of the state and the economy back into their own hands. The further reconstruction proceeds, the more the rate of accumulation falls owing to bureaucratic mismanagement, and the more economic difficulties will intensify and social inequality will worsen. Through the constant upheavals that Soviet society will undergo, its young working-class generations will become conscious of their own interests. With the help of the revolutionary movements of the capitalist countries, they will find the road to the overthrow of the bureaucracy and will open a new revolutionary chapter in the history of Russia.
THE PROGRAMME OF THE COMMUNIST REVOLUTION
The Fourth International does not set itself the task of patching up the capitalist regime, or of seeking substitutes for revolutionary solutions deemed "too radical." Its programme is that of the mobilisation of the masses for the overthrow of capitalism. That is why the transitional demands contain not a trace of conformist or evolutionist spirit. Overcoming the old antithesis between the minimum and the maximum programme, they instead link each daily concern to the most burning problem of our epoch: the revolutionary conquest of power. Sectarian is any propaganda that confines itself to repeating this general goal of the movement as a ritual formula, without providing the working class with the means of acquiring an understanding of it through its own experience. Opportunist is any activity that introduces, even surreptitiously, a conception of struggle by stages, limiting itself "for the time being" to immediate demands, transforming transitional slogans into ends in themselves, and regarding the workers as too backward to be told the programme of the communist revolution from the outset.
Faced with the appalling prostitution of communism by the Stalinist bureaucracy, and with the innumerable distortions and falsifications that have followed from it, it is today necessary to reaffirm the fundamental characteristics of the communist revolution. It means the expropriation of the bourgeoisie and its destruction as a class; it means the taking over of the means of production and exchange by the proletariat. It means the destruction of the bureaucratic machine of the bourgeois state and its replacement by the proletariat, organised as the ruling class in workers' councils in which proletarian democracy prevails. The collectivisation of the means of production and exchange, the concentration of all credit institutions into a single state bank held in collective ownership, the establishment of the monopoly of foreign trade, the establishment of a planned economy — these are not ends in themselves of the revolution; they are only means of progressively raising the standard of living and the culture of the masses, of shortening the length of the working day to the point where the immense majority of workers will be capable of administering the economy and public affairs, where the division of society into classes will fade away, and where the state will wither away. That is why the establishment and development of workers' control over production, the active participation of the masses in the drawing up, execution and verification of production plans, the increasingly decisive intervention of the human factor at every level of economic life, and the ever-greater subordination of production norms to the needs of consumption, are indispensable elements of the economy after the overthrow of capitalism, and constitute so many indices of society's real progress toward socialism. That is why the radical reduction of the body of professional officials, the fusion of legislative and executive functions and their exercise in rotation by a growing number of educated workers, are the clearest indices of the definitive liquidation of the counter-revolution, of the stabilisation of the new society and of the radical diminution of its internal contradictions.
The programme of the communist revolution is that of the emancipation of all nationalities, the effective granting to all peoples of the right of self-determination, including the right of secession. By eliminating every exploitation and every oppression of one people by another — through the joint elimination of the exploiters of each nation — and by giving every nationality the possibility of freely developing its own cultural individuality, the revolution will simultaneously destroy the sources of chauvinism, will hunt down nationalist and racist mystiques into their last refuges, and will root out everything that could obstruct the achievement of a genuine universal federation of the peoples of the whole world.
The communist revolution will not merely liberate the immense productive energy of the masses on the economic plane. It will penetrate every sphere of society and will everywhere liberate a considerable creative potential. Education, scientific and technical training, the artistic and literary movement, the organisation of public health, the building of cities and the shaping of morals will for the first time be opened to the millions of proletarians and coolies whose economic slavery systematically cripples their innumerable talents. As a result, all these activities will in turn undergo a radical and continual transformation of their nature. Having finally become mistress of her own fate, humanity will cause critical consciousness to penetrate the last shadowy recesses of the unknown, and its own nature will become the ultimate object of the permanent revolution. From the realm of necessity, man will pass into that of freedom.
In a society that risks sinking into barbarism, but that is still pregnant with all these grandiose possibilities, the Fourth International considers realistic only the programme that firmly sets itself the goal of communism. To devote one's life today to the cause of the revolutionary emancipation of humanity is the only way to preserve human dignity amid the nightmare of a dying world. To lament the decay of civilisation without showing peoples the way out toward a better future is to become oneself a factor of social decomposition. Only the programme of the communist revolution deserves sacrifices for its realisation today. Only this programme gives the Fourth International the right to call, today, on the advanced workers of every country to rally beneath its banner.
UNDER THE BANNER OF THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL!
Twenty years ago, Stalin brought his heavy state machine crashing down on this programme. Allying himself with the police forces of every country, he hunted down, imprisoned and murdered, with fanatical relentlessness, the few revolutionary cadres who had remained faithful to intransigent Leninism. A wave of reaction without parallel submerged the whole world. Today, after countless sacrifices and on the eve of new upheavals, the militants of the Fourth International in thirty-five countries can proudly affirm that they have passed the test of this dark period of history. The example of the heroes of the civil war who refused to capitulate before Stalin's police, the example of the militants of the Left Opposition struggling to their last breath in the isolators of Siberia, and of the young Komsomol members dying beneath the bullets of the GPU with the cry of "Long live Trotsky" — this has not been in vain. Today Bolshevism lives again on five continents, its ideas are spreading and its organisations are growing stronger. For every martyr lost, ten new militants arise. Having survived the terror of Stalin as well as that of Hitler, the Fourth International is sure of its future, for within it lives the whole of the Marxism of our epoch, the whole indomitable emancipatory will of the world proletariat. On the scale of a human life, its progress may seem slow. On the scale of history, its victory is already assured.
Engaged in a struggle to the death against the bureaucratic usurpers, the Fourth International proudly claims the tradition, the ideas and the lessons of the October Revolution. All of Stalin's crimes will not succeed in tearing from the hearts of the workers the memory of the most grandiose upheaval in the history of humanity. Facing capitalism and its ever more hideous decay, the Fourth International takes up again, on a world scale, the central idea of the Bolshevik revolution: "All power to the workers and poor peasants!" Facing the wretched agents of the class enemy within the labour movement, the Fourth International forges the instrument of the proletariat's victory: the world Bolshevik party. Facing wars, ruins and devastation, the Fourth International steadfastly pursues its historic mission: to prepare the world October.
Today, in these solemn days in which the first century of scientific communism has been celebrated, on this 1 May 1948, day of combat for the workers of every country, the Fourth International, gathering together the best of its militants from every continent at its World Congress, pays homage to the memory of all the heroes who have fallen for the emancipation of the proletariat. The fighters on the barricades of June 1848, the soldiers of the Paris Commune, the workers of the first Petrograd soviet, the victors of October and of the civil war, the Spartacists and the militants of the Commune of Hungary, of Bavaria and of Canton, the dynamiters of Asturias and the militiamen of Barcelona, the fighters of the Vienna Schutzbund, the Greek and French partisans, the innumerable soldiers of the colonial revolutions, will remain forever the witnesses to the obstinate efforts of an exploited class to wrest the world from the chaos of exploitation. To the young working-class generations of the whole world, the Fourth International entrusts the memory of these fighters and of the already long list of its own martyrs. To be worthy of their example today means to range oneself beneath the banner of the Fourth International.
The World Congress of the Fourth International, world party of the socialist revolution, calls on the exploited and oppressed of every country to unite in struggle against every form of slavery, against every government and against their agents. The struggle of the workers throughout the world is today one and the same struggle for the communist revolution. Workers of the old revolutionary citadel of Paris, unite with the young, indomitable revolutionaries of rebel Vietnam! Miners of the Urals, unite with your brothers-in-arms of the United States! Tear yourselves from your ruins, German workers, and unite with the workers of Great Britain! Unite, workers of China, of India and of all the colonies, with the workers of the metropolitan countries in a single battle against imperialist enslavement! Beneath the banner of the Fourth International, proletarians of all countries, unite, so that the old battle-cry of the Communist Manifesto may become, tomorrow, the sovereign motto of triumphant communism.