Ten theses by Ernest Germain (Ernest Mandel), 15 January 1951
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Foreword
The theses of general orientation adopted by the Ninth Plenum of the International Executive Committee [IEC] have fixed the general perspectives of the revolution and of our movement in the years ahead. They represent the basis on which the discussion for the Third World Congress must unfold. Without understanding them, without assimilating them, our sections will inevitably be confused and disoriented by the successive upheavals of the political and social situation that will mark the preparation and the unleashing of the third world war by imperialism.
These theses do not, however, claim to fix the precise attitude of our movement toward all the important questions currently under discussion. In particular, they cannot offer an overall conception of the question of Stalinism. Our International possesses, on this subject, a fundamental document: the theses of the Second World Congress. Within the framework of the traditional Trotskyist conception, we have been led to make certain modifications to the opinions expressed in that document, especially in the resolution of the Eighth Plenum on the revolution in the Far East, in the resolution of the Ninth Plenum on the Yugoslav revolution, and in the orientation theses of the Ninth Plenum. So that the international discussion may proceed in full clarity, it is necessary to undertake once again an overall analysis of Stalinism, specifying what we are modifying and what we are maintaining in the theses adopted by the Second World Congress. Such is the purpose of this text.
1. "Between capitalism and communism lies a period of transition. It must necessarily combine within it traits and particularities of these two forms of social economy." These lines of Lenin, taken from an unfinished article ("The Economics and Politics of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat," Selected Works, II, p. 634), remain to this day the basis from which one must start in order to understand the USSR. In Lenin's time, capitalism and nascent communism were fighting each other in Russia in the form of two different modes of production. The capitalist mode of production has been vanquished; the fundamental contradiction of Soviet society today lies in the antagonism between the non-capitalist mode of production and bourgeois norms of distribution. This antagonism, which is characteristic of every transitional society, does not, however, diminish in acuteness and does not tend to disappear in the USSR as the productive forces develop, but on the contrary is accentuated as a result of the particular role played by the bureaucracy. Growing inequality, the bureaucratic management of the economy, the monstrous degeneration of the state — all these phenomena express, in the last analysis, this fundamental contradiction, namely that, despite the abolition of the capitalist mode of production in Russia, the worker continues to receive as income only the strict minimum necessary to reconstitute his labour power.
The essential error of the revisionist theories on the nature of the USSR consists in their incapacity to grasp this contradiction. The theory of bureaucratic collectivism recognizes the non-capitalist nature of the Soviet mode of production but, denying the bourgeois character of the norms of distribution, finds itself obliged to invent "a new form of slave exploitation." It fails to understand that in reality the capitalist past and capitalist environment of Russia have hindered and deformed the new society issuing from the proletarian revolution. The theory of state capitalism recognizes the bourgeois character of Soviet norms of distribution and, thereby, the capitalist origin of the whole degeneration of the USSR. But it mechanically transposes and generalizes these facts to every level of Soviet economic life and thus constructs a perfectly mystified "state capitalist" mode of production. Only traditional Trotskyist theory combines the understanding of the two antagonistic characteristics of the Soviet economy and explains their significance by uncovering their historical origins and their dynamism.
The maintenance of bourgeois norms of distribution, the growth of inequality, the total absence of any participation by the masses in the management of the economy and of planning, increasingly hold back the development of the productive forces in the USSR.
The rate of accumulation diminishes from one five-year plan to the next.
Bureaucratic management produces anarchy on a growing scale in the development of the parallel market and clandestine trade, not only in foodstuffs and consumer goods as before 1941, but also in labour power, raw materials, machinery and means of transport.
The vitality of the Soviet system of production has proved greater than had been thought before the war, and there is no stagnation of the productive forces to be expected in the USSR in the short term. At the same time, the possibility of the development of centrifugal forces within this system also exceeds our earlier forecasts. This fact alone can explain why, after four five-year plans, the USSR continues to appear as a backward and predatory economic power in comparison with countries such as Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary, not to mention Western Europe.
The theses of the First World Congress on the question of the USSR had for the first time sketched out this dynamic of the Soviet economy. This conclusion remains an integral part of our programme. The overthrow of the bureaucratic dictatorship in the USSR has become an urgent necessity, even from a purely economic point of view, so that the USSR may continue to benefit from its progressive foundations and narrow the still enormous distance separating it from the United States.
2. By its existence and its nature, the bureaucracy reflects and sums up the contradictions of Soviet society. The bureaucracy remains attached to the non-capitalist mode of production of the USSR, to the planned economy and to collectivized property, and it defends them, in its own way, against their internal and external enemies. At the same time, by its very existence, its parasitism, its arbitrary and irrational management, it constantly generates tendencies that dissolve this planned economy and this collectivized property. It is not the tendency of the individual bureaucrat toward private appropriation — a real but secondary factor — but the objective function of the bureaucracy as a caste that increasingly undermines the economic foundations of the USSR. Proletarian democracy is becoming ever more a sine qua non condition for a new upsurge of the productive forces.
Stalin's domestic policy contains all the contradictions that are the product of this particular role of the bureaucracy in Soviet society. It defends and protects the privileges of the bureaucracy — but only insofar as these do not tend to directly break the framework of collective property and planning. It defends and protects the economic foundations of the USSR against bureaucratic "excesses," but by constantly tightening the vice of the dictatorship against the masses, it reproduces these "excesses" on an ever growing scale. The Bonapartist character of the Stalinist dictatorship still best expresses the real policy of the Kremlin toward the social forces present in the USSR.
The foreign policy of the bureaucracy carries beyond the borders of the USSR the contradictions of its own social nature. On the international arena, the bureaucracy seeks to defend, with its own methods, the economic foundations of the USSR without which its social existence would be impossible. At the same time, its fundamentally counter-revolutionary policy prolongs the existence of world imperialism. Through its attempts at total subordination of the international workers' movement, it weakens the anti-capitalist forces on a world scale and periodically causes serious conjunctural defeats for the proletariat. Despite all the apparent successes the bureaucracy has achieved, it is truer today than ever that the bourgeoisie continues to rule over a large part of the globe only as a result of the crimes of the Kremlin.
Before the Second World War, the international policy of the Soviet bureaucracy was based above all on a game of manoeuvres between the imperialist groupings, the proletariat being used only as a secondary instrument within the framework of these manoeuvres. After the Second World War, the international policy of the bureaucracy is based above all on a balancing act between imperialism on the one hand and (the proletariat, the colonial peoples) on the other; the exploitation of inter-imperialist contradictions now plays only a secondary role. This change is the product of two decisive upheavals in the world. The transformation of the relationship of forces between the great imperialist powers excludes, for an entire epoch, the alignment of two imperialist blocs against one another. The new world revolutionary upsurge, which begins with the August 1942 days in India and with the Italian revolution of 1943 in Europe, likewise excludes any possibility of treating the world anti-imperialist forces as a mere pawn on the political chessboard. As long as this new world situation is not profoundly modified, no change in this fundamental strategy of the Kremlin is to be expected.
Within the framework of this overall strategy, different stages have succeeded one another. During a first stage, the Kremlin collaborated with imperialism against the revolution in Europe and Asia. During a second stage, the Kremlin relied on the colonial revolutions against imperialism. But in neither case is this a new strategic line, but rather particular aspects of a fundamental policy of seesawing. The Soviet bureaucracy can no more collaborate durably with the international bourgeoisie than with the world revolution. Decisive victories of the international bourgeoisie, or of the proletariat, always mean its certain ruin. This is why the theses of the First World Congress on the question of the USSR rightly underlined the fundamentally reformist character of the Soviet bureaucracy and of its international policy. Its aim is not the overthrow of world imperialism, but the establishment of a favourable modus vivendi with it. This does not result from political errors of the bureaucracy or from its psychological timidity, but from its social nature: its incapacity to control the forces liberated by the international development of the revolution, forces which will stimulate the combativity of the Soviet proletariat and will precipitate the bureaucracy's downfall.
3. The contradictory nature of the Soviet bureaucracy is only partially reflected in the Stalinist parties.(2) The dual nature of these parties has a different social origin; it does not stem from the particular role of a parasitic bureaucracy in a workers' state, but from the dual function of these parties, working-class by their base in their own country, international instruments for the Soviet bureaucracy. In their respective countries, they must strive to win and retain a broad mass base within the working class and the petty bourgeoisie; this implies the necessity of following a policy that makes it possible to use, at least in part, the aspirations of these masses. For the Kremlin, the usefulness of this mass base lies exclusively in its capacity to serve its diplomatic designs. But these designs periodically imply a political line diametrically opposed to the most elementary aspirations of the masses. Hence the possibility that the CPs may be outflanked by their own mass base, which, in action, may go beyond the objectives set by the Kremlin and escape its control. This possibility has always been one of the fundamental perspectives of the Trotskyist movement. It can only occur in the case of a genuinely powerful revolutionary upsurge of the masses; a limited upsurge, in the absence of a mass revolutionary party, such as the one we witnessed in Europe after 1943, generally allows the Stalinist leadership to adapt progressively to the combativity of the masses while maintaining its control over them and continuing to serve the diplomatic objectives of the Kremlin.
Our movement had traditionally conceived of the outflanking of Stalinism by the masses as entailing profound splits within the CPs. The Yugoslav and Chinese examples have shown that, placed in certain exceptional conditions, entire Communist parties can modify their political line and lead the masses' struggle through to the conquest of power, disregarding the objectives of the Kremlin. Under these conditions such parties cease to be Stalinist parties in the classic sense of the word. Such an eventuality, moreover foreseen by the Transitional Programme, nonetheless requires above all a genuine and profound mobilization of the masses. Where CPs are installed in power by the bureaucratic action of the Kremlin, the opposition between the needs of the autonomous development of the revolution in their country and the demands of the Kremlin leads only to impotent velleities of independence on the part of Communist leaders (Rajk, Kostov, Gomułka, Pătrășcanu, etc.).
The outflanking of the Communist parties by the masses, within the framework of a genuine and powerful revolutionary upsurge, never begins with a break by the masses with these parties. It means first of all an outflanking, in action, of the Stalinist opportunist policy by the most advanced layers, while a genuine influx of more backward layers is still occurring toward these parties. The latter are then obliged to adapt, at least partially, to this new situation in order not to lose control over the masses. In the coming revolutionary upsurge in Western Europe, in the course of the period of preparation and outbreak of the war, the growing pressure of the masses is likely to compel the French and Italian CPs to modify their pacifist course of "neutralizing" the bourgeoisie. These parties might then, as the theses of the Ninth Plenum of the IEC put it, "sketch out a revolutionary orientation" and "find themselves compelled to undertake a struggle for power," if they wish to prevent the masses from advancing directly to the second stage of outflanking, that of organizational rupture with the leadership of these parties and direct struggle against it. It is one thing to sketch out a struggle for power, and another thing to actually conquer power.
In the two cases where CPs actually conquered power through the action of the masses (Yugoslavia and China), this fact did not directly result in a break with Stalinist political and organizational methodology, nor in a public break with the Soviet bureaucracy. It was only afterward that the necessity of maintaining and broadening their mass base, in order to preserve and consolidate the gains of their revolution, pushed these CPs onto the path of an increasingly independent policy from the Kremlin. This dialectical development is explained by the following facts:
a) Yugoslavia and China are very backward countries, with a small proletariat and a weak Marxist tradition, having moreover gone through two decades of prostration under a reactionary dictatorship. The CPs, even with their Stalinist line, found themselves at the extreme left of the working-class forces.
b) The revolutionary struggle has its centre of gravity in the countryside and takes the form of a military centralization by the CPs of uprisings of the poor peasantry. The Soviet bureaucracy fears the struggles of these masses less than those of the industrial proletariat. Nor do the objectives of this peasant struggle immediately clash with the objectives pursued by the Kremlin.
c) Revolutionary victory is achieved through the military conquest of the cities, where, for a set of historical reasons, no uprising occurs.
d) For all these reasons, revolutionary victory can be achieved without the CP having had to break completely with an opportunist tactic and to publicly demarcate itself from the Kremlin.
The enumeration of these factors makes it possible to specify that such a conquest of power by an autonomous CP might conceivably be repeated in the Middle East and in East Asia, but is extremely improbable in an industrially advanced country of Western Europe or America. In these countries, the revolution will never be able to advance from the countryside to the city, but will always march from the cities to the countryside.(3) Large-scale military struggle cannot precede but only follow the revolutionary mobilization of the industrial proletariat there. This proletariat, by virtue of its traditions, its past, its level of consciousness, possesses a broad vanguard that is consciously oriented toward the socialist revolution, even if it still follows the CP. The autonomous seizure of power by the CPs of these countries is possible only through a genuine revolutionary mobilization of the proletarian masses, which requires a genuine outflanking of the Stalinist programme, policy and organizational forms. For its part, the Kremlin, for which such a development in an advanced country would represent a threat a thousand times more deadly than the Yugoslav revolution, would in all likelihood do everything in its power to prevent such a development. A friendly cohabitation for a certain period between a victorious revolution in an advanced country and the Soviet bureaucracy is very improbable.
It must therefore be concluded that the Communist parties are not reformist parties in the sense that, under certain exceptional circumstances, they can conquer power autonomously. Like centrist parties and even certain left social-democratic parties (Austria, Spain in 1934), they may moreover be compelled, under the pressure of the masses, to modify their usual counter-revolutionary course in a leftward turn that leads them as far as sketching out a struggle for power, these cases being less exceptional than those cited above. The exact relations of these parties with the Soviet bureaucracy could be modified according to these political turns, insofar as they brought the CPs to positions endangering the Bonapartist character of the Soviet bureaucracy, which bases its power on an international equilibrium of the fundamental classes of contemporary society.
4. The historical background against which we must view the outflanking of Stalinism by the masses and the conquest of power by certain CPs with the proletariat's own forces in its country is the ever more advanced decomposition of international capitalism. The revolutionary upsurge in the world continues to broaden and deepen, even if between 1948 and 1950 it unquestionably underwent a temporary setback in Europe; today it is drawing the whole of Asia in its wake, tomorrow it will cross the Atlantic and attack capital in its last bastion. The development of this upsurge is the quasi-automatic product of the extreme decomposition of capitalism. It is in the absence of a sufficiently powerful revolutionary leadership that this revolutionary upsurge temporarily takes on new or transitional forms, such as those we saw in Yugoslavia and are currently seeing flourish in Asia.
For ten years, the forward march of the world revolution has taken the most diverse and unexpected forms, and the boldest and most bewildering combinations. We have seen a national anti-imperialist movement, with broad bourgeois participation, advance to within two steps of a general armed insurrection (India in August 1942); the proletarian revolution raise its head under a tottering but not yet overthrown reactionary dictatorship (Italy in 1943); petty-bourgeois parties proclaim the dissolution of the regular army and workers' control over production (Warsaw in 1944); the armed struggle of the workers for power hide behind the ideological façade of a "national front" with their own bourgeoisie (France, Greece in 1944); the dictatorship of the proletariat become established following the departure of bourgeois ministers from a government (Yugoslavia in 1945); the most backward peasant masses put the Soviet state on the order of the day (Vietnam, Indonesia, Burma, 1946-1950); the miners of Bolivia strive, on several occasions, to take the destiny of their country into their own hands (1948-1949); a CP still steeped in the most opportunist ideology seize power in China (1949); a monarchist and ultra-reformist Socialist Party in effect call the workers to the barricades (Belgium in 1950).
To fail to understand this concrete development of the world revolution and to entrench oneself behind schemas of an "ideal" world revolution is to turn one's back on the real movement in the name of a chimera; it is to degrade communism from the rank of a science to that of a utopia.
5. Soviet expansionism finds its origin in the fact that the Stalinist bureaucracy, obliged to defend the USSR in its own way in order to maintain and increase "its power, its privileges and its prestige" (L. Trotsky), is confronted with a degree of decomposition of the capitalist regime in neighbouring countries that allows it to extend its zone of influence without risking being outflanked by the international proletarian revolution. This situation is, in the last analysis, the result of the modification of the world relationship of class forces and in no way proves the existence of "expansionist aspirations" on the part of the bureaucracy. It corresponds in no way to a "deep logic" of Soviet society, or to a need inherent in its economy.
Historically, the bureaucracy can consolidate its power over the countries of its zone of influence only by structurally assimilating them to the USSR. But this is true only from a historical point of view. Experience has already proved that the ruling bureaucracy of a degenerated workers' state can, under certain conditions, temporarily manipulate bourgeois property relations to its own advantage. The Kremlin did so, in the case of the Chinese Eastern Railway, for many years. It has possessed, for the past five years, its mixed companies in purely capitalist countries such as Finland, Austria and Iran. It has exploited, for years, to its own advantage, the economy based on private ownership of the means of production in Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary. Understanding of this possibility, inscribed in the theses of the Second World Congress on the question of the USSR, is henceforth part of our programme.
If the theses of the Second World Congress did not envisage as certain the complete destruction of the bourgeoisie in all the countries of the "buffer zone," this is not because our movement had forgotten Trotsky's teaching, according to which the bureaucracy does not wish to share its privileges with the bourgeoisie. We have affirmed, from the outset and without interruption, that the bureaucracy has the tendency to assimilate its "buffer zone" to the USSR. What was in question was not the bureaucracy's desire but its capacity. Nor was the error committed an overestimation of the capacity for resistance of the bourgeoisie of the "buffer zone," whose extreme weakness, if not non-existence, as a result of the events of the war, appeared clearly from the outset. The erroneous thesis was something else: it was the one according to which the bureaucracy could not rely on the masses to eliminate the remnants of the bourgeoisie throughout the "buffer zone" without risking being outflanked by these masses. This thesis was realized in a single case in an unforeseen form: in Yugoslavia, the only country where the bourgeoisie was crushed by the action of the masses from the first stage, the Kremlin actually lost control of events. But owing to the extremely limited character of the mobilization of the masses in the other countries of the "buffer zone," owing to the passivity and even growing apathy of the workers of these countries, unforeseen by our movement, such a development was not repeated, and the Kremlin was able to eliminate the remnants of the bourgeoisie step by step, while maintaining strict control over the masses. The Soviet bureaucracy has in fact subordinated the structural assimilation of its "buffer zone" to the destruction of the possibilities for autonomous development of the workers' movement, but these possibilities were able, as a result of the very consequences of Soviet expansionism, to be reduced to an extreme degree. This is why, from the point of view of the international revolution, the completed structural assimilation of this or that country is infinitely less important than the destruction of the living workers' movement that preceded it (Poland).
It is therefore against two errors that our movement must guard itself: the error of underestimating the importance of the mass movement by allowing oneself to be blinded by its temporary Stalinist leadership (an error committed in the case of Vietnam, Greece, China, etc., by certain sections), and the error of overestimating the scope of this movement by considering it capable of outflanking, a priori and necessarily, bureaucratic control (an error committed in the case of the "buffer zone"). It is the distinction between a limited development, usable and controllable by the Kremlin, and a powerful and general upsurge of the movement and consciousness of the masses, that explains, in the last analysis, these two variants.
6. To resolve the problem of the future prospects of Stalinism, two phenomena must be distinguished which, up to now, have mutually excluded one another: Soviet expansionism (the military occupation of certain countries by the Soviet army) and the conquest of power by CPs with their own means, that is, driven forward by a powerful revolutionary upsurge. Where Soviet occupation has occurred, as a general rule the revolutionary upsurge has been halted and broken; the Kremlin has not lost but increased its control over the CPs; these CPs have become ever more cut off from the masses; through a series of crises they have been increasingly transformed into mere apparatuses commanded by the Soviet bureaucracy. The latter is not weakened but strengthened by this process. Where, on the other hand, CPs have been pushed into power by the movement of the masses, Stalinism has actually found itself weakened. But this did not happen as a result of its "expansion," but of the depth of the revolutionary movement of the masses. This is a fundamental thesis of Trotskyism that has been confirmed: Stalinism is a phenomenon of working-class retreat and can only flourish under such conditions. And where, on the borders of the bureaucracy's zone of influence, powerful revolutionary movements broke out, the bureaucracy tried by every means to bring about their retreat, either by abandoning these centres to imperialist repression (Greece), or by actively contributing to it itself (Poland). It was only in Yugoslavia that this same tactic of the bureaucracy (the Eden-Molotov agreements) failed, thanks to the depth of the mass movement and the empirical assimilation of certain experiences of revolutionary struggle by the leadership of the Yugoslav CP.
By mechanically counterposing Soviet expansionism and revolutionary upsurge, the problem is obviously oversimplified in the extreme. Reality has produced more numerous variants. We have seen cases where the approach of the Soviet army stimulates the revolutionary activity of the masses. The effects of the occupation were then not long in bringing about the retreat of the mass movement. On the other hand, occupation by the Russian army has its reactionary effects from the point of view of this movement, especially in countries where the standard of living and culture is higher than that of the USSR. The temporary occupation of countries at a lower level (Inner Mongolia, North Korea, northern Iran, etc.) can have opposite effects because, in these countries, the bureaucracy does not appear as a plundering force and the low level of political consciousness of the masses allows the establishment of control over them by methods that appear to them as progressive in comparison with the oppression they previously suffered. The de facto united front that exists today between the colonial revolutions in Asia and the Soviet bureaucracy, whose objective origin is the common threat from imperialism, is subjectively made possible by this difference between the relations of the bureaucracy and the masses in Asia and those existing in Europe. In the long run, the antagonism between the international revolution and the Soviet bureaucracy will also reveal itself in Asia, but first of all on the political plane.
In Europe, by contrast, this antagonism must appear much sooner, both on the political and on the economic plane. It is not by chance that the bureaucracy has conceived its theory according to which socialism can no longer triumph in Europe without occupation by the Soviet army. It seems certain that the bureaucracy cannot, on pain of self-destruction, favour a broad revolutionary mobilization of the masses in Western Europe. Under these conditions, it will tend to limit the insurrectionary activity of the CPs there in the event of the outbreak of war, and will try to impose on them a course of neutralizing the bourgeoisie of these countries, as well as of collaboration with certain bourgeois factions. Even more than in Eastern Europe, it will have to strive to break the free development of the workers' movement there. But unlike Eastern Europe, an eventual Soviet occupation of the advanced countries of Western Europe would take place in the face of masses in the midst of a revolutionary upsurge.
The capacity of the Soviet bureaucracy to manipulate the mass movement at will, or to intervene brutally against it, will therefore be much more restricted and determined by the relationship of forces between the proletariat and the bureaucracy. The broader the revolutionary upsurge, the more it will sharpen the crisis of Stalinism by compelling the CPs to adapt partially to the revolutionary aspirations of the masses, the more a new leadership, autonomous from them, will strengthen itself by skilfully making use of the turns of the CPs, and the more restricted will become — not the will, but the capacity for counter-revolutionary action — of the Kremlin. The overthrow of the capitalist regime in several important countries of the continent before any eventual Soviet occupation would in all likelihood eliminate any danger for the proletariat of having to pass through this new bitter experience. Should the revolutionary upsurge fail to overthrow in time the worm-eaten rule of the bourgeoisie, notably as a result of the lack of an effective leadership, it would not be destroyed by an eventual Soviet occupation, but only compelled, after an intermediate period, to change its form into a movement of resistance of the labouring masses for proletarian democracy, against the regime of occupation that the Stalinist bureaucracy would impose on them.
Our revolutionary optimism is based on the prediction of our Transitional Programme that the objective conditions of rotting capitalism will in the long run break all the bureaucratic obstacles on the road of the revolution. The revolutionary upsurge at whose beginning we now stand will fully realize this prediction. It will sound the death-knell of the Soviet bureaucracy and of Stalinism, products of a stage of world reaction that is irremediably over.
7. The role of the Soviet bureaucracy in the third world war is determined by the specific, entirely new character that this war will have, specified for the first time by the orientation theses of the Ninth Plenum. It will be fundamentally different from the Second World War, for two reasons: it will not break out at the end of a long stage of defeats and retreats of the proletariat, of which it was the logical and final outcome (1923-1939); it will occur, on the contrary, in a profoundly revolutionary epoch, in the course of which the international bourgeoisie will have proved incapable of subduing the proletarian forces in Asia and Western Europe, an incapacity of which it once again constitutes the ultimate outcome; it will not break out between two imperialist blocs, but between the imperialist united front on the one hand, and the USSR, the "buffer zone" and the colonial revolutions on the other. It is precisely because, on the eve of the Second World War, the world revolution had reached the lowest point of its ebb, that this war had, in the first place, the character of an inter-imperialist war, its counter-revolutionary character appearing as decisive only in the period of its liquidation. It is precisely because, on the eve of the third world war, the world revolution has reached an upsurge more threatening and universal than ever, that this war will be, in the first place, a counter-revolutionary war. American imperialism will not unleash the war to punish Stalin's crimes or to combat the bureaucracy's privileges; it will unleash it, economically, to bring the USSR, the "buffer zone," China and Yugoslavia back into its orbit by destroying collectivized property there, politically to attempt, in one final desperate effort, to drown in blood the revolution that will advance across the five continents. It is this particular character of the third world war that will determine, at one and the same time, our unequivocal position of defence of the USSR, the "buffer zone," China, the colonial revolution and Yugoslavia against the war of imperialism, and our certainty that the Soviet bureaucracy will perish together with the international bourgeoisie.
In the period of the liquidation of the Second World War, the decomposition of the imperialist system and the appearance of a new revolutionary upsurge were sufficiently advanced to save the USSR from destruction, but the revolutionary upsurge was insufficient to break the Stalinist grip on the workers' movement of the countries in the centres of the revolution. Two new developments, products of the post-war period, radically modify this capacity of the Soviet bureaucracy to maintain itself and survive. The infinitely more advanced decomposition of capitalism is already liberating, and will liberate still further, such revolutionary forces that they will definitively destroy the world equilibrium between the classes and will prepare a new revolutionary upsurge of the Soviet proletariat, overthrowing the reactionary bureaucratic caste of the USSR. The universal extension of the revolutionary upsurge has already created, in numerous future centres of the revolution (USA, Great Britain, Germany, Latin America, perhaps even India and Japan), a new situation of the workers' movement that will no longer allow Stalinism to play a decisive counter-revolutionary role there. It is moreover because it is clearly conscious of this situation that the Soviet bureaucracy will do everything possible to avoid the outbreak of war. But it is precisely because it is losing more and more its capacity to control — and to betray — the international revolution that it will no longer, in the final analysis, be able to halt, through these very concessions, the march of American imperialism toward this war.
The existence of the Soviet bureaucracy finds its objective origins in the retreat of the Soviet and international proletariat, as well as in the low level of the productive forces of Russia after October. The world development of the revolution that lies ahead of us will radically destroy these foundations of the Kremlin's domination. It will succumb under the blows of the Russian proletariat, aided and rescued by the proletariat of the advanced countries where the revolution will triumph, in the first place the USA, Great Britain and Germany. It is not excluded that the great devastation produced by a very long third world war may bring about, in large parts of the world, vast collapses in the productive apparatus, thereby favouring initial bureaucratic deformations of new victorious revolutions. These deformations will not, however, be comparable to the monstrous bureaucratization of the USSR, the product of twenty-five years of a particular historical evolution. The experience of the Yugoslav and Chinese revolutions — despite all their weaknesses — fully confirms Marx's prediction that each victorious proletarian revolution will largely overcome the weaknesses and setbacks of the preceding revolution. Our conviction of the victory of the American revolution, endowing the socialist world with a prodigious productive capacity even after a war of devastation, allows us to envisage with confidence the prospects for proletarian democracy after the third world war.
8. The defence of what remains of the conquests of October, as a strategic task of our movement, was correctly specified by the theses of the Second World Congress on the question of the USSR, following new developments that have occurred since the outbreak of the Second World War. Since then, we have been led, for the first time in the history of our movement, to raise as an immediate concrete possibility the conduct, on the part of the Soviet bureaucracy, of a historically reactionary war against a workers' state, against the victorious proletarian revolution in Yugoslavia, in the course of which revolutionary defeatism would have been the task of Soviet revolutionaries. This example, together with the experience of the counter-revolutionary intervention of the Soviet army in the "buffer zone," requires us to maintain the clarification that specifies the tactical significance of our strategy of defending what remains of the conquests of October in different concrete situations.
We defend what remains of the conquests of October against the restorationist attempts of imperialism. But the proletarian masses are not, and cannot be, restorationist; this is why the defence of the USSR cannot in any way imply the defence, the justification, or the critical support of military actions by the bureaucracy, either against workers' states such as Yugoslavia, or against popular insurrectionary movements in the "buffer zone." Even in time of war, and independently of the effects it might have on the immediate development of hostilities, we will always unconditionally support every insurrectionary movement of the masses against the Soviet bureaucracy, if this movement corresponds to the real aspirations of the masses, because an autonomous development of the revolution in the world represents a blow a thousand times more deadly against imperialism than this or that advance of the Soviet army. Our position is not that of defending one "diplomatic bloc" against another. We do not accept situating our policy in terms of the existence of "two blocs." Our policy is a class policy. We defend the USSR against imperialism, and at the same time the world revolution against the Soviet bureaucracy. We do not identify the revolution with its bureaucratic usurpers. If imperialism combats not only the bureaucracy but also the USSR and the revolution, the bureaucracy for its part defends not only, in its own way, the USSR against imperialism, but also its privileges and its power against the masses and against other victorious revolutions. Our policy takes account of both aspects of the question.
The strategic example of the Warsaw Commune [the Warsaw Uprising] must be a lesson assimilated by revolutionaries of every country. The development of anti-imperialist insurrectionary movements behind the front lines, whose justification must be determined by the relationship of class forces and not by the military needs of the Soviet army, must under no circumstances result in a coordination of these forms with the bureaucratized general staffs of the Soviet army, or in subordination to it. The tragic experience of the last war showed that the bureaucracy will far prefer a temporary military setback or weakening to the strengthening of autonomous armed forces of the proletarian revolution. It would not hesitate, if necessary, to attempt to crush such forces in the midst of a world war. To bind oneself militarily to the bureaucracy's general staffs in the name of defending the USSR would mean digging the grave of the revolutionary movement of the masses.
Thus, with the exception of the USSR itself, where the defence of what remains of the conquests of October imposes specific military tasks on revolutionaries, in the rest of the world this strategic task merges entirely with the task of pursuing the victory of the socialist revolution in the various countries themselves, or of defending and completing there the revolutionary conquests already achieved (Yugoslavia, China, "buffer zone"). In peacetime as in wartime, any policy that diminishes the cohesion of the proletarian forces, lowers their level of consciousness and their confidence in their own strength, diverts them from their revolutionary objectives, or uses them for goals that are not those of their class, will be pitilessly combated by the Fourth International, whatever semblance of "military" justification may be offered for it in this or that concrete situation.
9. The method by which our movement resolved the question of the class nature of Yugoslavia, in the resolution adopted by the Third Plenum of the IEC, is directly linked to its Marxist-Leninist tradition, already successfully upheld in the solution of the question of the USSR. The resolution of the Third Plenum resolves the Yugoslav question by starting from the real class forces and not from property relations isolated from their historical origin. It "legalizes," at the same time, the use of the formula of "workers' and peasants' government" to designate certain transitional stages between the decomposition of bourgeois power and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the construction of a state apparatus of a new type. This formula, inscribed in our Transitional Programme, has since demonstrated its full usefulness in the case of China, where our movement uses it to characterize the current stage of development of the Chinese revolution. It forms part of our necessary programmatic baggage for understanding phenomena of transition specific to our epoch.
The international discussion currently under way concerning the class nature of the countries of the "buffer zone" can only be concluded positively on condition that the theoretical gain that constituted its point of departure is not abandoned. Everyone had agreed, at the start of the discussion, that we are dealing, in the "buffer zone," with countries dominated by the Soviet bureaucracy since 1944. In the course of this domination, structural transformations have been carried out in these countries within the framework of the policy of structural assimilation pursued by the bureaucracy. The difficulty consists in this: determining at what moment, in this process of structural assimilation, the transformation of quantity into quality takes place. In the case where a proletarian revolution occurs in a country, the very fact of this revolution dispenses us from seeking other criteria to demonstrate the change of domination from one class to another; the Yugoslav example is a fresh proof of this. We can very well conceive that the proletariat, after the seizure of power in certain countries, may maintain private ownership of the means of production there in certain sectors throughout an entire period. Complete nationalization of the means of production is not even a fact in the USSR. Generalized nationalization can only serve as proof of the prior existence of a workers' state, no bourgeois state being supposed capable of taking such measures. In the "buffer zone," the problem is entirely different: there has been no proletarian revolution, and the question to be determined — the form of the passage of power from one class to another — is complicated by the fact that the bureaucracy has effectively exercised power there from the outset. It is in this sense (in order to determine the moment of structural assimilation) that we have raised the question of planning and the effective suppression of borders, and in no way in order to limit the possibilities for action of victorious revolutions in small countries, or to introduce new criteria for a revolutionary victory.
It is consequently necessary to admit that the bourgeoisie lost, very early on — the dates differ from one country to another — political power, which passed to the CPs, relying on the military and police forces of the bureaucracy, and which reigned for an entire epoch without radically transforming the structure of private property and of the state apparatus. The changes that have recently appeared in several countries in the state apparatuses mark a new stage in the transformation of these workers' and peasants' governments into deformed workers' states. At the same time, this transformation is accompanied by an ever stricter and more direct control by the Soviet bureaucracy over the whole of social life in these countries. The outcome of this process is the effective integration of their economy into Soviet planning, of their army into the Soviet army, which will complete the process of structural assimilation. As long as this process is not completed, the situation of each country of the "buffer zone" remains unstable and transitional and subject to the oscillations of the international relationship of forces (the examples of Germany and Austria have recently demonstrated this once again). One may debate whether this process is already concretely complete in this or that country (it appears most advanced in Poland and Bulgaria). But it must be admitted that the criterion of property relations, however important and decisive it may be, does not by itself allow the question to be resolved, if it is isolated from its whole historical context.
10. The tasks of our movement in the face of Stalinism cannot be conceived in isolation from the nature of the epoch in which we live, powerfully underscored by the events that have unfolded over the past two years. The collapse of imperialist domination in East Asia, the autonomous development of the Chinese revolution, the eruption of the Yugoslav affair prove that the world revolution, having passed into a new stage of its expansion, has at the same time sharply accentuated the crisis of Stalinism. What matters above all in the present period is to give the proletariat a world leadership capable of coordinating its forces and achieving the world victory of communism. The Stalinist bureaucracy, compelled to turn with blind fury against the first victorious proletarian revolution outside the USSR, is socially incapable of accomplishing such a task. That is the historic mission of our movement. We must prepare ourselves, in accordance with Trotsky's brilliant prediction, "for long years, if not decades, of wars, uprisings, brief interludes, truces, new wars and new uprisings." During this period, we shall fulfil the central task of forging the world general staff of the revolution.
The historical justification of our movement does not lie in the fact that it is more democratic than Stalinism, that it makes the revolution at less cost, or that it alone is capable of building a socialist society. Its only possible justification, confirmed by three dramatic decades, lies in the incapacity of Stalinism to overthrow world capitalism, an incapacity that has its origins in the social nature of the Soviet bureaucracy. That is why its final defeat is as certain as that of the international bourgeoisie. No more than the bourgeoisie will it survive a war that will be transformed into a world upsurge of the revolution. The period elapsed between the second and third world wars will historically appear only as a temporary interlude, and Trotsky's prediction that the bureaucracy will not survive the war will be historically confirmed.
It is not because the defence of what remains of the conquests of October is taking on a new and greater importance in the present conjuncture that our movement has, for the past two years, made a turn toward the Communist worker. On the contrary, it is because the new revolutionary upsurge contains within it the seed of the destruction of the Stalinist parties as such, that we must today be closer to Communist workers. This is but one phase of our fundamental task: building new revolutionary parties. Experience has shown us that, in certain countries, these parties can arise in an unforeseen form, or even that CPs may, under the pressure of grandiose revolutionary experiences, take the first steps on the road to regeneration. But all these cases lie within the perspective of the crisis of Stalinism, and not of its revitalization, even temporary. If our slogan today is "Closer to the Communist worker," it is because we feel the moment approaching when we shall be able to strike a mortal blow at Stalinism; it is precisely because the revolutionary concerns of this worker will increasingly collide with the counter-revolutionary policy of Stalinism. To be "closer to the Stalinist worker" thus means, at the same time, affirming more than ever, in the face of the Stalinist policy that leads him into a dead end, our Trotskyist programme and policy. There is no other possibility for an international victory of the revolution.
Yet this orientation is of limited application. It does not apply to the Anglo-Saxon countries, where the Stalinist parties represent an insignificant minority, and this concerns the three most industrialized countries in the world (USA, Great Britain, Canada). Nor does it apply to several countries of Western Europe, and above all not to Germany. It does not yet apply to most of the countries of Latin America. It no longer applies to certain countries of the Far East such as Ceylon, and perhaps even India. And when the masses awaken tomorrow in all the countries of the "buffer zone," it will in all likelihood not apply there either, with the possible exception of Czechoslovakia, where this awakening might still originate from the CP.
The historic task of Trotskyism in the USSR itself, in the "buffer zone" and in any countries newly occupied by the bureaucracy, takes on a new meaning within the framework of our revolutionary perspectives. It consists in ensuring for the insurrectionary movements of the masses that will inevitably break out in these countries, in the event of a prolonged war and a world revolutionary upsurge, a leadership independent of imperialism, capable of leading these countries forward toward proletarian democracy and not backward toward capitalism, capable of grounding the alliance of workers and peasants on the maintenance of collectivized property combined with the democratization of the whole of social life. A sine qua non condition for accomplishing this task is participation in the mass resistance movements against the Soviet bureaucracy, just as participation in the mass revolutionary movements led by the CPs in Asia, and eventually in Europe, is a sine qua non task for achieving the outflanking of Stalinism in these countries. Participation in the present movements of the masses, the conquest of as broad an influence as possible among the masses of the various countries at the present stage, are the necessary preconditions for accomplishing our tasks in the next stage, whatever the concrete nature of that stage may be. Our task is universal; it consists in embedding ourselves in the mass movement of all countries, in coordinating these movements on an international scale, and this task is in no way reducible to an attitude toward the problem of Stalinism.
If our movement proves capable of establishing and deepening these contacts with the masses of all the important countries; if it continues to train a new generation of cadres and working-class leaders on a world scale; if it remains the sole centre in which the international experiences of the mass movement and of the revolution are progressively assimilated, its future and its victory are assured, whatever the conjunctural progress that this or that opportunist party may still achieve.
Internal Bulletin of the International Secretariat, No. 3, March 1951
Notes
1. "Distribution, however, is not a merely passive product of production and exchange; it reacts upon both of them in turn. Every new mode of production or form of exchange is at first hampered, not only by the old forms and the political institutions that correspond to them, but also by the old mode of distribution. It has to struggle through a long process before it can secure a mode of distribution corresponding to it." (Engels, Anti-Dühring, translated from the German, p. 138 of the edition of the Verlagsgenossenschaft ausländischer Arbeiter in der UdSSR, Moscow-Leningrad, 1934)
2. Certain Stalinist parties of the "buffer zone" and the CP of the USSR are of course exempt from the definition that follows.
3. Italy and Spain, owing to their particular geographical and social structure, represent limited cases that would require a specific clarification.