Trotsky's expectation of an imminent second world war and his estimate of its character led him to the conclusion that the Fourth International should be founded before the war broke out. The war was the most cataclysmic in world history, far surpassing even the first world war in that respect. It was followed by revolutionary upsurges all over Europe, and resulted in a significant weakening of capitalism on a world scale. In all of these respects Trotsky's prognosis for the course of the war, made in 1938-40, proved correct.
But the results of World War II were not as far-reaching as Trotsky had thought they might be. The foundations of the workers state—the Soviet Union—proved to be strong enough to withstand the ferocious Nazi onslaught in spite of the misleadership of the Stalinists. This was a tremendous victory for the world working class, but it also produced one of history's greatest ironies—it enhanced the prestige of Stalin and the Stalinist parties all over the world. In Trotsky's expectation, Stalin's efforts to preserve "peaceful coexistence" with Nazi Germany through the Stalin-Hitler Pact and at the expense of revolutionary struggle would shift the center of working-class opposition to the war elsewhere. The failure of the Stalinist parties to oppose the fascist regimes in the early stages of the war would result, Trotsky thought, in the revolutionary energies of the masses, provoked by wartime conditions, being channeled into the only party that uncompromisingly struggled against all the imperialist regimes- —the Fourth International. Trotsky predicted Hit-ler's attack on the Soviet Union long before it occurred and he warned that Stalin's policies were dangerously weakening the workers state; for example, the destruction of the staff of the Soviet armed forces through purges and the disorganization of the planned economy. The treacherous role of the Stalinist apparatus in leaving the USSR vulnerable to the Nazi assault could, Trotsky thought, result in the growth of a revolutionary Marxist opposition that could effectively rally the Soviet masses to defend the workers state against Hitler.
But in fact, despite huge initial losses owing to Stalin's unwillingness to believe that his "ally" would break their nonaggression pact, the Kremlin managed to maintain the leadership of the defensive struggle in which the Soviet masses finally turned the tide of the Nazi invasion.
That resistance was not waged in defense of Stalin's repressive political dictatorship; it was motivated by the desire to preserve the social and economic foundations of the workers state that were instituted under the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky. In a very real sense, then, the victory of the Soviet Union in World War II was Trotsky's victory rather than Stalin's. But nevertheless, the Soviet triumph enabled the Stalinists to continue posing as heirs of Lenin and the October Revolution.
In Western Europe the Nazi blitzkrieg had demoralized and disoriented the working masses for several years, and their recovery came at a time when the Stalinists' influence was strengthened by their identification with the heroic resistance of the Soviet masses.
After the war, the Red Army stood astride Eastern Europe, while in the West the revolutionary Marxists again found huge Stalinist movements blocking their paths. The entrenchment of Stalinism extended the crisis of proletarian leadership for a whole historical period. In particular, by preventing the workers of Western Europe from taking power, the Stalinists laid the basis for the resta-bilization of the capitalist system on a world scale. It was only the collaboration of the Stalinists in propping up the capitalist system in Western Europe that saved the day for the American policy-makers who emerged as the central leadership of world capitalism.
The reason the Fourth International was not able to develop mass sections with millions of members throughout the world and wasn't in a position to lead revolutions to successful conclusions cannot be ascribed to shortcomings on the part of individual leaders of the Trotsky-ist movement, nor can it be ascribed to any insufficiencies of its political program, it is ascribable to the mammoth obstacles in the objective situation.
The history of the Fourth International during the second world war reveals one significant victory - —the survival of the International itself. The Nazis and the Stalinists dealt heavy blows to the organizations and threatened it with extinction, but its survival permitted preservation of the continuity of Leninist internationalism from the October Revolution to the present day.
The survival of the Fourth International through the second world war was by no means a foregone conclusion. Because of the war, communications between groups of Trotskyists in different countries became very difficult; in fact, contacts were completely broken for a time. But by 1942 Trotskyists who were active in the French underground had made contact with comrades in Belgium and the United States.
France was a gathering place for revolutionists who were in exile from all over Europe. After the Nazi occupation of France these people went underground. The Trotskyist movement there built a functioning underground group. They published 73 issues of La Verité in illegality—19 issues were mimeographed and 54 were printed—over a four-year period beginning in 1940. This same underground organization put out a paper in German called Arbeiter und Soldat (Worker and Soldier), which they issued to German occupying troops, and they began to politicize the German soldiers.
[p. 4]
This work was carried on throughout 1942 and part of 1943 until the Gestapo decimated the leadership of the French Trotskyists. Hundreds were arrested and murdered or deported to concentration camps. Eight members of the Central Committee were caught, and almost the entire leadership in Brittany was seized. Among sixty-five comrades arrested in Brittany were thirty German soldiers who had joined the group.
In spite of this crushing blow, the comrades were able to reorganize and begin to function again; later in 1943 a temporary European secretariat was established. The Trotskyist movement in Europe actually grew during the war in spite of the fact that whole sections, the Danish section, for example, were completely liquidated by the Gestapo. The Greek section, too, which had been one of the strongest Trotskyist organizations before the war, was the common target of both the fascists and the Stalinists.
The repressions were worst in Europe and in the colonial world, but they weren't confined to those areas. In the United States, eighteen leaders of the Socialist Work-ers Party were imprisoned. Trotskyist leaders were also imprisoned in Britain.
In Latin America, the Argentine and Uruguayan sections came under attack by their governments. The comrades there had to fight for their right to exist and publish their newspapers.
In Ceylon, the leading comrades were imprisoned. They recruited their jailer to Trotskyism and fled with him to India and started a party there.
In Indochina there had been, before the war, a Trotskyist movement of considerable size and influence, especially around Saigon. The Stalinists had been dominant in North and Central Indochina, but in the south the relationship of forces between Trotskyism and Stalinism was more even. In the liberation struggle following the war, the Trotskyists fought along with the Viet Minh and even commanded some of the Viet Minh military units. But the Stalinists who led the Viet Minh captured the Trotskyist leaders and executed them in late 1945, effectively suppressed the movement, although small groups of Trotskyists continued revolutionary work for several years, despite the repressions. In China, the story was similar. Our comrades were murdered and imprisoned by the Chinese Stalinists led by Mao Tse-tung. The fate of many of them is still unknown.
A European secretariat was established about August of 1943 with French, Belgian, Greek, Spanish, and German Trotskyists participating. It began publishing Quatrième Internationale in mimeographed form in January 1944.
Perhaps the most significant action of this body was the organization of an international conference of European sections *during the war-held in France in February of 1944, "within the very tentacles of the Gestapo," as one account described it. The news of this conference wasn't printed in The Militant until eight months later, indicating the difficulty of trans-Atlantic communications at the time.
The underground conference established a European Executive Committee and worked toward the building of functioning organizations in the European countries in preparation for the postwar revolutionary upsurge. The Belgian Trotskyists, who had maintained an organization throughout the war and had published two newspapers—one in Flemish and one in French—sent representatives to the underground conference. The Greek, Spanish, and German representatives at the conference were from groups of Trotskyist emigrés in France. Three separate French groups attended the conference and fused into a single organization there, becoming the PCI—Internationalist Communist Party of France.
At about the same time two British tendencies fused, forming the RCP (Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain). These fusions were important, but they were not fusions of completely homogeneous groups. The fact that they weren't really homogeneous was to become clear in the future in the form of organizational difficulties and, finally, splits. But the main objective at the time was fulfilled: to consolidate the various Trotskyist groups as much as possible and at the same time to clarify the political program of Trotskyism; to reaffirm the international line of the movement. This was especially necessary because of the confusion caused by popular frontism, which was in the ascendancy in all of the partisan movements.
Meanwhile, in the United States, an internal dispute had arisen within the SWP during the war. A minority led by Felix Morrow and Albert Goldman was develop-ing a conciliationist line toward Shachtman who had his own group called the Workers Party. In 1945, during this dispute, a leader of the Fourth International, Michel Pablo, made a trip to the U. S. and while he was here he raised the idea with Shachtman of possibly unifying his group with the SWP.
Morrow and Goldman made this a central issue in their inner-party fight. They were in favor of unity with the Shachtmanites and they promoted that goal energetically. The SWP met with representatives of Shachtman's group twice, but the negotiations bogged down over Shachtman's insistence on the right to publish an internal organ of his tendency inside the party — —not a temporary internal bulletin, but a permanent one. The SWP took the position that this would lead to permanent factions and, eventually, to another split, especially since the differences that had led to the original split with Shachtman had not narrowed, but had widened. It would have raised again the questions of the nature of the Soviet Union and the character of a Leninist party.
At one point unity was agreed to by both groups but then Shachtman launched a public attack on the SWP. So the discussions were ended and Goldman quit the SWP and joined with Shachtman. Later, in 1946, Morrow was expelled by an SWP convention because he had been caught collaborating with Shachtman secretly even though he was still formally a leading member of the SWP. After his expulsion he joined the Shachtman group, and a number of his supporters left the SWP with him. In 1947 a faction around J. R. Johnson (C. L. R. James) in Shachtman's party split and joined the SWP. So this whole affair amounted to a minor regroupment.
Meanwhile, in Europe, after this period of consolidation had accomplished as much as could have been expected, a conference was held in April 1946, in Belgium. Trotskyists from twelve countries participated.
This conference elected a new Executive Committee and Secretariat, which was to begin functioning as a full-fledged international center. One of its main functions was to begin preparations for a world congress, including the drafting of line documents for discussion.
[p. 5]
One of the documents produced was on the USSR; it generally reaffirmed the Trotskyist viewpoint of the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers state. There were also documents on revolutionary perspectives in Europe and on the colonial struggles. It was significant that in spite of several years of broken communications between the SWP and the European comrades, these discussion documents were in close harmony with resolutions that had been passed a few months earlier by the SWP.
These documents were to lead to the Second World Congress of the Fourth International, which was held in April and May 1948 in France. Twenty-two organizations participated, representing nineteen different countries.
A great deal of discussion at the congress focused on the East European "buffer states." In Eastern Europe at the end of the war the Soviet army was in actual control and the imperialists were too weak to challenge its power. Stalin had illusions that the wartime alliance with the United States and Britain could last indefinitely but the imperialists had other ideas, which eventually led to the Cold War.
Stalin's illusions led him to promise, at Potsdam, that capitalism would not be overturned in Eastern Europe—that coalition governments would be established and private-property relations maintained. These coalition governments did actually function for about two or three years—from the end of the war to 1947, and in some cases 1948. But by 1948, under pressure of the Cold War and the Marshall Plan, the Stalinists had eliminated the capitalist elements in the governments and nationalized the means of production.
One country in Eastern Europe had an entirely different path of development from the rest: Yugoslavia. The discussion at the Second World Congress of the Fourth International began with Yugoslavia.
In Yugoslavia, the fight against the German and Italian invaders had clearly taken on the character of a civil war, where the struggle for national liberation was carried on by a partisan movement led by the Communist Party. Stalin ordered Tito, leader of the CP, to form a popular front with procapitalist forces, but Tito found that instruction impossible to carry out. The procapitalists, represented by a partisan group called the Chetniks, spent most of their time fighting on the other side—in collaboration with the Nazis against Tito's partisans. It was a situation like that in China, where Stalin ordered Mao Tse-tung to unite with Chiang Kai-shek to fight the Japanese, but Chiang Kai-shek kept attacking Mao's troops.
Tito's forces fought against the Chetniks and won. When they took power in Yugoslavia, they tried to please Stalin and the imperialist Allies by forming a coalition government with remnants of the bourgeoisie—the Tito-Su-basich coalition—but it didn't hold up for more than a few months. The last two bourgeois ministers left the government in October 1945.
There had been no real basis for the coalition in the first place. It represented a dangerous opening for the Yugoslav capitalists to regain their political power, but the real power in the country was being exercized by the People's Committees under the leadership of the CP. The People's Committees had arisen during the civil war as organs of dual power. They came out of the partisan struggle and were solidly supported by the masses of Yugoslav workers and peasants. This social base, of course, had irreconcilable conflicts of interest with the capitalist elements in the coalition government.
After the breakup of the coalition, a rapid process of economic transformation took place. Sweeping nationalizations were implemented, collectivization of agriculture was begun, a monopoly of foreign trade was established, a five-year plan was adopted, industrialization and electrification of the country got under way. In short, Yugoslavia became a workers state.
Throughout this process the independent course of the Yugoslav CP met resistance from the Kremlin, but because the Titoists had firm control over their own armed forces, and had proved their fighting capacity in the revolutionary upsurge, Stalin viewed it as too risky to try to crush the Titoists quickly by brute force. Instead of a confrontation with Tito in 1945-46, then, Stalin pursued the more modest goal of bringing the Yugoslav party and state apparatus under Kremlin control. With the onset of the Cold War, Belgrade and Moscow found themselves in a common front against Washington—which did not prevent Stalin from continuing to try to undermine Tito. These efforts finally led to a violent confrontation in 1948.
Ironically in 1947 when Stalin established the Cominform, he headquartered it in Belgrade and held up the economic transformation of Yugoslavia as the model to be followed by the other East European countries. But in 1948, when Tito began campaigning for the formation of a Balkan-Danube federation of states, Stalin saw that as a challenge to Soviet hegemony over Eastern Europe and expelled the Yugoslav CP from the Cominform. As the Tito-Stalin split deepened, the Kremlin's offensive of slander, economic pressure, and even military threats against Yugoslavia intensified.
During the same period, 1947-48, the transformations in other East European countries were taking place, but the process was very different. There the social transformations were being carried out, for the most part, not as a result of civil war and not primarily through mass action, but on the orders of the top bureaucrats with the power of the Soviet army at their disposal.
This whole process raised a basic problem for revolutionary socialists: what kind of countries were these unusual East European states? Were they workers states or were they capitalist? What was their class nature?
If they were workers states, how did that happen without the revolutionary action of the masses? If there had been social revolutions, how could they have been led by Stalinists, whom Trotskyists had characterized for years as counterrevolutionary through and through? There were a number of apparent contradictions that could not be ignored.
Another question was raised. Were these special cases or was a whole new stage in world history opening up wherein this process of revolution-by-bureaucratic-takeover could be repeated?
If Stalinist parties could lead revolutions, as one interpretation of the events could imply, where did that leave Trotskyism? Hadn't Trotskyists held that only revolutionary parties could lead an overturn of capitalism?
[p. 6]
Another problem: Should Trotskyists support what was going on in Eastern Europe, or oppose it? If we sup-ported it, should we join those parties that were carrying it out or not?
In the Trotskyist movement in Europe in 1948-49, Michel Pablo and Ernest Germain took somewhat different positions on the question of the class character of Eastern Europe. Germain held that the East European countries, including Yugoslavia, were capitalist states. Pablo agreed except on Yugoslavia, which he said must be a workers state because there had been a civil war there. In the United States, the majority of the SWP generally agreed with Germain, but a minority led by Joseph Hansen and Bert Cochran disagreed. Hansen and Cochran held that all of the East European states were workers states deformed from birth. They were saddled with Stalinist bureaucracies, but their economic foundations were qualitatively the same as the USSR's, and they had to be considered workers states.
Some resolution of these differences had to be found. This question was not a semantic one or an academic dispute over abstractions. As Hansen put it, "the question of the class character of the state is the touchstone of the proletarian revolution and the heart of Marxist politics." What it boils down to is that if you can't determine whether a revolution has occurred or not, then you don't know what a revolution is, and that is a bad position for a revolutionary to be in.
The discussion on Eastern Europe was a model discussion in that it was carried out in a principled manner—the goal was always theoretical clarification, and not narrow factional gains. One example of this came at an internal debate that the SWP arranged between Joseph Hansen and George Clarke. Clarke was won over during the debate. He began defending the SWP majority position, but became convinced during the debate that Hansen's position was correct. Such a thing could never happen in a debate where the participants were motivated by purely factional considerations.
One of the key documents of this discussion came from the Seventh Plenum of the IEC (International Executive Committee), which was held in June 1949. Its title is "The Evolution of the Buffer Countries." (It is reprinted in the Education for Socialists bulletin Class, Party, and State and the Eastern European Revolution.) This resolution defends the idea that the East European states were "capitalist countries on the road toward structural assimilation with the USSR." Structural assimilation, the document said, meant "the abolition of national frontiers between the various buffer countries," either through direct incorporation into the USSR or the formation of a single East European state formally independent of the USSR. In any event, this "elimination of national frontiers" was considered the "decisive and fundamental" factor for the completion of structural assimilation. The historical model for a Stalin-ordered structural assimilation was the incorporation of Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and parts of Poland into the USSR during World War II.
Pablo voted for this resolution of the Seventh Plenum that defined the East European countries as capitalist states, although he disagreed that Yugoslavia was in that category. And the National Committee of the SWP also passed this resolution at an SWP plenum later.
I make a point of mentioning that Pablo voted for this resolution because in a later dispute Tim Wohlforth tried to claim that Hansen had merely adopted Pablo's position in this discussion. That is obviously untrue, because Pablo voted against Hansen on this question and only later, with the rest of the International, was won over to the position that all of the Eastern European countries were deformed workers states.
The document entitled "The Problem of Eastern Europe" by Joseph Hansen (also reprinted in the Education for Socialists bulletin mentioned above) is his answer to that resolution of the Seventh Plenum of the IEC.
Let's consider some of the arguments advanced during the discussion. I'm not going to try to give a detailed analysis of the merits of the argumets; just a brief outline. The Education for Socialists bulletin, and Hansen's article in particular, are very thorough on these questions. The article by Cochran (written under the name E. R. Frank) in the same bulletin is worth reading, too.
The first argument to be considered is this one: That a revolutionary mobilization of the masses is a necessary condition for overturning capitalism. This was first stated with regard to the East European discussion in a resolution of the Second World Congress in 1948. But the resolution contradicted itself, because it also acknowledged that there had been overturns of capitalism in some countries without revolutionary mobilizations of the masses having taken place; for example, in the Baltic countries and other areas that had become part of the Soviet Union as a result of World War II. The 1948 resolution called this "structural assimilation" and said that this was the only alternative way, aside from a revolutionary mobilization of the masses, that capitalism could be over-turned. And with regard to the East European states, it made the judgment that they were not moving in the direction of structural assimilation. That is, that the tendency in Eastern Europe was in the direction of remain-ing capitalist states.
The next year, 1949, at the Seventh Plenum of the IEC, this last judgment was reversed. It was noted that "important changes [had] taken place in Eastern Europe during the year 1948," and that now the East European states seemed to be moving in the direction of structural assimilation into the USSR.
Nevertheless, the Seventh Plenum continued to maintain the line that Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and the rest were still capitalist states, because obviously their national frontiers were still intact.
Again, Pablo agreed with all this, but he said that since there had been a civil war in Yugoslavia—a revolutionary mobilization of the masses—Yugoslavia was different and must be considered to be a workers state. The others were capitalist states, he said, even though the capitalists were no longer the dominant class there, because they had not gone through the process of civil war.
The basis for this position was a fear of falling prey to the old revisionist idea of a peaceful transition from capitalism to socialism, of the type promoted today by the supporters of Salvador Allende in Chile.
But no one was trying to say that the transformation in Eastern Europe had been peaceful. It was extremely violent, but the violence was not primarily a result of revolutionary uprisings; it was a byproduct of World War II.
[p. 7]
Why is it that a socialist transformation cannot occur without violence? It requires the destruction of the state power of the former ruling class, the bourgeoisie! The capitalists, we know, never give up without a fight; they have to be defeated by force.
The virtual destruction of the power of the old capitalist ruling classes in Eastern Europe was accomplished by force during the war in two ways. First, in Poland, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and Greece, large sections of the ruling classes were physically obliterated by the Ger-mans; by the Nazi invaders. The German occupation armies then played the dominant role as repressive force. When Germany was defeated, the Kremlin filled the political vacuums in most of these countries on the strength of the victorious Soviet army. The exceptions were Greece, where Stalin allowed the British to fill the vacuum leading to a rebuilding of the bourgeois order there; and Yugoslavia, where the Yugoslav CP filled the vacuum as a result of the civil war.
In the other East European countries the old bourgeoisies were driven from political power by a different process. In Hungary, Rumania, and Bulgaria the capitalist classes had allied themselves with Hitler, so they were not liquidated by the Nazis. But when Germany fell, these bourgeoisies were left with virtually no military or political support. The masses in these countries rose up in advance of the Soviet army (which they saw as a liberating force) in powerful upsurges against their discredit-ed capitalist rulers. But the Soviet armed forces quelled these independent mass movements and disarmed and demobilized the workers and peasants. At the same time, the Soviet military forces themselves filled the power vacuum and, utilizing mass mobilizations to a limited extent, proceeded to obliterate the former ruling classes.
The point here is that the debilitation of the capitalist classes throughout Eastern Europe was not primarily accomplished by revolutionary mobilizations of the mass-es. Only in Yugoslavia was a mass upsurge the decisive factor.
It is important to note that this physical weakening of the bourgeoisies in itself did not make social revolutions in Eastern Europe; did not transform capitalist states into workers' states. Destruction of the capitalist ruling class is obviously a necessary precondition for a workers' state. But unless the bourgeois state is destroyed and the process of nationalizing the economy and outlawing private property in the means of production is begun, capitalist property relations will persevere and will spawn a regenerated bourgeoisie, as happened in Greece.
* * *
Now, another group of arguments used as late as 1950 to prove that Eastern Europe was capitalist centered around the idea that the various states were "too small" to be socialist states. This was why "structural assimilation" was considered a necessary condition for their social transformation. But it was a peculiar argument, because the Trotskyist movement had always held that the Soviet Union was "too small" to be a socialist country. That's why Trotsky opposed Stalin's theory of "socialism in one country" so vigorously. But Trotsky certainly never characterized the Soviet Union as a capitalist state for that reason.
The confusion here was between two different social structures: on one hand, the workers state; on the other hand, socialism. These are not the same thing. Marxists considered the workers state to be a transitional form between capitalism and socialism. So Hansen and Cochran pointed out in this discussion that they weren't claim-ing that Eastern Europe had completed the transformation to socialism, but that the transformation had begun. The first steps had been taken; the political power of the capitalist classes had been destroyed and capitalist property relations overturned. That meant that the states were no longer capitalist states, but were postcapitalist formations of the sort that Trotsky had called a workers state.
Trotsky's methodhad been to judge the class character of a state by determining what class was dominant—and not only politically dominant, not only which class controlled the government, but which class actually controlled the major means of production.
In Eastern Europe the initial steps toward nationalization began right after the war, but (excepting Yugoslavia) they were sharply limited by Stalin's program for the "People's Democracies," which did not include expropriation of the capitalist classes. With the onset of the Cold War, Stalin was forced to abandon his attempt to create "friendly" capitalist states along the USSR's border. On his orders, sweeping nationalizations were carried out between 1947 and the middle of 1949 that transformed the Eastern European countries into workers states.
Since the Soviet army held de facto power in Eastern Europe at the end of the war, would it not be more accurate to say that the countries there became workers states as early as 1945? After all, didn't Engels say that in the final analysis the state is "bodies of armed men"? The Soviet army did indeed play a heavy role in determining the nature of the East European states. But Engels's formula refers to the state apparatus as a guarantor of property relations. When one "armed body of men" is deposed and replaced by another, the final outcome depends on the class character and program of the new rulers. In the case of Stalinism, the power was in the hands of a petty-bourgeois formation with a pro-capitalist program.
No political confidence can be placed in such a transitional formation proceeding onward to the construction of a workers state through the decisive expropriation of capitalist property in the means of production if it is not guided by a revolutionary Marxist program. Han-sen and Cochran refused to predict beforehand that Stalinism would in fact carry out such a transformation. It was only with the actual change in social relations that they concluded that the states of Eastern Europe had been transformed into workers states.
* * *
The majority's most sophisticated argument, in Han-sen's opinion, centered on the question of agricultural property in Eastern Europe. They contended that since these were predominantly agricultural countries, and since agriculture had not been nationalized in any of them, then the economies must be dominated by capitalist property relationships—and therefore, they must be capitalist countries.
[p. 8]
The reply to this argument is worth studying. Hansen and Cochran argued that from Marx to Lenin to Trotsky, Marxist theory has never based its appraisal of the class character of the state on the property relationships in the countryside. Not that it's an unimportant question, but that it isn't the decisive question.
In any event, as more time passed and as the development of the East European phenomenon unfolded, it became obvious to all that the buffer states could no longer be called capitalist states of any kind. In 1951 the Third "World Congress of the Fourth International was held and this discussion was concluded. In general, the Fourth International and the SWP majority had been won over to what began as the position of a small minority. That is, that the East European states were "deformed workers states," and that the criterion for making that judgment was the property relations upon which the states were based.
Some of the comrades who had held the position of the Seventh Plenum resolution came to the new conclusion by changing their earlier definition of structural assimilation and saying that it could happen, after all, without abolishing national frontiers between the buffer countries. Based on the revised definition, they said that what had happened was that structural assimilation had been completed, and that they had been right before when they said that the East European states were on the road to structural assimilation.
But they did grant that those who had characterized Yugoslavia as a capitalist state had been wrong. The Third World Congress passed a resolution on Yugoslavia acknowledging that the process there had been qualitatively different; that a revolution independent of the Kremlin had established the Yugoslav workers state.
The theoretical gains of this discussion were extremely helpful later on when the class character of the Chinese and Cuban revolutions came up for discussion. In particular, the question of how transformations from capitalist to workers states could come about without revolutionary Leninist parties was raised again in the discussions on China and Cuba.
Isn't that a refutation of the Transitional Program? In fact, it is not. The Transitional Program specifically points out that petty-bourgeois parties, including the Social Democrats and the Stalinists, could, under extreme circumstances—a world war, for example—lead a movement to the formation of a workers' and farmers' government that "would represent merely a short episode on the road to the actual dictatorship of the proletariat." ("Dictatorship of the proletariat," after all, is just another way of saying "workers state"; they are synonymous terms.)
The fact that some social transformations have taken place under exceptional circumstances without the intervention of Leninist parties has never led us to the conclusion that Leninist parties are no longer necessary. To the contrary, in the strongest sections of the capitalist system, that is, in the advanced industrial societies, the necessity of revolutionary parties is more obvious than ever before. And their necessity in the colonial world has been thrown into sharp focus by the frequent crises in Latin America.
Now, I want to step back again to 1949 to begin to trace another line of development within the Fourth International, leading up to 1951. In Yugoslavia, the break between Tito and Stalin in June 1948 led to a situation where the International began to look at the Yugoslav party in a different light. This, too, was a new phenomenon in world history—Stalinism had always been absolutely monolithic, but now there was a Stalinized regime in Yugoslavia taking an independent course.
The Yugoslav CP was designated as a centrist party by the Seventh Plenum in 1949. There is a qualitative difference in our conception between a centrist party and a Stalinist party. Stalinist parties are considered to be counterrevolutionary through and through. But a centrist party, vacillating by its very nature, theoretically has the possibility of taking steps that help advance the revolution. That was what was behind the Trotskyist movement's characterization of Stalinism in the 1923-1933 period as bureaucratic centrism. Our perspective was to fight to regenerate the Communist International in a revolutionary direction. We dropped that characterization after the bankruptcy of the Stalinist Comintern was definitively proved by the debacle in Germany. We no longer considered the Communist International capable of being pushed in a direction that would advance the revolution, and instead set about to construct a new international.
So the designation of the Yugoslav CP as "centrist" had some very important theoretical implications with regard to our analysis of Stalinism.
More recently, discussion on the nature of the Chinese and Vietnamese CPs has led the SWP to conclude that it is generally incorrect to conclude that because a Stalinist party has been forced under exceptional circumstances to participate in a revolution it has ceased to be Stalinist and can be regarded as "centrist." It is a fact that Stalinist parties have been at the head of revolutionary struggles that have ended in victory, but that is not the same as saying that the parties themselves helped advance the revolutionary process.
In China, the policies of the Chinese CP were consciously designed to hold back the revolution; to prevent the transformation of China into a workers state. Even the archetypal Stalinist—Stalin himself-was at the head of a victorious armed struggle that immensely aided the world revolution: the defense of the Soviet Union in World War II. But Stalin's political leadership throughout that whole period can only be characterized as counterrevolutionary. To call Stalin's role during World War II "centrist" would render the term meaningless.
A centrist party, according to the Marxist definition, is one that vacillates between reformist and revolutionary policies. Under bourgeois pressure the centrists' political program bends toward reformism; under pressure from the masses it can bend in a revolutionary direction. A Stalinist party, by contrast, defends the material interests of a well-defined petty-bourgeois social layer: the parasitic bureaucracy of a workers state. That is the determinant of its consistently antirevolutionary program.
[p. 9]
As for the Yugoslav CP in 1949, it should be remembered that a non-Kremlin-oriented Stalinism was a brand-new political phenomenon. And it did seem, for a short period, to be moving in a leftward, antibureaucratic direction. The "centrist" designation at that time, then, did not seem unreasonable, although in retrospect it can be seen to have been theoretically wrong.
The Yugoslav CP's "left turn" temporarily served Tito's interests in his defensive struggle against Stalin, because at that time Tito was trying to win the support of important sections of the West European working class; particularly within the mass communist parties in Prance and Italy. And his efforts met with some success. For the first time in decades, opposition currents appeared in CPs all over the world, and this was occurring under the banner of "Titoism." Needless to say, the Fourth International saw this development as an extremely fertile field for political work.
The Fourth International adopted a practical orientation of vigorous, active support to the Yugoslav workers state's democratic right of national self-determination. Fundamental political differences with Titoism notwithstanding, the Trotskyists launched an energetic campaign aimed at countering the Kremlin's attack against Yugoslavia.
And the Yugoslav CP accepted our collaboration in its effort to win a hearing among radicalized workers around the world. Representatives of the Fourth International visited Yugoslavia and held discussions on this matter with Yugoslav officials.
As a result, the International arranged to send work brigades of young people to participate in rebuilding war-devastated Yugoslavia and to gain a first-hand understanding of what was happening in that country. These youths would then return to their own countries and spread the truth about what they saw in Yugoslavia. It was sort of a predecessor to the Venceremos brigades in Cuba.
In France, the Trotskyists organized more than 1,000 young people to go on these brigades. The SWP began to organize brigades from this country, but they were called off when the political direction of the Titoists took a sharp turn for the worse.
As we have seen more recently from our experience in the antiwar movement, the revolutionary party is able to function at its best when there is a concrete political issue to organize around. As a result of the Fourth International's active intervention in the Yugoslav developments, the Trotskyist movement grew in Europe.
But then, in the summer of 1950, the Yugoslav CP took a right turn that clearly revealed its fundamentally Stalinist nature. It gave up the strategy of appealing to working class movements abroad for support and instead, under pressure from the Kremlin on one side and the capitalist world on the other, it began to look toward the imperialist powers for a base of support. The most blatant manifestation of the Titoists' rightward swing came in the form of their official support to the UN "police action" in Korea, which, of course, was nothing less than a cover for US imperialist aggression against Korea.
But in spite of the ending of possibilities for Trotskyists to directly intervene in the Tito-Stalin split, the Yugoslav break with the Kremlin continued to be a factor of the first magnitude in world politics. It was the first crack in the once-monolithic Stalinist bloc, and the cracks since then have multiplied, spread, and deepened so that now several diverse poles of Stalinism are in conflict with each other.