Where is Pablo going?
by Bleibtreu-Favre, June 1951
[First posted online at http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/fi/1950-1953/ic-issplit/04.htm ]
[Revolutionary Regroupment note: While expressing confusion on Yugoslvia and China, the document’s more general critique of Pablo, who looked to the Stalinists to act as substitutes for the working class and it’s Trotskyist vanguard, was key in laying the groundwork for the 1953 split.]
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Introduction by La Verite
The document we are serializing appeared at the beginning of June 1951 under the title ‘Where is Comrade Pablo Going?’ Its publication has been postponed for several months at the request of a member of the International Secretariat—Comrade Germain, the author of ‘Ten Theses’ (see issues 300-304 of La Verite)— who warned the leadership of the Parti Communiste Internationaliste (PCI) against ‘the trap Pablo has laid for destroying the French section.
When the author of the ‘Ten Theses’ opposed their adoption by the PCI Central Committee, he left no room for doubt that he had renounced defending his ideas. He had capitulated, like Zinoviev and others had done before him, like Calas did recently before the French CP’s Central Committee. Trotsky had learned from experience that the rarest and most necessary quality for a revolutionary leader is ‘that little thing called character’!
The Trotskyist critique of the revisionist notions expressed by Pablo in ‘Where Are We Going?’ began with ‘Where Is Comrade Pablo Going?’ The reader can refer to the former document, which appeared in the February 1951 issue of the magazine Quatrieme Internationale. It is interesting to note that neither ‘Where is Pablo Going?’ nor any other political documents of the PCI were published in the international bulletins preparing for the World Congress.
‘Where Are We Going?’ was the ideological proclamation of Pabloism. To date, the split in France has been the main practical result. May it be the last!
Where is Comrade Pablo Going?
Clarity in a discussion arises from the presentation of opposing theses on the one hand and from polemics on the other; the two methods do not contradict each other but are instead complementary, in the strictest sense of the word.
To refrain from stating your theses, to stage a sort of guerrilla warfare of partial amendments when principles are at stake or, even worse, to restrict yourself to polemicizing against the weak points of the contested thesis is the distinguishing characteristic of tendencies that have neither principles nor any consciousness of their duty to our World Party of the Revolution.
As for us, we think that the method that guided the international discussion on the problems posed by the people’s democracies is the correct method; each thesis was fully presented by various comrades (we are speaking of the comrades of the majority who at the Second World Congress came out against the revisionist tendencies, which dissolved after having fought us with a series of indirect attacks [Hasten is the prototype in this regard—F.B.]).
In particular, we believe that Germain’s ‘Ten Theses: What Should Be Modified and What Should Be Maintained in the Theses of the Second World Congress of the Fourth International on the Question of Stalinism!’—we emphasize that we mean the ‘Ten Theses’ and not their bizarre foreword—is a positive and extremely timely document in the discussion preparing for the World Congress. Its clarity fully exempts it from the obligation to engage in a polemic against the points of view expressed on several occasions by Pablo. This is the way a healthy discussion should start. But to remain healthy, it can’t stop there. The points on which there is disagreement must be brought before the full light of day, which is something that only a polemic can accomplish.
The goal of this document, which is addressed to our entire International, especially to all our leading comrades in the International, is to tell them fraternally and frankly of the danger that a whole series of new positions represents for the program, the activities, and the very existence of our International. We say: be careful; the scratch may become infected, and then gangrene can set in.
We don’t pretend to be infallible, we don’t think our theses are exempt from a number of insufficiencies, we don’t feel we have the right to give lessons to any of our comrades; but we say to them ‘Look out, our ship has lost its course; it’s urgent that we take our bearings and change our course.’
In his document ‘Where Are We Going!’ Comrade Pablo brings into full daylight the revisionist tendencies that were included in the International Secretariat’s draft thesis but were disguised in the Ninth Plenum’s [November 1950!] compromise resolution.
Beginning with its opening lines, the violent tone of this document is surprising, all the more so since we don’t know which members of the International Executive Committee and the International Secretariat were being taken to task in … January 1951. We will undoubtedly never know the names of the people in question, those ‘people who despair of the fate of humanity,’ nor those who have written that ‘the thinking of the international seems out of joint,’ nor those who ‘cry bitter tears’ (which Pablo wants to believe are genuine), nor those who ‘tailor history to their own measure,’ nor of those Trotskyist careerists who ‘desire that the entire process of the transformation of capitalist society into socialism would be accomplished within the span of their brief lives so that they can be rewarded for their efforts on behalf of the Revolution.’ [Emphasis added.]
I. The Theory of ‘Blocs’ and ‘Camps’ Makes in Appearance in the International.
‘The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles, one reads in that dustbin known as the Communist Manifesto.
But it’s necessary to keep abreast of the times and to admit without hesitation along with Pablo that:
‘For our movement objective social reality consists essentially of the capitalist regime and the Stalinist world. [International Information Bulletin, March 1951, ‘Where Are We Going?’ p.2. Emphasis added.]
Dry your tears and listen: the very essence of social reality is composed of the capitalist regime (!) and the Stalinist (!) world (?).
We thought that social reality consisted in the contradiction between the fundamental classes: the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Clearly an error, for from now on the capitalist regime, which encompasses precisely these two classes, becomes a totality that is counterposed …to the Stalinist world.
The term ‘world’ is quite obscure, you will say; but it offers some significant conveniences and permits classifying states and social groups according to the supreme criterion: their Stalinist or non-Stalinist ‘nature.’
Thus the state that arose from the Third Chinese Revolution (whose economy, let us recall, has retained a capitalist structure up to the present) is classified by Pablo as being in the Stalinist world. We will return to this question.
On the other hand,the Yugoslav workers state (where the economy is almost fully nationalized and planned) is expelled from the Stalinist world. And since it cannot remain outside the realm of objective social reality, it drifts objectively, though imperceptibly, into the enemy camp (along with its arms, bags and baggage, and dictatorship of the proletariat!).
In order to dispel any uncertainty as to his conception of contemporary history, Pablo continues:
‘Furthermore, whether we like it or not, these two elements (the capitalist regime and the Stalinist world) essentially constitute objective social reality, for the overwhelming majority of the forces opposing capitalism are tight now to be found under the leadership or influence of the Soviet bureaucracy.’ [‘Where Are We Going?,’ p.2. Emphasis added.]
Thus the sum total of Pablo’s ‘social’ criterion seems to be the political nature (Stalinist or non-Stalinist) of states and human groupings.
He gives us no details about the tiny remaining minority that is neither under the leadership nor influence of the bureaucracy. Let’s admit that it’s the exception that proves the rule. What then is this tiny minority of forces that are anticapitalist but non-Stalinist?
We don’t think it’s intended to include the millions of workers in the USA, England, Canada, Germany, etc., who are neither influenced nor led by Stalinism. We must then conclude that the proletariat in the most advanced countries of the world do not constitute ‘forces opposed to capitalism.’ They have been labelled and pigeonholed under the category ‘capitalist regime.’
It’s more difficult to pin this label on the massive liberation movements in North Africa, Black Africa, Madagascar, India, Ceylon, and Indonesia, a movement that cannot possibly be considered as either a tiny minority or belonging to the Stalinist world.
Thus, like it or not, classes, states, and nations must rush pell-mell into one camp or the other (capitalist regime or Stalinist world). Moreover, Pablo adds, the international relationship of social forces is, ‘to express it in a schematic way, the relationship of forces between the two blocs.’ [1] (p.5.)
What Pablo calls ‘expressing it in a schematic way’ in reality constitutes mixing and jumbling everything together, ending up with an incredible confusion. When analyzing situations it is impossible to abandon class lines even for an instant without ending up with such ‘schematic concepts’ and fruitless endeavors.
What? The international relationship of forces is the relationship of forces between the two blocs! Some progress.
Since contemporary social reality consists of the two blocs, the relationship of social forces is naturally .. .the relationship of forces between the two blocs! This logic is irreproachable, because it is a tautology.
We will be told that we have misinterpreted what Pablo is saying; he meant the international relationship of forces between the classes which, schematically, is the relationship between the blocs. But where is there any room here for the old-fashioned notion of classes? Where in Pablo’s document is there any serious analysis of the situation of the International proletariat? If he had tried to give any, he certainly wouldn’t have ended up with this astonishing notion of ‘blocs,’ nor would he have designated the international proletarian forces as the forces of this extraordinary ‘Stalinist world.
Furthermore, he explains what he means quite clearly when he talks about the respective roles of Stalin and the revolutionary proletariat within the very ‘Stalinist world.
According to him, ‘the revolutionary spirit of the masses directed against imperialism acts as an ADDITIONAL FORCE supplementing the material and technical forces raised against imperialism.’ (p.5 Emphasis added.)
In effect, he is making it quite clear that the revolutionary forces are the forces of the Stalinist world. But within this Stalinist world there are major forces: these are the material and technical forces—Soviet industry, the divisions of the Red Army; and there are supplementary forces, a sort of National Guard that is tacked on to these technical forces. The revolutionary spirit of 400 million Chinese workers, the Vietnamese, the Koreans, and all the working people in the ‘Stalinist world’ are the auxiliary forces of the socialist bastion led by Stalin.
Here you have the conclusion that necessarily emerges when the petty-bourgeois concept of a ‘bloc’ between states is substituted for a class analysis of world reality (an analysis of the contradiction between the international proletariat and the international imperialist bourgeoisie), that is, for the basic reality of the world we live in. Like it or not, on the basis of this concept the most one can do is provide more ammunition for Zhdanov, whose thesis rests on the following supreme postulate: the acid test for revolutionaries is their loyalty to the Soviet Union and to its leader Stalin. The petty-bourgeois concept of blocs necessarily leads to a choice between Stalin (with or without reservations) and Truman (with or without reservations).
The direction in which the choice is made depends solely on where the dominant pressure is coming from. In Central and Western Europe, the petty bourgeoisie tends to lean in a ‘neutralist’ direction, that is,to adapt to the Stalinist bureaucracy, which they see as having the prestige of power and of numerous ‘victories’ in Asia, in the buffer zone, etc.—and whose ‘material and technical forces’ are impressive by virtue of the fact that they are quite close at hand.
Marxists have been accustomed to starting out with the criterion of class. It was this class criterion that enabled Leon Trotsky and the Fourth International to take on the revisionists on the question of the USSR and to classify the degenerated workers state in the camp of the international proletariat. Today we are supposed to turn Marxism upside down, stand it on its Hegelian head, its legs waving toward the sky ‘of life’, of ‘objective social reality, in its essence’ (the worst of abstractions under the circumstances). And from this inconvenient position we are supposed to classify such-and-such section of a class, and such-and-such state, and such-and-such technical force in one or the other ‘bloc’, capitalist regime or Stalinist world.
II. The Beginning of a Revision on the Nature of the Bureaucracy
In Pablo’s article we discover the notion of a Soviet bureaucracy that will survive after the world revolution and then wither away by virtue of the development of productive forces. We read, in fact, that the Soviet bureaucracy will disappear in ‘two (contradictory) ways’:—’by the counterblows of the anti-capitalist victories in the world and even in the USSR, stimulating resistance of the masses to the bureaucracy’;
—’by elimination in the long run of the objective causes for the bureaucracy, for all bureaucracy, in direct proportion as the capitalist regime suffers setbacks and an ever increasing and economically more important sector escapes from capitalism and organizes itself on the basis of a state-ized and planned economy, thereby stimulating the growth of the productive forces.’ (p.5 Emphasis added.)
The second thesis, the idea that the bureaucracy will disappear through the development of the productive forces, contains as many errors as words:
(1) It establishes an amalgam between the Soviet bureaucracy and bureaucratism as it appeared in the USSR during Lenin’s lifetime.
(2) It begins with the notion of a slow and gradual decline (‘in direct proportion’) and of a slow accumulation of sectors in which a planned economy is installed. This is in flagrant contradiction with the perspective of a war that will be the final struggle between the classes, of a war that will determine the fate of world capitalism and that excludes capitalism’s being nibbled away over a lengthy period.
(3) Does Pablo—who believes, by the way, that a third world war is imminent—mean that in the very course of the war the development of the productive forces (which would be turned entirely toward the war effort at the expense of consumer goods for the masses) is capable of forcing a retreat in bourgeois norms of distribution? Or doesn’t he take seriously the notion that the third world war will be a final struggle, that is, does his perspective admit the possibility that the outcome of this war might be a new situation of equilibrium between the fundamental classes, with fewer bourgeois states coexisting with more numerous workers states?
Actually, the principal fault with the second thesis is the fact that it even exists, because it is equivalent to conceding that the Soviet bureaucracy can survive after the victory of the world revolution over imperialism. It is in direct contradiction with the first thesis (the traditional Trotskyist thesis), which is juxtaposed in an eclectic manner to the second thesis (Pablo’s thesis).
In the draft theses that Pablo presented to the Ninth Plenum of the IEC, whose relationship to his personal positions we have noted, the sole explanation given for the Soviet bureaucracy’s hostility to world revolution was the following vulgar economist explanation:
‘If (the bureaucracy) cannot capitulate to imperialism without undermining its existence as such in the USSR; on the other hand, it cannot base itself on the proletariat and the extension of the world revolution, which would remove, by organizing and developing the productive forces in the world, the objective reasons for its existence and above all(?) : for die omnipotence of any bureaucracy!’
The notion here is perfectly clear and is substituted for the Trotskyist notion of the bureaucracy’s incompatibility, not with planning and the development of productive forces, but with the revolutionary action of the masses, whose ‘first revolutionary victory in Europe,’ [2] Trotsky said, ‘will have the effect of an electric shock on the Soviet masses, awakening them, reviving the traditions of 1905 and 1917, weakening the position of the bureaucracy; it will have no less importance for the Fourth International than the victory of the October Revolution had for the Third International.’
The bureaucracy is not afraid of the development of productive forces. It is not holding back development in the USSR of its own will but rather through its incapacity. To the extent that its very character permits, it will try to increase development. Its slender results in relation to the great possibilities of planning both inside and outside the USSR don’t stem from a fear of disappearing following a growth in income sufficient to eradicate social inequality. [3] What the bureaucracy fears is not the growth of productive forces. What they fear is the awakening of the consciousness of the Soviet masses in contact with a revolution in another country.
The main danger in the explanation given by Pablo (even when juxtaposed with the discussion of another, correct explanation, the above one) is that it has the effect of masking the organically counterrevolutionary nature of the workers bureaucracy in the Soviet Union. This bureaucracy cannot be equated with the bureaucratism inherent in any society in which a scarcity in consumer goods exist. This bureaucracy is the result of nearly thirty years of the degeneration of a workers state. Politically, it has totally expropriated the Soviet proletariat. Contrary to what Pablo states, wherever it has been able to act bureaucratically or to maintain its bureaucratic control over the masses, the Soviet bureaucracy had tried to develop the productive forces (in the USSR and in the annexed or satellite territories) in order to strengthen the base of its own privileges and increase their extent. On the other hand, its liquidationist attitude toward the revolution that began in France in 1936; the way it brutally crushed the conscious cadres of the Spanish revolution; its complicity with Hitler in order to allow him to crush the Warsaw uprising; its Yalta policy against the interests of the revolution in Greece, Italy, Yugoslavia, and France; its blockade and military pressure against the Yugoslav workers state in the hope of delivering it bound hand and foot to imperialism (contrary to the interests of defending the USSR itself) unequivocally express the incompatibility between the Soviet bureaucracy and the development of the proletarian revolution. Such a revolution would represent a immediate and direct threat to the bureaucracy’s existence and it would do so even more sharply if it were to take place in an economically less backward country.
* * *
Leaving the door open, however timidly, to the hypothesis that the Thermidorian bureaucracy of the USSR could survive a third world war is to revise the Trotskyist analysis of the bureaucracy. First, as we have seen it calls into question the bureaucracy’s nature as a parasitic growth of the workers movement that lives off the advantage of the equilibrium between the fundamental classes. At the same time, this concept leaves the door open to the negation of its working-class nature. [4]
—Second, it overestimates the capacity of the USSR’s technical means when confronted with those of imperialism. —Third, it underestimates the breadth of the revolutionary movement in Asia and around the world. — Fourth, it accepts the notion that the Soviet bureaucracy can exist peacefully alongside a victorious revolution in the advanced countries.
— Above all, and here is where what Pablo really thinks comes in, it accepts the notion that the Soviet bureaucracy will not oppose the extension of the revolution but will even stimulate it.
In giving priority to ‘technical and material forces’ as opposed to the revolutionary struggle of the masses, however, Pablo does not go as far as the thesis of our comrades in Lyon. [5] This apparent superiority expresses a total incomprehension of the predominant role of the mass revolutionary struggle in the development and the outcome of a third world war.
The marked inferiority of the technical means at the disposal of the proletariat in the present world situation, a situation of ‘blocs,’ as Pablo puts it, becomes transformed into the proletariat’s superiority in direct proportion with its revolutionary mobilization, with an increase in its level of class consciousness and socialist consciousness, and with its revolutionary victories over imperialism. The military relationship of forces is politically determined. The Thermidorian bureaucracy in the USSR will play an even more emphatic counter-revolutionary role when it sees an upsurge in the revolution take shape, and when it sees mass socialist consciousness threatening its own domination in the USSR.
In its enormous struggle to smash the coalition of the imperialist bourgeoisie and its vast material means, the revolution will liquidate the Thermidorian bureaucracy in the USSR along the way. Otherwise the Thermidorian bureaucracy will impede, sabotage, and use military force against the revolutionary movement of the masses, paving the way for the victory of imperialist barbarism and for its own disappearance as a parasitic caste in the degenerated workers state.
All the experiences since 1933 have shown the role of the Soviet bureaucracy with increasing clarity and simply express its dual character—working-class and counter-revolutionary—its fundamentally contradictory nature, and its impasse. This bureaucracy will not survive a third world war, a war between the classes, a war whose outcome can only be world revolution or, failing that, a victory for imperialism that would liquidate all the conquests of the working class in both the USSR and the rest of the world.
III. From ‘Stalinist Ideology’ to the New ‘Bureaucratic Class’
Several times in the past the tendency to revise the Trotskyist concept of the Soviet bureaucracy has been expressed through the notion that Stalinism has its own ideology. Pablo seems to share this belief today when he speaks of the ‘co-leadership of the international Stalinist movement’ (our emphasis) by China and the Kremlin.
‘…China,’ he writes,’could not play the role of a mere satellite of the Kremlin but rather of a partner which henceforth imposes upon the Soviet bureaucracy a certain co-leadership of the international Stalinist movement. This co-leadership is, however, a disruptive element within Stalinism. …’ (‘Where Are We Going!’ p. 9. Emphasis added.)
What does this Russian-Chinese ‘co-leadership’ of the international Stalinist movement mean? Is there then a Chinese Stalinism alongside Russian Stalinism! What is the social base of this Chinese Stalinism? What then is its ideology? Is there really a Stalinist ideology?
We reply in the negative to all these questions.
The bureaucracy in the USSR has never even been capable of trying to define a new ideology, contrary to the way in which any historically necessary social formation, any class, operates. When you speak of the Stalinism of a Communist Party, you are nor speaking of a theory, of an overall programme, of definite and lasting concepts, but only of its leadership’s subordination to orders from the Kremlin bureaucracy. This is the Trotskyist conception. The ‘Stalinism’ of the international Stalinist movement is defined by this movement’s subordination to the bureaucracy of the USSR.
‘The Stalinist bureaucracy, however, not only has nothing in common with Marxism but is in general foreign to any doctrine or system whatsoever. Its ‘ideology’ is thoroughly permeated with police subjectivism, its practice is the empiricism of crude violence. In keeping with its essential interests the caste of usurpers is hostile to any theory: it can give an account of its social role neither to itself nor to anyone else. Stalin revises Marx and Lenin not with the theoretician’s pen but with the heel of the GPU.’ (Leon Trotsky: Stalinism and Bolshevism, New Park Publications, 1974, p.15.)
Would it be possible to have a Stalinist co-leadership, a dual subordination, one part of which would be .. .the Chinese revolution in full ascendancy? Is a modified version of Stalinist ideology supposed to have survived the victory of the revolutionary masses in China or is it supposed to have arisen in the course of the revolution?
But, Pablo adds, this co-leadership is a disruptive element for Stalinism. This clarification introduces a new confusion.
We are compelled on the contrary to state that the disruptive element in the ‘international Stalinist movement’ as such is the Chinese revolution and that this celebrated co-leadership, far from being a disruptive element, expresses an inherently temporary compromise between the counter-revolutionary bureaucracy of the USSR and its NEGATION, the Chinese revolution. This compromise reflects the lag between consciousness and reality, and more particularly the slowness with which China has begun to accomplish the tasks of the permanent revolution. We will return to this question.
The notion of co-leadership betrays a vast incomprehension of the irreducible character of the contradiction between the Soviet bureaucracy and a revolution in motion. Pablo has spoken several times of the victories ‘victories’ or ‘pseudo-victories’ of Stalinism when designating the development of the revolution in China, Asia, or elsewhere.
For Comrade Pablo, the most important lesson of the Yugoslav and Chinese revolutions is that it is important not to confuse them with ‘pure and simple victories (?) of the Soviet bureaucracy’!
For us, the lesson is that the development of the revolution is a defeat and a death threat for the bureaucracy, which does not evaluate the ‘revolution in all its forms’ from the same perspective as Comrade Pablo.
When this comrade adds that ‘the evolution of China can prove different from that of the Soviet bureaucracy,’ we have reached the height of confusion.(p.l2. Emphasis added.)
If someone can explain to us at what conjuncture, in what century, and on what planet the evolution of China could have even proved comparable to that of the Soviet bureaucracy—we’d like to hear about it.
This notion is only admissible if we accept beforehand Burnham’s thesis of the rapid formation (if not the pre-existence) of a bureaucracy of the Soviet type within the very course of a revolution.
In that case, this bureaucracy would not only have an ideology of international value, but we would have to accord it a historically progressive role. On the contrary, however, everything leads us to believe that the outcome of a revolution—even one that is isolated—will necessarily prove different and distinct from that of the USSR even if this revolution must degenerate because of its isolation and weakness. Trotsky has clearly demonstrated, in opposition to the revisionists, that the degeneration of the USSR has a specific historical character.
The Centuries of Transition
Are we compelled to revise Trotsky’s opinion on this point as well? Are the norms of the dictatorship of the proletariat, of the withering away of the state, outmoded and consigned to the rubbish bin by ‘life’ and by experience? Is the Soviet workers state really a degenerated workers state (a counter-revolutionary workers state, Trotsky said) [6] or, on the contrary, is it the prototype of what the transition between capitalism and socialism will be like after the victory of the world revolution? Although he doesn’t pronounce himself clearly in favour of one position over the other, and although his statements on this point are quite contradictory, Comrade Pablo does seem to lean toward the second response.
To those people-who-despair-of-die-fate-of-humanity, he replies that the transitional society between capitalism and socialism will last for several centuries (in oral discussion he has been more precise and has spoken of two or three centuries). [7] ‘… this transformation will probably take an entire historical period of several centuries and will in the meantime be filled with forms and regimes transitional between capitalism and socialism and necessarily deviating from ‘pure’ forms and norms.’ (‘Where Are We Going?’ p.13. Emphasis added.)
We are quite ready to engage in any struggle against purist utopians who subordinate reality to norms in order to reject reality. But we don’t see any sense in such a struggle at present, since we are unaware of any expression of this ‘purism’ within the international majority that emerged from the Second World Congress.
What we do see, on the other hand, is that the degenerated bureaucracy of the USSR has become the new norm, that Pablo is constructing a new utopia based on it, that the transitional society (‘several centuries …’) takes on a character of the sort that the Soviet-type bureaucracy (which is confused with all manifestations of bureaucratism that are inherent wherever you have a low level of the development of productive forces and a low level of culture) becomes a historically necessary evil, that is, a class.
What we see is that the bureaucratic caste of the USSR, which we consider to be the specific product of twenty-five years of degeneration of the first workers state, is supposed to be only the prefiguration of the ‘caste’ called on to lead the world for two or three centuries. So the notion of a ‘caste’ has been sent packing, and what’s really involved here is a class that was not foreseen by Marx, Engels, Lenin, or Trotsky.
As realists, we will have to revise Trotsky and his writings since the New Course because they are full of errors and misunderstandings on the historically progressive role of the bureaucracy. His explanation for the formation of the bureaucracy in the USSR is tainted from the start by its old-fashioned, utopian, and outmoded norms that have been contradicted by reality.
His attachment to these norms led him to consider the evolution of the USSR as a particular, exceptional, and specific violation of the norm.
‘In the bureaucratic degeneration of the Soviet state it is not the general laws of modern society from capitalism to socialism which finds expression but a special, exceptional, and temporary refraction of these laws under the conditions of a backward revolutionary country in a capitalist environment. (Leon Trotsky: ‘The USSR in ‘War’ in In Defence of Marxism, New Park Publications, 1971, p.8.)
What Trotsky calls degeneration is thus in reality the process that must begin after the victory of the world revolution and will last two or three centuries. And Trotsky put himself on the wrong side of the barricades when he wrote:
“The most honest or open-eyed of the ‘friends’ of the USSR console themselves with the thought that ‘a certain’ bureaucratic degeneration in the given conditions was historically inevitable. Even so! The resistance to this degeneration also has not fallen from the sky. A necessity has two ends: the reactionary and the progressive. History teaches us that persons and parties which drag at the opposite ends of a necessity turn out in the long run on opposite sides of the barricade.” (Leon Trotsky: ‘Socialism in One Country,’ in The Revolution Betrayed, New Park Publications, 1973, pp.307-8.)
He didn’t foresee that in the third world war the Soviet bureaucracy would be called on to carry out the function of gravedigger for world imperialism, to make an ‘international’ anti-capitalist revolution, or at least to co-operate with it. Neither Trotsky nor the Fourth International—a tragic misunderstanding—were aware of that up to this day.
Some Clarifications on an Incorrect Formulation
When we read in the Ninth Plenum resolution the following declaration on the defense of the Soviet Union: ‘The defence of the USSR constitutes the strategic line of the Fourth International, and its tactical application remains, as in the past, subordinated to unimpeded development of the mass movement in opposition to any attempt on the part of the Soviet bureaucracy, the Russian army, and the Stalinist leaderships to throttle and crush it. When we read this we are tempted to see no more than an incorrect formulation.
But we would be blind if we were to maintain this position after having studied the document in which the secretary of the International sets forth his perspective more fully, deriving it from the division of the world into the capitalist regime and the Stalinist world, a division considered as the essence of social reality in our epoch.
If we adopted this revisionist perspective it would seem to be necessary to go much further, to follow its logic to the end and to subordinate tactical application to the strategic line. It is precisely this principled attitude, this constant subordination of tactics to strategy, that distinguishes Marxism from opportunism of every stripe.
Pablo cannot remain there, straddling a fence. He must bring tactics into accord with not only strategy but also with a social analysis (his analysis) of the ‘present’ world.
If on the contrary we retain Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky’s analysis of society and their methodology, if we refuse to abandon the solid ground on which the foundations of our International rest, if we refuse to abandon this in favour of the quicksand of revisionism, our Third World Congress will of necessity return to the Trotskyist definition of the defence of the Soviet Union.
For Trotsky, the defence of the USSR did not constitute a ‘strategic line.’ The strategic line of the Fourth International is the world revolution.
Defence of the USSR against imperialism, like the defence of any workers state, is one of the tasks of this strategy, tasks that are entirely subordinated to the perspective of world revolution, to the strategy of the revolutionary mobilization of the masses.
Defence of the USSR cannot take the place of the strategic line of the World Party of Revolution—any more than the defence of the Yugoslav workers state or any other workers state could.
Therein lies the difference between Trotskyism and the Titoist and Stalinist varieties of centrism.
No unclarity can be allowed to remain in this discussion. Incorrect formulations on such questions are genuine errors of doctrine. No document of the International can today allow itself the slightest imprecision in defining the defence of the USSR and the place of this defence in our strategy. The defence of the USSR and of all the workers states constitutes a task of the Fourth International, a task that as such and in all its tactical applications must be entirely subordinated to the strategy of the struggle for the world revolution, to the unimpeded development of the masses, etc. [8]
Pablo Yields Ground to Martinet
This notion that the defense of the USSR (or of the ‘Stalinist world’) must be a strategic line has perhaps been most thoroughly developed by Gilles Martinet. Martinet is, in fact, the spokesman for the entire Stalinist intelligentsia in France. The Second World Congress correctly characterized his position as the Stalinist counterpart to Burnham’s revisionism.
The pro-Stalinist manifestation (a product of the Stalinist pressure in France) of this revisionism has been given its fullest form by Bettelheim, Martinet, & Co. in Revue Internationale. When they themselves apply the concepts mentioned above to the present world situation, they arrive at the following conclusions:
‘a) Owing to its lack of homogeneity and technical education, the working class will be obliged to pass through a stage of social differentiation and inequality after its conquest of power. Historic progress is assured by the privileged strata of the proletariat (the bureaucracy). It is the task of the state to defend these privileges.
‘b) During the epoch of decaying imperialism, the proletariat ceases to grow numerically and ideologically and instead retreats, witnessing the decline of its strength and the decay of its social structure. The failure of the ‘classic’ proletarian revolutions of 1918-23 is final. The Leninist strategy of the proletarian revolution is a thing of the past. In views of this incapacity of the proletariat to fulfill its historic mission, humanity has no other road to progress except to try to ‘participate’ in the stratification of the means of production by the Soviet bureaucracy on an ever larger scale,and to draw up a new minimum programme in order to attenuate the violent character of this process. …
‘There is no room for [these revisionist tendencies] in the revolutionary movement. But some of their features appear at the bottom of mistaken conceptions on the Russian question which have found expression in our own ranks. What is important is first of all to lay bare the inner logic of this incipient revisionism and make its proponents aware of its dangerous consequences to the whole of Marxism. [‘The USSR and Stalinism: Theses Adopted by the Second World Congress of the Fourth International, April 1948,’ in Fourth International, June 1948, p. 125.]
In ‘Where Are We Going?’ Pablo throws this analysis overboard, declaring:
‘Our fundamental (!) difference with certain neo-apologists for Stalinism, of the Gilles Martinet stripe in France, does not involve the fact that there are objective causes at work imposing transitional forms of the society and of the power succeeding capitalism, which are quite far from the ‘norms’ outlined by the classics of Marxism prior to the Russian Revolution. Our difference is over the fact that these neo-Stalinists present Stalinist policy as the expression of a consistent, realistic Marxism which, consciously and in full awareness of the goal, is marching toward socialism while taking into account the requirements of the situation.’ (p.8.)
Note first of all that contrary to the notion Pablo elaborated above, Martinet does not repudiate the Soviet bureaucracy; instead he considers it a necessary evil on which falls defacto the task of destroying imperialism, and which will be overturned historically by the development of productive forces. It is his servility when faced with an accomplished fact, his tendency to generalize on the basis of the degeneration of the first workers state in order to transform a specific historical fact into a general historical necessity, more than his evaluations of Stalin’s ‘Marxism’ that make Martinet the most agile theoretician of the Thermidorian counter-revolution. The definition Trotsky gave in ‘After Munich’ applies to him without qualification:
‘Only the overthrow of the Bonapartist Kremlin clique can make possible the regeneration of the military strength of the USSR. Only the liquidation of the ex-Comintern will clear the way for revolutionary internationalism. The struggle against war, imperialism, and fascism demands a ruthless struggle against Stalinism splotched with crimes. Whoever defends Stalinism directly or indirectly, whoever keeps silent about its betrayals or exaggerates its military strength is the worst enemy of the revolution, of socialism, and of the oppressed peoples. The sooner the Kremlin gang is overthrown by the armed offensive of the workers, the greater will be the chances for a socialist regeneration of the USSR, the closer and broader will be the perspectives of the international revolution.’ (Writings of Leon Trotsky: 1938-9, p.16.)
Such is the language we expected from the secretary of the International in regard to the wing of the petty bourgeoisie that has capitulated before Stalinism and its supposed ‘victories.’ In place of that we are supposed to accept an ambiguous definition (actually the absence of a definition) based on a stupid quarrel over Stalin’s merits as a theoretician.
The Chinese Comrades’ Error Corrected With Another Error
It would be useless to deny that the Chinese comrades’ error weighs very heavily on the present discussion. Not only does it explain in part the orientation presented by Pablo, but Comrade Pablo also uses it openly as an argument in defence of his thesis and in the hope of overwhelming his adversaries.
We are not overwhelmed and for a whole series of reasons, among them the following:
(1) In April 1950 one of us, Comrade Bleibtreu, spoke before a public meeting of the ‘Lenin Circle’ on the problems of the Chinese revolution. Vietnamese, Chinese, French, and Sinhalese comrades attended the meeting. It concluded with an analysis of the Chinese revolution and the Chinese Communist Party, and with the necessity for Trotskyists to enter the Chinese Communist Party and form its consistent Marxist wing, a wing capable of resolving in both theory and practice the tasks of the permanent revolution.
This led, among other things, to his being vigorously contradicted by a member of the International Secretariat.
(2) The Central Committee of the PCI [Parti Communiste Internationaliste—Internationalist Communist Party met December 2, 1950, and passed a resolution asking the International Secretariat to take a position on the Chinese events and on the errors of the Chinese comrades. To date we have had no response from the International Secretariat or the International Executive Committee. We hope that this document will see the light of day before the World Congress, because it would represent an essential element of clarification.
In the face of this persistent silence, we are compelled to take the initiative in a discussion that the international leadership should have begun.
What Was the Error in China?
According to Comrade Pablo, this error began ‘following the victory of Mao Tse-tung.’ (‘Where Are We Going?’ p. 17.) In our opinion, it predates this victory by quite a bit.
A revolution had been developing in China since 1946, a revolution in which the Trotskyists should have been an integral part. Abandoned by Stalin, whose advice aimed at forming a National Front government with Chiang Kai-shek they had rejected,and encircled by virtue of the fact that the Red Army had given up Manchuria to Chiang, the Chinese leaders had to confront the most powerful offensive the white troops ever launched against the Seventh Army. The only possibility that remained open to them (like the situation confronting the leaders of the Yugoslav Communist Party 1942-43) was the revolutionary mobilization of the masses. Rejecting their Stalinist course of the previous years, they adopted a limited programme of agrarian reform, which the masses greeted with immense enthusiasm. Mass peasant committees and resistance groups sprang up everywhere and organized themselves to defend and extend the agrarian reform and to crush Chiang, the representative of the landlords. The advances Mao’s army made were above all the product of the massive levy of the revolutionary peasantry, and of the parallel collapse of Chiang’s peasant army, which was contaminated by the revolution and the thirst for land. The Chinese CP itself underwent a change in its social composition. The literate sons of well-to-do peasants, who constituted the backbone of its cadres up to that time (and certain among whom tended to oppose the explosion of elementary violence set off by the turn their party had made), were submerged by an influx of new militants hardened on the forge of the revolution itself.
Thus:
(1) The birth of the Chinese revolution was the beginning of the end of the Chinese CP’s ‘Stalinism.’ [9]
(2) The Chinese CP stopped subordinating itself to directives from the Kremlin and became dependent on the masses and on their actions.
(3) Its social composition was actually modified.
(4) The Chinese CP stopped being a Stalinist party and became a centrist party advancing along with the revolution. This doesn’t mean that the Chinese CP became a revolutionary party ipso facto. It retained from its past a series of incorrect and bureaucratic concepts that came to be reflected in its actions:
—by the timid character of its agrarian reform;
—by its limiting itself to North China;
—by the Chinese CP’s conscious effort to keep the urban proletariat isolated from the revolution. [10] The dialectic of social reality has already partially withdrawn certain barriers, and there are reasons to hope that this course will continue.
In any event, it is absurd to speak of a Stalinist party in China, and still more absurd to foster belief in even the resemblance of a ‘victory of Stalinism in China.’
The Korean war temporarily presented Stalin with both the means to slow down the Chinese revolution’s progress toward the solution of the tasks of the permanent revolution and to re-establish partial control over the Chinese CP. This explains Stalin’s policy of ‘nonintervention’ at the time when the victorious march of the Korean armies could, with a minimum of support, have driven the imperialists into the sea. This also explains the scantiness of his present aid and his fear of a solution, especially of a solution in favour of the Korean revolution.
But when all is said and done, the reality of class struggle will prove more powerful than the Kremlin apparatus and its maneuvers.
The error of the two Chinese groups is precisely to have failed to grasp the social reality. They have identified the revolution with Stalinism, which means identifying Stalinism with its negation.
The Chinese comrades turned their backs on the revolutionary movement of the masses, fell back when confronted with its march forward, and finally ended up in Hong Kong. [11]
Their greatest error was not their failure to understand Stalinism; it was a different and much more serious lack of comprehension.
They didn’t recognize the very face of the revolution. They saw the advance of Mao’s revolutionary armies as a step forward for Stalinism. They failed to understand that it is the action of classes that is fundamental,that it is social classes and not the apparatuses that make history, and that once it gets going, the action of masses is more powerful than the strongest apparatus.
In many respects Comrade Pablo revives the analytical errors of the Chinese comrades, even if he draws conclusions that are contrary, though just as disastrous.
He makes the same error on the nature of the Chinese revolution, which he considers as a victory—not a ‘pure and simple victory’ but nevertheless a victory of Stalinism.
This error flows from the erroneous notion of the Stalinist world and is expressed in the notion of Russian-Chinese co-leadership of the international Stalinist movement.
He shares the same erroneous criteria concerning the ‘Stalinist’ nature of a Communist Party. The Stalinist nature of a CP is constituted by its direct and total dependence in respect to the interests and policy of the Kremlin. A refusal on the part of the Chinese CP to accept the legal existence of a Trotskyist tendency—either inside or outside its ranks—and even the repression against this tendency would in no way constitute a criterion that ‘demonstrates its bureaucratic and Stalinist character’ (Pablo), but solely its lack of understanding of the permanent revolution, a lack of understanding that is not specifically Stalinist. We have often been served up such absurdities to ‘prove’ the ‘Stalinist’ character of the Yugoslav CP, which petty-bourgeois idealists don’t hesitate to define as Stalinism without Stalin!
He shares the same lack of understanding of the relationships between the masses, the CP, and the Kremlin bureaucracy: Pablo places an equals-sign between the dual nature of the CPs and the dual nature of the Soviet bureaucracy.
Generally, we would not deny that 2=2. But combining two errors (for example, Comrade Pablo’s error and the Chinese comrades error) is not the equivalent of combining two correct statements(for example, the thesis of our Central Committee and Comrade Germain’s ‘Ten Theses’). Thus it’s not always true that 2=2.
The dual nature of the Soviet bureaucracy is both the reflection and the product of contradictions in Soviet society. It is expressed through the Bonapartism of Stalinism when it is confronted with social forces inside the Soviet Union and on a world scale. The policy of the bureaucracy is not dual but rather forms an integral whole throughout all its variations: it’s a policy of balancing between the basic classes.
The dual nature of the CP means something quite different and expresses a different contradiction because of the fact that a parasitic bureaucracy of the Soviet type doesn’t exist internationally. The duality, the contradiction of a CP stems from the fact that it is a workers party by virtue of its social base (a necessary base for the Kremlin’s balancing act) and a Stalinist party by virtue of its politics and its leadership (a leadership chosen from above on the basis of its total submission to the Kremlin’s orders).
The thing that defines a workers party as Stalinist.—as opposed to a revolutionary party or a social-democratic party (linked to the bourgeoisie) or any sort of a centrist party—is neither a Stalinist ideology (which doesn’t exist), nor bureaucratic methods (which exist in all kinds of parties), but rather its total and mechanical subordination to the Kremlin.
When for one reason or another this subordination ceases to exist, that party ceases to be Stalinist and expresses interests that are different from those of the bureaucratic caste in the USSR. This is what happened (because of the revolutionary action on the part of the masses) in Yugoslavia well before the break in relations; the break only made it official. This is what has already happened in China, and will inevitably be reflected by a break in relations no matter what course the Chinese revolution takes.
A break in relations or a gradual differentiation within the Chinese CP, an eventuality that flows first from the correct evaluation of the nature of the CPs (an evaluation we gave in some detail at the Fourth Congress of our party in 1947) that was developed by the Second World Congress, and then from the lessons of the Yugoslav experience, would have the effect of greatly stimulating the revolutionary struggle in Asia, Europe, and Africa. It would also facilitate revolutionary victories in a series of countries, diminish considerably imperialism’s capacity for resistance and counterattack, and increase the level of consciousness and the combativity of workers in the advanced industrial countries. At the same time, it would modify in a favourable way the relationship of forces within the workers movement, making it more receptive to the revolutionary programme and thus infinitely more effective in the class struggle. The Chinese CP’s declaration of its independence in regard to the Kremlin and its steps toward accomplishing the tasks of the permanent revolution both in China and internationally are events that will probably take place before imperialism can start a world war.
It is under this perspective—with the Chinese masses, with the Chinese CP, against Stalin—that the actions of our Chinese comrades must be corrected. In every country where a Stalinist party has an extensive working-class base, the International must work under this broader perspective of the independence of the workers movement and its communist vanguard with respect to the Kremlin’s policy.
Concerning our Tasks
Never before has the Fourth International had such possibilities for implanting itself as the leadership in a mass revolutionary struggle. Nor has it ever (and this is a corollary of the revolutionary upsurge around the world) had such possibilities for gaining the ear of Communist workers organized in the Stalinist parties. Never in the past (and this is a function of the very development of the worldwide revolutionary upsurge) have we witnessed so profound a worldwide crisis of Stalinism.
Despite the fact that they consider these things as Stalin’s ‘victories,’ as proof of ‘his revolutionary effectiveness,’ the most conscious Communist workers will not accept the notion advanced by their leaders that socialism will be installed by the Red Army. They are seeking the road of class action, of the emancipation of workers by the workers themselves. This concern of theirs actually touches upon a fundamental aspect of the proletarian revolution, an aspect that dominates the works of Marx and Lenin: that is, that the essence of a proletarian revolution is not this or that economic measure but rather the proletariat’s gaining of consciousness, its molecular mobilization, the formation of its consciousness as an active and dominant class. This notion of Marx and Lenin has been strikingly confirmed by the example of the buffer zone on the one hand and, inversely, by the Russian revolution [12] and partially by the revolution in Yugoslavia on the other. We are not talking about a priori norms but rather about the very essence of the proletarian revolution: the working class gaining a consciousness of itself and setting itself up as the ruling class,not only by taking power but also and above all by exercising the dictatorship of the proletariat and building socialism. And this latter task is not a mechanical phenomenon (the opposite of capitalist development) but requires the intervention of the proletariat as a conscious class. [13] This is the ABC. The experience of the USSR confirms it 100 per cent (relative stagnation domestically and a counter-revolutionary policy abroad), as does the Yugoslav experience, the Chinese experience and, in a negative way, the experience in the buffer zone.
No serious Communist worker criticizes Stalin for being afraid of world war, for refusing to declare the war-revolution or the revolution-war. On the contrary, what the best of them criticize him for is for subordinating the class struggle in other countries to the diplomatic and military needs of the USSR, subordinating the strategic line of the proletarian revolution to one of its tasks, the defence of one of the workers states.
In France the crisis of Stalinism, which has just manifested itself in the split among the mine workers, is fuelled continually by the ample proof that the French CP is an inadequate instrument for making a revolution:
— the ineffectiveness of its policy of supporting national fronts, of building ‘New Democracy’ (the politics of Yalta);
—the ineffectiveness of its policy of [parliamentary] opposition, of its leadership in the important class struggles since 1947 (the Zhdanov line);
—the incapacity of Stalinism to contribute toward uniting the proletarian forces.
All the strikes up to the present have reinforced the impression held by Communist workers that the French CP is not leading the proletariat toward revolution, but toward neutralization of the French bourgeoisie and a period of waiting for the war and the Red Army’s entry into it.
The Communist workers witnessed their struggle against the war in Vietnam—an undertaking the French CP had entered with a violence tainted with adventurism—subordinated to the campaign around the Stockholm appeal.
They witnessed their struggle against the eighteen months halted in mid-course and used as a springboard for the Sheffield-Warsaw appeal.
A great uneasiness spread among members of the French CP (and certainly among members of other CPs) in the fall of 1950, when the imperialist armies in Korea were within an inch of pulling out and a minimum of material support would have been sufficient to assure a success of immense scope for the entire Asian revolution. They saw that Stalin—applying the same policy of non-intervention he had used against the ascendant phase of the Spanish revolution—then allowed the imperialist armies to regain the offensive. This uneasiness was expressed so widely that the leadership of the French CP had to respond publicly—using Jeanette Vemersch as a mouthpiece—in the following way: Those who demand that the USSR intervene in Korea don’t understand what a world war would be like. This response disarmed the burgeoning opposition, because no Communist worker wanted a world war. What they were demanding wasn’t intervention but an end to the de facto embargo on arms that was strangling the Korean revolution.
It comes as no surprise that the Stalinist leaders are still inventive enough to pull the wool over the eyes of Communist workers. But what is surprising and inadmissible is that La Verite, through Comrade Pablo’s [14] articles, did nothing to take advantage of this crisis, although:
—it explained that it was difficult to make pronouncements about Stalin’s intentions;
— it remained silent about the meaning of his non-intervention;
—it did not wage a systematic and sustained campaign to publicize the demand the Communist workers were making on their leadership: Airplanes and artillery for Korea,
—worse yet, it adopted J. Vermersch’s evaluation of the situation as its own (aiding Korea means a world war), simply adding that if Stalin were a real revolutionary he wouldn’t be afraid of entering a world war (war-revolution, revolution-war).
Here we have a convincing application of the orientation Comrade Pablo refers to as ‘Closer to the Communist workers.’ It reminds us of the politics of the right-wing tendency that left our party. This tendenency also fought for the slogan ‘Closer to the Communist workers,’ which meant closer to Stalinist politics.
In the present case, La Verite was closer to Stalinist politics (it played the role of the MacArthur of the ‘Stalinist world’) but quite far removed from the concerns of the Communist workers; it didn’t help them find the correct response to their uneasiness.
By virtue of its methodology, perspectives, and application, this brand of politics is related to the most negative aspects of the history of our International. Through its impressionism and empiricism, its passive submission before accomplished facts and apparent ‘power,’ and through its abandonment of a class strategy, it revives all the errors of the right wing in the French party, of Hasten [15],” and of many other tendencies that followed a liquidationist course.
The Alarm Signal
We think that Comrade Pablo’s orientation is neither clear nor definitively set. We are convinced that he will correct his errors without too great a difficulty. But this isn’t the question. Comrade Pablo is also a leader of the International. This means that the positions he takes do not involve just him. His line has already been partially expressed in the Plenum resolution, which is a confused and contradictory document, the result of an unprincipled bloc between two lines, and the very model of an eclectic document.
But above all, a whole series of alarming signs have emerged as direct consequences of this theoretical hodgepodge.
On the one hand, a Stalinist tendency is rapidly developing in the International. Certainly Comrade Pablo can say, like the sorcerer’s apprentice, that this isn’t what he wanted. He can even apply a vigorous ‘self-criticism’ across the shoulders of politically weak comrades who tried to be more consistent than those who inspired them. But the remedy only disguises the disease and doesn’t heal it.
Similar destructive tendencies in the International have appeared on the editorial staff of our English comrades.
In France they cropped up among our comrades in Lyon, whose resolution we have cited.
They have appeared in our Central Committee, where Comrade Mestre stated her support for the Stalinist slogan of a struggle against German rearmament, manifestly subordinating the problem of the German and French proletariat’s gaining consciousness and taking up revolutionary struggle to the military defence of the USSR, seen in Stalinist terms as the number-one priority, the strategic line.
On the other hand, tendencies toward rejecting the defence of the USSR have already appeared and will inevitably develop. Some comrades who are troubled by the present tendency toward revisionism on the nature of the bureaucracy and on the Trotskyist concept of the defence of the USSR will inevitably break away from both Trotskyism and the defence of the USSR. We must seriously consider the defection of Natalia Trotsky, whose radically false concepts on the question of the USSR didn’t prevent the Second World Congress from placing her on its honorary presidium.
The orientation that has been outlined threatens to lead to the splintering of our International into a Stalinist tendency and a tendency that is defeatist toward the USSR.
We must react without delay and return to the Marxist method of analyzing society, return to the Leninist concept of the function of the working class, return to the Trotskyist analysis of the degeneration of the USSR and of the character of the bureaucracy, return to Trotsky’s fundamental statement that the crisis of humanity is and remains the crisis of revolutionary leadership, return to the revolutionary working-class line, that of the construction and the victory of the Fourth International, the World Party of the Socialist Revolution.
Footnotes
[1] Thus two camps have been formed in the world: on the one hand there is the imperialist and anti-democratic camp, whose basic goal is to establish American imperialism’s domination over the world and to crush democracy; on the other hand there is the anti-imperialist and democratic camp, whose basic goal consists in undermining imperialism, strengthening democracy, and liquidating the remnants of fascism.
‘The struggle between these two camps, between the imperialist and anti-imperialist camp, unfolds under conditions of a continued deepening of the overall crisis of capitalism, of a weakening of the forces of capitalism, and of the strengthening of the forces of socialism and democracy. (Zhdanov Theses, 1947, given to the first meeting of the Cominform in 1947.)
[2] So far as Europe is concerned, consider the bureaucracy’s policy in France (1936), Spain (1936-39), Poland (Warsaw uprising), Greece (1944-45), its efforts to prevent and overturn the Yugoslav revolution, its policy in France and Italy in the face of the revolutionary upsurge following the second world war.
[3] ‘…economic growth, while slowly bettering the situation of the toilers, promotes a swift formation of privileged strata,’ Trotsky said in the fundamental document defining the USSR (Revolution Betrayed, point D in the definition of the USSR, New Park Publications, 1973, p.255.)
[4] The draft theses presented by Pablo to the Ninth Plenum of the International Secretariat (point 2l, paragraph 3) spoke of the ‘conditions of economic exploitation’ of the Soviet proletariat by the bureaucracy. The idea of class exploitation no longer appears in the text adopted by the International Executive Committee, by the notion of historically necessary social layer (a class!) turns up again in Pablo’s document.
[5] “Once the war breaks out …the bureaucracy will no longer have any reason to oppose the development of mass revolutionary struggles in the imperialist camp. Quite the contrary the bureaucracy will have every interest in developing anything that will help undermine the military strength of the imperialist camp, including revolutionary movements of great scope. …’ (Thesis of the Lyons cell.)
The thesis as a whole comes down to this: up to the present the bureaucracy has been opposed to the revolution out of fear of military intervention by the imperialists. In the third world war the bureaucracy will no longer have this preoccupation and will become the leadership of the world revolution. This is much more consistent than Pablo’s thesis. The author of this resolution nevertheless was weak enough to renounce it in favour of Pablo’s position.
[6] Some voices cry out: “If we continue to recognize the USSR as a workers’ state, we will have to establish a new category: the counter-revolutionary workers’ state.” This argument attempts to shock our imagination by opposing a good programmatic norm to a miserable, mean, even repugnant reality. But haven’t we observed from day to day since 1923 how the Soviet state has played a more and more counter-revolutionary role on the international arena? Have we forgotten the experience of the Chinese Revolution, of the 1926 general strike in England and finally the very fresh experience of the Spanish Revolution? There are two completely counter-revolutionary workers’ internationals. These critics have apparently forgotten this “category.” The trade unions of France, Great Britain, the United States and other countries support completely the counter-revolutionary politics of the bourgeoisie. This does not prevent us from labelling them trade unions, from supporting their progressive steps and from defending them against the bourgeoisie. Why is it impossible to employ the same method with the counter-revolutionary workers’ state? In the last analysis a workers’ state is a trade union which has conquered power. The difference in attitude in these two cases is explainable by the simple fact that trade unions have a long history and we have been accustomed to consider them as realities and not simply as ‘categories’ in our programme. But, as regards the workers’ state there is being evinced an inability to learn to approach it as a real historical fact which has not subordinated itself to our programme. (Leon Trotsky:’Again and Once More Again on the Nature of the USSR,’ in In Defence of Marxism, New Park Publications 1971, pp.30-31)
[7] In 1651, three centuries ago, the bourgeoisie began to emerge in England.
In 1751, two centuries ago, it began to appear in France.
The two or three century transition period in which Pablo accords a necessary role to the bureaucracy would be longer than the period of bourgeois domination in the countries that developed the earliest, and three to six times longer than the worldwide domination of the capitalist bourgeoisie. It would therefore be difficult to find fault with applying the term class to the Soviet bureaucracy.
[8] In the Second World Congress theses there was already an unfortunate formulation, though it was appreciably different: ” ‘Defend what remains of the conquests of October’ is a (“a,” and not “the”) strategic line for the revolutionary party, and not alone a ‘slogan.’ ” [‘The USSR and Stalinism,’ Fourth International, June 1948, p. 114] It would have been more correct to say: ‘a strategic task’ or ‘a strategic orientation,’ formulations that are clearly opposed to the notion that the defense of the USSR is just a ‘slogan.’
‘The defence of the USSR coincides for us with the preparation of world revolution. Only those methods are permissible which do not conflict with the interests of the revolution. The defence of the USSR is related to the world socialist revolution as a tactical task is related to a strategic one. A tactic is subordinated to a strategic goal and in no case can be in contradiction to the latter.'(Leon Trotsky: ‘The USSR in War,’ in In Defence of Marxism, New Park Publications, 1971, p.ll.)
[9] A ‘Stalinism’ that was never very deeply entrenched at any given moment in the history of this party. Apart from the documents published by the Fourth International, a reading of the works of Mao Tse-tung (each page of which contains a more or less veiled attack on Stalin) is quite helpful in this regard.
[10] It is quite clear that the reasons for this stem from the difference between the proletariat’s aspirations and forms of action, and those of the peasantry. The peasantry desires bourgeois-democratic reforms and mobilizes spontaneously in the form of partisan armies. The proletariat has socialist aspirations and its revolutionary mobilization creates proletarian organs of power, both of which lead to a direct contradiction with the Stalinist bureaucracy right from the start.
[11] We request that the International Secretariat present its file of correspondence with the Chinese comrades to the World Congress,and in this way inform the congress of the directives that it had the right and the duty to give to the Chinese section.
[12] The Russian revolution unfolded in a way that was far removed from the ‘pure norms’; Lenin thought it was even further removed than any future revolution in an advanced country would be.
[13] ‘The primary political criterion for us is not the transformation of property relations in this or another area, however important these may be in themselves, but rather the change in the consciousness and organization of the world proletariat, the raising of their capacity for defending former conquests and accomplishing new ones. From this one, and the only decisive standpoint, the politics of Moscow taken as a whole, completely retains its reactionary character and remains the chief obstacle on the road to world revolution.'(Leon Trotsky: ‘The USSR in War,’ in In Defence of Marxism, p.23.)
[14] The Militant, the newspaper of the American Trotskyists, waged an excellent campaign around the revelations on this question. In France, where the basic cadres of the working class are organized in the CP, an extensive campaign should have been mounted around the theme: ‘Airplanes for Korea.’
[15] A reading of Hasten’s amendment to the World Congress is instructive: it is a timid outline of ‘Where Are We Going?”
