International!
THE INTERNATIONAL SECRETARIAT
OF THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL
September 1959
Appeal of the International Secretariat
Distributed at the Youth Congress in Vienna
Don't listen to imperialist propaganda, in which to its dishonor, the leadership of the Socialist Party and the Socialist Youth also participate. Listen to us, who speak as communists to communists. Listen to the voice of revolutionary Marxism!
BACK TO LENIN!
Appeal to the Progressive and Working-Class Youth of All Countries Assembled at the Vienna Festival Dear friends and comrades,
In the name of revolutionary Marxists everywhere, who unflinchingly upheld the banner of Leninism, greet the progressive and working-class youth of all countries, assembled in Vienna for the Youth Festival.
We greet the young workers, peasants, and students of the Soviet Union, of New China, of the "people's demoof Eastern Europe and Asia, who are building a new and better society. Whatever criticism we have of the political regime in these countries; whatever may be the distortions and deviations from the true path of Marxism-Leninism of which the bureaucratic leaders of these countries are guilty, we shall never underestimate the gigantic importance of the economic and social progress achieved thanks to the nationalization of the means of production, the suppression of capitalism, the building of a planned
This progress we hail enthusiastically. We call upon the youth and the workers of all countries to defend it with all their strength against attacks and attempts at subversion on behalf of reactionary imperialism. All Help to the Heroic Colonial Revolution!
We greet the young workers, peasants, and students of the colonial and semi-colonial countries, of Asia, the Arab world, Negro Africa, and Latin America. We greet the heroic fighters of the unconquerable struggle for freedom and independence of all oppressed peoples, who are writing a unique and glorious page in the history of human eman-
We call upon the youth and the workers of all countries to give their utmost help to the colonial revolution, above all to the Algerian revolution, upon which the whole
The imperialists hide behind the mask of "freedom. But their reign is marked by countless crimes against the freedom and dignity of all peoples, by savage repression against the peoples of Korea, Vietnam, Malaya, Kenya, South Africa, the Cameroons, Guatemala, and above all their inhuman war against the Algerian people in which more than half a million slaughtered in the last four years.
lave no confidence in the crusaders for "free enterprise and their various self-titled "democratic" lackeys! 'Capitalism is a decaying reactionary system; it is able to ensure he workers of some privileged imperialist countries a re atively high standard of living only at the expense of terrible exploitaion of hundreds of millions of colonial whose incomes are less than 10% of the average income of the Western countries.
Whatever wrongs must be righted in the USSR and in the people's democracies, must be righted by the toilers of these countries themselves, never by the stooges of American imperialism! power of French imperialism and its NATO allies is brought to bear. Dockers, railroad-workers, pilots, refuse to load and transport arms for the French colonial army! Workers of the capitalist countries, express your protest against the cruelties and tortures of French imperialism in huge meetings, demonstrations, and solidarity strikes! Workers of the Soviet Union and the other workers' states, your governments to give much greater help.
noney, and especially arms to the heroic Algerian people and to recognize its government.
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The organization of a world-wide movement of political upport and practical help for the colonial revolutior
›day the utmost duty of the international labor movemen
It is only through such a huge movement of class solidarity
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL that the oppressed toilers of the colonial and semi-colonial countries will learn not to have confidence in their own national bourgeois exploiters, to build their own revolutionary parties of workers and poor peasants.
Progressive and Communist Militants of Underdeveloped Countries! the permanent revolution. The revolution in backward colonial or semi-colonial countries will triumph and open a definite road to national rebirth and growth only if it is led by a revolutionary working-class party and arrives al the conquest of power by the toiling masses.
All attempts to limit the revolution to a stage of "democratic revolution," of collaboration with the "national bourgeoisie," to which in fact the leadership of the revolution is delivered, can lead only to stagnation and deteat. The recent tragic examples of Guatemala, Iran, Egypt, Indonesia, and Argentina, provide a lesson which must not be forgotten. In all these countries, Communist Parties called upon the people to support bourgeois democratic
"progressive" forces. Today, Frondizi, for whom the Argentine CP called the workers to vote, has unmasked himelt as a stooge of imperialism. Nasser has organized : iolent repression of the communist and working-clas movement. Sukarno will do so tomorrow.
Communists and progressives should support each step forward of national bourgeois leaders against imperialism in underdeveloped countries. But at the same time they should constantly warn the toiling masses of their countries, that the final victory over imperialism is impossible without a general uprising of the masses, without their organization in democratic committees, the overthrow of the old state machine, and the leadership of the masses by a revolutionary, communist party.
Put the Overthrow of Capitalism on the Agenda in the West!
We greet the young workers, peasants, and students who have come to Vienna from industrialized capitalist countries of the West. They come from countries where the labor movement, in contrast to the magnificent upsurge of the colonial revolution, is witnessing. In France, the coming to power of de Gaulle is a great defeat for the working class; it creates for the first time since 1945 a threat of fascism in Western Europe.
In most of the other Western countries, the Communist Parties are weaker than ever since the Second World War, sometimes even weaker than duringos and during and standing the tremendous crisis in the after the Second World War, capitalists everywhere the West have succeeded in temporarily restabilizing their cconomy and their state.
"fatal" result of the "cold war," "American intervention," and the "anti-communist campaign." It is the result of fatally wrong policies of the Communist Parties. At the end of the war, these were everywhere in rapid growth. The masses, disgusted by capitalism and disappointed by Social-Democratic reformism, wanted new and radical changes. Italy, and Greece, power was within reach of the labor
At that time, however, the leaders of the Communist Parties, aided and abetted by Stalin and the leaders of the Soviet Union, completely failed to live up to their historic task of destroying capitalism (with the of the leadership of the Jugoslav Communist Party, which, against Stalin's orders, established a workers' state in its country). They participated in bourgeois eis coalitionis overments. They sang the praise of the cracy. They condemned strikes as "weapons of the trusts." Gommunist and Progressive Workers of Western .
It is necessary to come back to Lenin's programme of uncompromising struggle against capitalism, its state and its economy. The working class will score its victories over Western capitalism not as a result of what happens elsewhere in the world, but only as a result of its own anti-
They did everything capitalist economy and the capitalist state. When the combativity of the working class was exhausted, and the masses deeply disappointed, the bourgeoisie broke this It could isolate the Communist Parties because they had first of all betrayed the revolutionary socialist aspirations
In no other country is this so clear as The French CP participated actively in the creation of the de Gaulle cult. It spread scandalous chauvinist propaganda — vying with the Gaullists in the defense of the greatness of France." It was opposed to a destruction of the so-called "Union Française, that peoples' prison! Its ministers actively participated in the savage repression of the uprising of the Algerian people in May 1945. Its deputies voted the military credits for Vietnamese people at the end of 1946. As late as January 1958, a few months before de Gaulle's coming to power, it claimed that the main task of the French workers was not the fight for Algerian independence but... for French (sic) independence, against building of American rocket bases on French territory!
This criminally doomed policy has powerfully assisted the French bourgeoisie in creating a chauvinist current inside the working class. It has paralyzed and sabotaged effective working-class action against the Algerian war, in the spirit of the campaign against the Morocco war organized by a much weaker French Communist Party in 1925. It has paved the way for the Gaullist dictatorship. It continues to disarm the French workers by creating the stupid parliamentary illusion that this dictatorship could be overthrown through "election victories." which, starting from the immediate concerns of the masses, mobilize them in an anti-capitalist struggle. It 1s ism on the agenda, instead of pushing it back to the distant great capitalist crisis" or of "the Soviet Union capitalist struggle.
It is necessary to work out in each country a concrete programme of transitional demands
For a Return to Soviet Democracy! Young Communists of the Workers' States!
The slogan "back to Lenin" applies first of all to your own countries.
The present leadership of the CPSU pays lip-service to the same slogan. But its practice is very far from this promise.
overtaking America's production and per capita consumption."
Undoubtedly many things have changed for the better since Stalin's death. The worst excesses of police dictatorship, the concentration camps, the inhuman labor laws, have been suppressed. But the Soviet Union is still far
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL from the soviet democracy which it experienced under Lenin and Trotsky,
"Back to Lenin' this means above all back to truth. You may deceive and lie to the class enemy in the class struggle, Lenin taught; you may never lie to your own party and your own class. But Khrushchev has not told you the truth about the terrible years of Stalinist dictatorprice see so, played a sense i am cruel crimes against the people, the working class, and the communists of the Soviet Union and all countries crimes which in Autumn 1941 brought the Soviet state within an inch of its downfall. He has not given you a serious Marxist evaluation and explanation of these crimes. "The personality cult" is a completely non-Marxist fornula; it replaces the struggle of social forces by individual psychology as a fundamental explanation of a whole historical period.
Stalin's reign and crimes are not to be ›lained by his personality, but by etween the ruling bureaucracy and the masses of the workers. The purpose of these crimes was to defend against the toiling masses the growing inequality, the huge privileges of the bureaucracy in the factories its usurpation of all political power, the "one-man-rule
Today, although Khrushchev has been forced to make many concessions to the workers, this rule of the bureauremains basically unchanged. Khrushchev even defends it with guns and tanks, as he did against the Hungarian workers' revolution. There are no workers' soviets n the factories who have the right to decide on the plan. he right to dismiss the managers. There are no wo soviets in the cities and the republics who, in free and lemocratic discussion, map out the general policy of thi
There is no freedom of tendencies and of discussio in the Communist Party as in the time of Lenin and Trotsky, no freedom to draft different resolutions and theses and fight for them within the party, before congresses.
"Back to Lenin" means, for the Soviet Union, soviet democracy, ie, full democratic rights and freedom for the toiling people. Soviet democracy today, capitalist class has physically disappeared from
Union, when the destruction of capitalism is definitively achieved, as Khrushchev himself admitted at the Party Congress, means not only the freedom for ideological tendencies inside the Communist Parties, but also freedom for the organization of all Soviet parties based upon the defense of the nationalized property and opposed
In order to discover for yourself the road back to Lenin, back to truth, back to soviet democracy, to self-government of the working people — you have to study the literature of the Old Bolsheviks murdered by Stalin, comrades-in-arms of Lenin who together gineered the victory of the October Revolution, and built the Soviet State and the Communist International.
Fight for free access to all libraries and archives! Study the works of Bukharin, Zinoviev, Piatakov, Preobashensky, Radek, and the closest collaborator of Lenin during and after the October Revolution, the leader of the October insurrection and creator of the Red Army, Lev Davidovitch Trotsky. Denounce the new falsifications which, contrary to the solemn promises made at the XXth Party Congress, abound in the newly edited History of the CPSU, and which you can discover easily by studying the historical documents of the years 19171927. Ask for a full rehabilation of all the victims of the infamous Yechovtchina, the victims of the infamous Moscow Trials, where the leaders of Lenin's Central Committee were forced by torture to besmirch their own imperishable memory. Fight in your universities, factories, youth and party organizations, and trade unions, for an increase of equality and democracy! Organize yourselves!
Build study circles to compare the programs of the various opposition tendencies within the CPSU after 1923 with the reality of Stalin's crimes denounced by Khrushhev, with the reality of the Soviet Union today. Familiarze yourself with the writings and works of Trotsky and the world Trotskyist movement which for 30 years has kept the stainless banner of Leninism flying, despite inhuman persecution by fascism, capitalist reaction, and sees an ere hough he Paris it on tomati
THE INTERNATIONAL SECRETARIAT OF THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL