The United Secretariat of the Fourth International condemns the military occupation of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic by the nations of the Warsaw Pact.
The pretexts are cynical: "Statesmen," it is claimed, whose identity is yet to be revealed forty-eight hours after the event, appealed for the troops to be sent in. The entry of the troops, it is pretended, was approved by the majority of the Communist leaders at the very same time as the emergency congress of the Czechoslovak Communist party -- composed of delegates elected under the influence of the rank and file -- condemned the intervention by an overwhelming majority.
The attempted justification is no less cynical. The truth is that the "counterrevolutionary danger" cited by the Kremlin did not exist. What did unquestionably exist was a right-wing course of the Czech leaders similar fundamentally to that practiced by the Soviet leaders themselves. However, their brutal intervention is not to be explained by the right-wing course of the Czechs but by their fear when they saw how the first beginnings of workers democracy, which had been timidly introduced in Czechoslovakia, stimulated the struggle of the young vanguard, intellectuals and workers in Poland, Hungary, East Germany and above all the Soviet Union itself. The intervention discloses the fundamental weakness of the bureaucratic leadership.
What the Soviet bureaucracy demonstrated in fact by its military intervention in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic is the incompatibility of its dictatorship, power and privileges with any form of workers democracy. The bureaucracy is mortally afraid of the resumption of Leninist norms in the internal life of the Communist parties.
The abolition of the censorship, the revival of open political discussion, the participation of the working masses in political life, the proposed adoption of statutes in the Czech Communist party sustaining the right of minorities to present their platforms to the party congress and to defend their positions inside the party -- this is danger No. 1 to the Kremlin. The bureaucrats know only too well that when the workers win these rights, they have started down the road to workers councils democracy, the road to power of the true soviet type projected in State and Revolution.
By intervening militarily in Czechoslovakia, the Soviet bureaucracy trampled underfoot the elementary principles of proletarian internationalism. The Soviet constitution affirms the right of national minorities to separate even from the USSR, if they so desire, but the Czechoslovak people have been denied the right to choose their own Communist leadership.
It was impossible to throw more inflammable fuel on the flames of anti-Communist demagogy, to provide more effective material for the propaganda machine of imperialism. To justify the intervention, the Kremlin has not even hesitated to invoke "the balance of power" in Europe, that is, the Yalta agreement, thus underwriting the excuse invoked by American imperialism for counterrevolutionary intervention in its own "zone of influence."
The occupation of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic by the Warsaw Pact troops was a blow to the cause of communism, to the socialist revolution, throughout the world.
The first effect of Moscow's move was to disintegrate the international Communist movement that adheres to the Kremlin. In the beginning this will favor the further evolution of several large Communist parties in the imperialist countries toward the social-democratic pattern. Eventually it will bring the world crisis of Stalinism to its culmination, out of which will emerge new forces to help reconstruct an authentic revolutionary Leninist vanguard on a world scale.
The outcome of this counterrevolutionary act will thus be different from what the rulers in Washington expect.
The world of 1968 is not the world of 1956. The heroic resistance of the Vietnamese people against the imperialist aggression has fostered the revival of revolutionary struggles throughout the world.
While condemning the crimes of the Kremlin, the workers must not forget for one moment the bloodier crimes committed by imperialism every day in Vietnam. Let us tear away the hypocritical mask worn by imperialism. The imperialists are shedding crocodile tears over the violation of the right of the Czechoslovak people to determine their own destiny, but they rain napalm and poison gas on the Vietnamese people to prevent them from setting up the kind of government and social regime they want.
The revolutionary uprising in France in May encouraged the working-class vanguard in Czechoslovakia to struggle for true socialist democracy. The May uprising opened up the perspective of a European Socialist Federation, a Socialist United States of Europe, within which the Czechoslovak workers will be able to construct their society and their socialist economy under much more auspicious conditions.
The Czechoslovak masses face the military occupation in a context and with organizations and perspectives that are much more favorable than those at the disposal of the Hungarian workers in their isolated struggle in November 1956.
The local and regional Communist party committees, which were basically renewed in recent months, and the action committees that are forming spontaneously could constitute the backbone of mass resistance.
This resistance, beginning with a general strike and street demonstrations, could become prolonged. It could utilize many different forms of action, harassing the occupation troops through steady propaganda in their own languages, reminding them of Lenin's teachings on the right to self-determination, on socialist democracy, on freedom of discussion and the rights of minorities in Communist parties.
The resistance must ostracize the collaborators and Quislings of the occupation forces. It could use the weapon of unannounced demonstrations, surprise strikes, constant refusal by the proletariat and the working masses of the Czechoslovak Republic to accept the regime of bureaucratic dictatorship which the Kremlin seeks to impose with foreign bayonets.
By conducting this struggle in the spirit of proletarian internationalism; by creating in the course of this resistance the committees that will become the organs of free workers and peasants power of Czechoslovak socialism, the proletariat of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic will not only gain its own liberation; it will also make an exceptional contribution to the struggle for soviet democracy in the USSR, Poland, and Hungary, as well as touch off the socialist revolution in capitalist Europe.
The Fourth International appeals to the Soviet, Polish, Hungarian, Bulgarian and East German troops to immediately leave the territory of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, as the Czechoslovak working masses ask them to do. Socialism is not endangered in Czechoslovakia except by the crimes of the bureaucracy.
The Fourth International demands the immediate liberation of Dubček, of Cisar, of Smrkovsky, of all the Czechoslovak Communist leaders, journalists, intellectuals, and militants who have been arrested. Woe to the henchmen of the Soviet bureaucracy who imprison Communists whose only crime is that they took into account the opinion of the workers of their country.
The Fourth International recalls the treachery of the Kremlin in the case of Imre Nagy, who left the Yugoslav embassy under a guarantee of safe conduct issued by the Soviet leaders and who was nevertheless arrested and later executed by the agents of the Soviet bureaucracy. The repetition of such a crime with respect to the Czech leaders must not be permitted to happen.
The Fourth International calls on all communists, all the Czechoslovak workers, to resist. Do not give the occupiers and their agents a single day of peace.
The Fourth International appeals to the workers, the intellectuals, and the students of the Soviet Union, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, and East Germany to support with all their strength the Czechoslovak mass struggle for the right to socialist democracy.
The Fourth International reminds the workers of all the capitalist countries that the best help they can give to the struggle of their Czech brothers is to redouble their efforts to overthrow the regime of capitalism, and to commit themselves even more wholeheartedly to the road of socialist revolution.
Withdraw all occupation troops from Czechoslovakia!
Send Soviet tanks to Vietnam!
Down with the Soviet bureaucracy which usurped power in the USSR and from whose hands the Soviet proletariat will wrench the flag of communism.
Long live the Socialist World Revolution!