The United Secretariat of the Fourth International salutes the students, intellectuals, and workers of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic who for months have been the driving force in a powerful movement for socialist democracy in their country. We salute the initiative of the students, who by going into the streets in support of their immediate demands and to protest the brutalities of the police, have considerably speeded the process of differentiation within the Czechoslovak Communist party. We salute the intellectuals who have called for creative freedom in the arts and culture, as well as freedom of the press and criticism. For currents respecting the socialist constitution and collective ownership of the means of production, these freedoms must be a basic right in all countries which have abolished capitalism. We salute the workers' efforts to eliminate the trade-union bureaucracy and elect their own union leaders in the plants and industrial divisions.
We salute the "March for Vietnam" and the actions in support of the students in West Berlin and West Germany which the Czechoslovak students have organized in recent weeks and their solidarity with the Polish students and intellectuals; these clearly differentiate them from their false "friends" both in the bourgeois press and public opinion in the West as well as in the pro-Moscow parties and open the way for a renewal of the internationalist spirit.
Czechoslovakia Is Ripe for Genuine Socialist Democracy
Of all the states which have abolished capitalism, Czechoslovakia is, along with the German Democratic Republic, the one whose social makeup is most favorable to socialism. The peasantry constitutes only a small minority of the working population; the proletariat represents the great majority of the people and has a long-established class tradition and consciousness. The remnants of the bourgeois order are weak, scattered, and demoralized.
Of course, in this industrialized country the Stalinist attempt to impose a dictatorship, not of the proletariat but of the bureaucracy -- with the help of infamous procedures such as terror, witch-hunt trials, the imprisonment of oppositionists, brutal suppression of all the workers and students' demands, manipulation of the state apparatus by means of corruption and farcical elections -- has profoundly discredited Marxism-Leninism among important sectors of the youth and even of the workers. But resolute action by a vanguard determined to fight for socialist democracy has begun to change this situation.
The defeats which American imperialism has suffered in Vietnam and the upset in the capitalist world's temporary economic stability increase the chances of a rebirth in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic of revolutionary-internationalist communism firmly based on socialist democracy. In the months and weeks to come, the workers and the youth will quickly relearn that real Marxism-Leninism has nothing in common with the repellent caricature that the Novotnys and Lenarts have made of it. They will rapidly go to the sources, above all to Marx and Lenin themselves, to rediscover the true and profound meaning of socialist revolution.
Objectively and subjectively, Czechoslovakia is becoming ripe for the creation of a real socialist democracy which could exercise a profound influence on the evolution of all the workers states and give a powerful impetus to the anti-imperialist and anticapitalist struggles in the West.
It would be illusory, however, to think that such a socialist democracy will be established automatically; that it could be produced by the struggle of cliques within the bureaucracy; that it could be definitively secured against its foreign and domestic enemies by mere petty reforms in the system of government in force in the country since February 1948.
The Fourth International, founded by Leon Trotsky, who was Lenin's closest collaborator in the victory of the October revolution, and who held high the banner of Leninism and of Soviet democracy in the darkest years of Stalinist reaction, warns in the most urgent way against such illusions.
Consolidating socialist democracy -- which has nothing to do with bourgeois democracy -- means preserving the positive conquests of 1948: collective ownership of the means of production and exchange, economic planning, and the state monopoly of foreign trade. If any impairment of these conquests is permitted, the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic would be in danger of reverting step by step back under the sway of international capital. The Czechoslovak workers would again be in danger of working to enrich the trusts of the Ruhr, Wall Street, Paris, and the City of London.
To consolidate socialist democracy by no means signifies giving back part of the power to the representatives of the old bourgeoisie and the bourgeois parties which remain firmly opposed to the country's socialist economic structure.
But the consolidation of socialist democracy does mean allowing freedom of criticism, press, organization as well as the freedom to demonstrate for all tendencies and parties which stand within the framework of the socialist constitution -- all those parties and tendencies whose program defends the socialized mode of production and which cannot be charged before the courts, on the basis of written law, with acts of collusion with the domestic or foreign counterrevolution.
The consolidation of socialist democracy means above all assuring direct exercise of power by the working people. This means putting into practice the program which Lenin formulated in State and Revolution and giving all power to a congress of workers councils (soviets) elected in all the plants in the country.
Only a government of a firmly soviet character will rally the great majority of the people around the workers state; only this will constitute an insuperable barrier to any counterrevolutionary attempt from within or without.
The Dangers Threatening the Birth of Socialist Democracy in Czechoslovakia
The Czechoslovak counterrevolution is extremely weak, and the international situation is hardly favorable to reenforcing it. A counterrevolutionary danger could, however, develop from the disappointment of the immense hopes which have arisen today in the Czechoslovak people -- if the movement for socialist democracy does not broaden and spread, if it does not move from the stage of reforms to that of profound revolutionary transformations in the state and the superstructure as a whole, but is stifled and crushed in embryo.
The Soviet bureaucracy's direct representatives in Czechoslovakia, the men of Novotny and the Kremlin, understand this perfectly. Their aim is to arouse skepticism and distrust for socialist democracy in the popular sectors, to seek a justification, even in entirely isolated phenomena, for an intervention and the crushing of the mass movement. The maneuvers which the Soviet army carried out on the borders of Czechoslovakia are an eloquent warning on this score.
The Soviet bureaucracy fears the contagion which could result for the toiling masses of the other workers states, above all Poland, East Germany, and the USSR itself, from an avowal or a triumph of socialist democracy in Czechoslovakia. The veritable panic in face of the Soviet nonconformist intellectuals reflected in Brezhnev's speeches in Moscow and the deliberations at the recent plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist party of the Soviet Union can hardly be explained by the extent or strength yet attained by the movement for soviet democracy in the USSR. This movement today is still embryonic and weak. Such a reaction, however, can be explained perfectly by the Kremlin's fear of a full-scale snowballing movement, above all after the 1956 experience and the Sino-Soviet conflict, in the rest of what only yesterday was still its "camp."
Today, the Soviet bureaucracy has already lost its control over one-half of the countries which have abolished capitalism: the People's Republic of China, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, the People's Republic of Korea, Cuba, Rumania, Yugoslavia, and Albania. This development, of course, has not always been uniformly favorable. Alongside authentically revolutionary forces like those in power today in Vietnam and Cuba -- or forces which have introduced certain reforms historically favorable to socialist democracy -- not a few forces that are regressive or favorable to compromises with imperialism have manifested themselves in the above-mentioned countries.
But the Kremlin's representatives lie, and lie deliberately, in claiming that this disintegration of their authoritarian control over all the anticapitalist and anti-imperialist forces in the world is weakening them vis-à-vis imperialism. The example of Cuba and Vietnam -- two countries whose leaders do not accept Moscow's ideological and political ukases and which did not participate in the recent Budapest conference -- clearly show the contrary. What weakens the vigor of the revolutionary forces vis-à-vis imperialism above all is the lack of a worldwide anti-imperialist strategy; and the greatest responsibility for this lack is borne by the Soviet bureaucracy with its policy of "peaceful coexistence" and defense of the status quo. It is weakened as well by the narrow egoistic nationalism of a number of bureaucracies in power in the workers states, which prevents the creation of a real firmly revolutionary anti-imperialist united front against the Yankee aggression in Vietnam.
It is this whole international context which explains why the Kremlin so fears the movement for socialist democracy in Czechoslovakia and why it is getting ready to halt and stifle this liberation movement with all the means at its command. And among such means, a favorite weapon is the attempt to turn the workers against the students and intellectuals who have set the present reform movement in motion. The Czechoslovak vanguard on the fighting front for socialist democracy must recognize the realities on which this maneuver is based and find the means for countering it in time.
For Democratically Centralized Workers Self-management
The workers have little sympathy for Novotny and the clique of profiteers who helped him run the country by systematically stifling all expression of the workers' will for such a long time. But at the same time they distrust the technocrats who are preparing to take the reins of the economy as a consequence of the "economic reforms" advocated by Ota Sik.
Both the Novotny clique's spokesmen and the Kremlin's agents, and the representatives of the "liberal" technocratic tendency present things as if the Czechoslovak workers had no alternative but to choose between a hypercentralized and bureaucratic kind of socialist economic management and return to the "market economy," rebaptised "socialist" for the occasion. The Novotny clique is sabotaging this "market economy" because it wants at any price to return to bureaucratic centralization. And the foes of this system, sincere or not, say that there is no alternative but "the market economy."
In reality, the workers are attracted by neither of these two models. In the first case, they know that what they can expect is a poor standard of living, scarce and shoddy consumers goods and few or no rights in the plants. In the second case, they correctly fear (as the example of Yugoslavia proves) the return of unemployment, high prices, and increasing social inequality. Furthermore, the economic reforms extolled by the present leadership threaten to increase the powers of the plant managers, including the power to fire workers and reserve the bulk of the anticipated bonuses for the professional personnel.
But the solution does not lie in a choice between these two evils. A movement whose object is to institute a real socialist democracy in Czechoslovakia can and must completely overturn the system of bureaucratic and conservative management established in the Stalin era. But it can and must do this basing itself on the initiative and power of the producers, the workers, rather than by seeking management by a highly privileged technocracy.
The real solution to Czechoslovakia's economic problems, a solution firmly on the path of socialist democracy, is election of workers councils in all the plants; exercise by these councils of the supreme economic power in the plants, including the hiring and firing of plant managers and management personnel; sharing by the factory collectives in the results obtained not through competition on the market but by a systematic striving to reduce production costs; guaranteed full employment for all workers; the formulation of the plans through free debate by a congress of workers councils with the right to modify any drafts drawn up by the plants which are contrary to the collective interests of the Czechoslovak working masses; subordination of the planning authority to this congress, a large majority of whose delegates must be workers earning no more than a skilled worker's wages, so as to prevent it from being manipulated by the technocrats; the launching of a vast movement of inspection and accounting by the rank-and-file workers of the economy's stocks and reserves; a guarantee that the workers' living standards will increase proportionally with the increase in the national income; and, on the basis of all these transformations, the launching of a vast movement of working-class initiative and creative enthusiasm.
For the Rebirth of Leninism, of Genuine Revolutionary Marxism
The Czechoslovak masses struggling for socialist democracy have instinctively understood that their victory cannot be assured if the people do not completely wipe out all of the crimes and injustices which have stained Czechoslovakia's recent past. Revolutionary peoples have a good memory. That is why it is right and proper to shed full light on the Slansky trial and all the injustices against worker militants committed since 1948 (including by Slansky himself). That is why it is right and proper to rehabilitate all of the victims of the Stalinist terror. That is why particular importance must be attached to rehabilitating revolutionary militants like Kalandra who criticized the regime from the left; the present rulers are much less in a hurry to rehabilitate such militants than they are to concern themselves with representatives of the liberal bourgeoisie.
The struggle for socialist democracy in the context of a society which has abolished capitalism, combined with a revolutionary and internationalist orientation, also has a long tradition. The Czechoslovak masses will only be able to fight effectively for their progressive aims if they thoroughly relearn the lessons of the past. The youth, above all, who are hungry for knowledge and truth and who reject the official fables, myths, and lies, seek to return to the revolutionary and internationalist tradition of a regenerated communism.
They must demand reproduction of and free access to all the historic documents of the Czechoslovak Communist party. Not only all of Lenin's works must be published and widely studied but also the works of Trotsky, the author of the manifestos adopted by the first four congresses of the Communist International; of Rosa Luxemburg, the first to raise the standard of revolutionary and democratic socialism in central Europe before the first world war; of Zinoviev and Bukharin, the first two chairmen of the Communist International; of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, the symbols of today's revolutionary spirit in the semicolonial countries. No work of Marxist or socialist inspiration must fall under a ban. As the great Soviet atomic scientist Kapitza said, the younger generation must relearn the art of polemics from its grandfathers who made the October revolution. And these grandfathers recognized no censorship of theoretical and political works inspired by Marxism.
The essential elements of the action program which the Fourth International proposes to the Czechoslovak working masses are: a soviet-type political regime; democratically centralized workers self-management in the economic sphere; freedom of organization, of the press, of assembly for all tendencies in the workers movement; critical examination of the ideological legacy of the great thinkers and great currents of thought in the international communist movement; full light on the trials and repressions of the Stalin era; the right of self-determination for all nationalities and the establishment of a genuinely federal statute; solidarity with the Polish and Soviet students, intellectuals, and workers who are struggling for socialist democracy in their respective countries; and active solidarity with the Vietnamese revolution and all the anti-imperialist and anticapitalist movements in progress throughout the world. By adopting this program and resolutely mobilizing behind it, they will make the socialist democracy which they seek to win invincible.