The Fourth International Will Lead the Proletariat to Victory!
Issuing body: The European Secretariat of the Fourth International
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On Stalin's order, the presidium of the CI has just dissolved the Executive Committee of the Comintern: thus the Thorezes and the Gottwalds officially repudiate the heritage of Lenin; they solemnly renounce his essential teaching, militant internationalism; they cynically break with the entire past of the proletarian and revolutionary movement: with the tradition of the "Communist Manifesto," calling on the proletarians of all countries to unite; with the tradition of the First International, proclaiming the necessity of a common organisation and world action of the proletariat; with the tradition of the Second International, making the First of May an international day of proletarian mobilisation; with the tradition of Zimmerwald and Kienthal, mobilising the masses for the international and revolutionary struggle against the war; with the programme inscribed in the soldier's oath of the international Republic of Soviets.
Stalin, Gravedigger of the International
Stalin thus puts the finishing touch to his work of liquidating the International, buried in 1934 under the auspices of "socialism in one country." The great organiser of defeat in England in 1926, in China in 1927, in Germany in 1933, Stalin, after having made of the International a passive instrument in the hands of Moscow and having delivered the leadership of the parties to the most mediocre and servile elements, degraded, in the wake of the German party's defeat without a fight, the Comintern to the role of a purely diplomatic instrument whose orientation changes according to the tortuous manoeuvres of the Kremlin, passing from the voting of military credits to a sabotage devoid of all revolutionary perspective, only to return to an unbridled chauvinism, according to whether Stalin was allying himself with Laval, with Hitler, or with Roosevelt. Not only did the Communist International renounce its very reason for being, the struggle for world revolution, but it also waged a bloody struggle against those who intended to remain faithful to Lenin's banner: the only victories Stalin can inscribe under his banner for twenty years are the terror against the revolutionaries in Spain, the massacre of the old Russian Bolsheviks, the crimes of the GPU, the assassination of Leon Trotsky.
But even thus enslaved, reduced to the role of an instrument of counter-revolution, the International remained an embarrassment. By its very existence it implied a single tactic on an international scale; it hampered the tortuous manoeuvres, disquieted the bourgeoisie; its very existence forced Stalin's agents into a radical phraseology. The Kremlin needed to dictate to each party separately a particular "national" policy, that is to say, a policy in conformity with Stalin's particular diplomatic designs. In practice, the International was reduced to a role of parade; whereas from 1919 to 1922 four congresses of the CI had been held in Moscow, it was only after three years that the Fifth met, and after another three years the Sixth. As for the Seventh, it had to wait seven years to meet, although during those years the fate of the revolution was being decided in Germany. Since 1935 the CI has ceased to manifest itself as the world guide of the proletariat, despite June 1936, despite the Spanish Revolution, despite the German-Soviet pact, despite the war: not only did the Executive Committee itself not find it necessary to meet, but the only manifestation of the presidium during four years of imperialist carnage will have been the act of dissolving the Comintern. Nothing could demonstrate more clearly that Stalin's decision only crowns the policy pursued by Moscow for years: the act of dissolving the CI merely records a death that occurred long ago; Stalin throws the last shovelful of earth on a corpse that has been putrefying for years already.
Indeed, Stalin has had to trample his own legality underfoot in order to stab the International in the back: the statutes which he himself had adopted at the Sixth Congress of the Comintern formally provide that only the congress of the CI has the power to modify the statutes. And a few of Stalin's lackeys, who have long since lost all real contact with the fighting and suffering labour movement, take it upon themselves to decide the gravest of modifications, to settle the life and death of the International! Hundreds of thousands, millions of men give their blood, suffer in the penal camps, sacrifice everything for a cause they believe to be their own. And the Stalinist bureaucracy, with monstrous cynicism, breaks the object of all their hopes, the reason for all their struggles. "The International does not belong to you," it tells them, "it belongs to me, it is my thing, which I can manoeuvre and lead, break and destroy as I please." It thereby demonstrates once again that it has nothing in common with the cares and sorrows, the aspirations and hopes of the world proletariat, that it constitutes a parasitic layer within the organism of the workers' state and the revolutionary movement. No legal quibbling can hide this fact: in taking its decision behind the back of the world communist movement, the only true judge of the International's existence, Stalin has not only proved once more that his phrases about the defence of democracy are nothing but a hideous deception, he has also cynically and deliberately admitted that in his hands the labour movement is merely an instrument intended to serve the particular interests of the bureaucracy.
Yet Stalin cannot break the last ties binding him to Marxism-Leninism, to revolutionary internationalism, without seeking once more to deceive the proletariat. Once more he cynically falsifies history and theory in an attempt to present his counter-revolutionary act as the very acme of revolutionary tactics; he cites the example of Marx and the First International, he invokes the political maturity of the sections of the International, he pleads changes in the international situation. These are so many opportunist sophisms, so many insults to the memory of Lenin, and of all those who fought and fell beneath the banner of the Third International.
Stalin's Arguments
The First International, undermined internally by the disruptive action of the "Bakuninists" and the theoretical incomprehension of the "Blanquists," sank definitively in the waves of reaction stirred up by the defeat of the heroic Paris Commune. Marx and Engels then could do no more than record the dislocation of the International, which had come about independently of their will. But even then they would not have consented to such an act had they not been convinced that capitalism still had before it a whole long period of progressive development. All this, Stalin does not say. He cannot say it. Not only because it would be admitting that under his leadership the International had suffered nothing but defeats, but also because he would have to explain why, at the very moment when it is evident to the least educated worker that capitalism is struggling in the throes of death agony, the bureaucracy liquidates the world party that was to be the gravedigger of capitalism. He would have to admit that the layer of enriched bureaucrats embodied by Stalin has tied its fate to the capitalist status quo, that it fears nothing so much as the world proletarian revolution which, by tremendously accelerating the development of the productive forces, would render bureaucratic management useless even in Russia itself.
It is a mockery beyond compare to speak of the political maturity of the sections of the CI, for this maturity closely resembles putrefaction. Mature, the defeated parties of Germany, Italy, Spain, which have not been capable of writing a single line to draw the lessons of their defeats? Mature, the English and American parties which have been incapable of tearing the working masses away from reformism? Mature, the colonial parties which see the masses turning ever more each day from the unknown martyrs to the cause of De Gaulle? These parties are mature indeed — to pass definitively under the banner of reformism and imperialism. Which section of the International, moreover, can boast of having produced a single serious theoretician, of having brought forth the slightest economic or historical study, of having enriched proletarian strategy and tactics? Is the whole of world Stalinist literature anything other than the repetition of the same Menshevik commonplaces, adapted without the slightest talent to the taste of the day?
But this seemingly triumphant argument is there only to conceal the cynical abandonment of Leninist positions on the question of the International. The International is not necessary merely to establish, in the struggle, the united front of the proletariat of different countries against the bourgeoisie of different countries. It is necessary because, in the epoch of finance capitalism, the organisation of production forms a whole on a world scale, because it is the same enemy that the proletariat must combat in every country, because its goal, everywhere, must equally be one and the same: the Socialist United States of the World. It is because the struggle today is the struggle of the world proletariat against world imperialism, and for the world reign of socialism, that the proletariat needs a single world party. The role of the International is not to advise and guide; its role is to lead. Its leadership is the collective organism in which the representatives of the different parties take, in common, decisions that are binding on all parties. To renounce this collective leadership on the pretext of the maturity of the various national parties is to admit that the various parties have definitively renounced the struggle against world imperialism and for world revolution.
Faithful to the purest opportunist tradition, Stalin naturally claims that the situation has changed since Lenin. But he does not deign to provide the slightest explanation of these changes. Has imperialism ceased to be the highest stage of capitalism? Has the domination of finance capital ceased to plunge humanity into a period of wars and revolutions? Is the breaking of the fetters that capitalism imposes on production no longer necessary? Is revolution no longer on the order of the day? Has the capitalist world suddenly ceased to be founded on the exploitation of man by man? Has profit ceased to be its economic motor? Stalin says not a word on this, and for good reason. Has not the whole course of the present war shown that it is for a new division of the world, for a new distribution of capitalist profit among the trusts, that men are fighting? Have not all the events of the last thirty years proved that outside socialism there was no road of progress for humanity? The truth is that nothing has changed in the capitalist world; what has changed is the attitude of the Communist International toward it: to the unyielding revolutionary position of Lenin has succeeded the opportunist capitulation of Stalin.
But if the scientific prognoses of Marx and Lenin concerning the future of capitalist society and the necessity of socialism have proved correct, then no secondary modification of the situation, whatever it may be, could authorise Stalin to break the essential instrument of the proletariat's struggle, the revolutionary International.
Nor can the evolution of the world balance of forces between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie provide Stalin with the slightest valid justification. If the working class were marching everywhere victoriously toward socialism, if it were close to its goal, nothing would justify such a measure. When Stalin says that the situation has changed, he admits, in the most hypocritical manner, that he has been able to lead the proletariat only from defeat to defeat. But no more than victories could defeats justify the disappearance of the International. Was not the Communist International itself born in the midst of the worst defeats and the worst difficulties, in March 1919? The White armies were victorious on every front; the Allies were organising the cordon sanitaire; the Spartacist revolution had just been crushed in Berlin. Many were the delegates who could not reach Moscow. For months the Executive Committee was cut off from all communication with its sections. It none the less fulfilled its task, addressing itself, on every important occasion, sometimes by the most roundabout and uncertain routes, to the world proletariat, advising, directing, guiding the sections, organising the world revolutionary struggle. And in the end it was precisely world communist action, the threat of revolution in every country of Western Europe, that saved the USSR, that allowed the International to consolidate itself.
Stalin Delivers the USSR to American Imperialism
In the final analysis, Stalin can invoke, to justify the dissolution of the Comintern, nothing but diplomatic reasons. The alliance of the USSR with Anglo-Saxon imperialism requires the liquidation of the International, the renunciation of revolutionary propaganda in the democratic countries. But who does not see that such an argument is a terrible admission of weakness on the part of the Russian bureaucracy? Despite the results achieved in the field of armaments thanks to the nationalisation of industry and planning, despite the heroism of the Russian workers and peasants rising to defend the heritage of October, the bureaucracy has thus succeeded only in leading the USSR to the edge of the abyss: the insufficiency of consumer-goods production, the poor quality of production, the inferiority in precision manufacture, the agrarian crisis — all this legacy of bureaucratic management, this liability which necessarily resulted from the attempt to build socialism in isolation, in a backward country, all this weighs today with a fearsome weight. It is not only the civilian population, it is the army itself that needs food, clothing, footwear, pharmaceutical products; it is the armaments industry, it is the oil industry that need machinery. The bureaucracy is caught by the throat: to defend itself against the attempted conquest by German imperialism, it is compelled to capitulate before American imperialism. Such is the bitter truth concealed by the phrases about diplomatic necessities. Stalin has bowed before Mr Wallace's ultimatum. He has definitively renounced the "Trotskyist conception of world revolution." But the counter-revolutionary programme of imperialism does not stop at the frontiers of the USSR. On the contrary, the existence of a proletarian state, however degenerated it may be, in the face of the capitalist world, constitutes a permanent challenge to the bourgeoisie, while at the same time offering a tempting prey to the great monopolies in search of raw materials, markets, and investments.
The goal of American imperialism is not only to break the world revolutionary movement, it is, through the methods of economic penetration, of diplomatic and political pressure, to restore the domination of capitalism in the USSR. The liquidation of the labour movement throughout the world prepares, for it, the liquidation of the Russian workers' state. In breaking the international communist movement, Stalin opens the way to the liquidation of the collectivist economy in the USSR by capitalism.
In the final analysis, no diplomatic combination can justify the dissolution of the International. The Soviet Union in fact has only one true ally: the international proletariat. Stalin casts down the only rampart today capable of effectively opposing the conquest of the USSR by capitalism.
Enough Betrayals!
Thus there is not a single argument invoked by Stalin that can justify his act. Once again it is shown that "realistic" phrases about tactics serve only to mask the abandonment of principles. For twenty years Stalin has duped and deceived the workers of the whole world by invoking the necessities of tactics. Tactics — the alliance with the bureaucracy and the Anglo-Russian Trade Union Committee, which in 1925 led to the failure of the general strike of the English miners. Tactics — the bloc of four classes and the Kuomintang, which led to the bloody crushing of the Chinese revolution in 1925. Tactics again — the inept formula which, under the pretext of setting "class against class," identified social democracy with fascism and prevented the unity of the proletarian front against Hitler in 1933. Tactics again — the Popular Front which, under the pretext of union with the petty bourgeoisie, subjected the proletariat to liberal politicians, to the imperialist exploiters of the petty bourgeoisie and the proletariat, broke the revolutionary onslaught of June '36, liquidated the Spanish revolution on the barricades of Barcelona in May 1937, and finally opened the door to Franco and Pétain. Tactics again — the defeatism without phrases, the military sabotage devoid of all revolutionary perspective which, in 1940, led to Hitler's victory. Tactics still — the German-Soviet pact, which allowed Hitler to conquer in the West, and then to turn against the USSR with the forces of the whole of Europe. Tactics — the support openly given in France, in Belgium, in Holland in 1940 to Hitlerite demagogy. Tactics — the union with the bourgeoisie in the National Front, which, from Yugoslavia to Algiers, does nothing but weld together military and clerical reaction against the working class. The truth is that each of these tactics has constituted a fresh capitulation before the bourgeoisie. Each of these tactics has ended in the worst disaster and the triumph of anti-worker reaction.
Only, indeed, an international party of the proletariat, only genuinely Bolshevik parties can, on the basis of unshakable fidelity to principles, use the contradictions of capitalism in the interest of the proletariat and effectively practise the boldest tactics.
Lenin negotiated in 1918 with the monarchist officer Lubersac and accepted, against the pressing threat of German imperialism, "the potatoes and the arms" of French imperialism. Leon Trotsky signed, a few months later, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with German imperialism. Chicherin, finally, signed the Treaty of Rapallo with England. But it would never for a single instant have occurred to any of them to call upon the German, French, American, or English proletariat to cease its struggle against its own bourgeoisie. They did not approve, as Stalin declared to Laval in 1935, the armaments of the capitalist countries. They did not reject, as Stalin does, the class struggle and defeatism in countries temporarily allied to the USSR. On the contrary, they called upon the proletarians of every country, gathered under the banner of Spartacism and nascent communism, to wage, more than ever, an implacable struggle against their own bourgeoisie. They proclaimed that the Soviet Union, weakened and bled white in the midst of a capitalist world hungry for conquest and profit, could be saved only by world revolution. Such is the unbridgeable gulf that separates Lenin's tactics from Stalin's betrayals. Stalin's legal quibbles, his "realistic" arguments, have no other purpose than to deceive and dupe the proletariat once more, to hide the truth from its eyes. And that truth is the definitive break with revolutionary principles and programme, the irreversible passage of the Stalinist bureaucracy to the side of imperialism in the struggle against world revolution.
We Must Resume the Tradition of Lenin and Liebknecht
The Communist International was born of the struggle against the imperialist war, in the merciless combat against social-patriotism and reformists of every stripe. Against the banner of "fight-to-the-finish" and chauvinism, beneath whose folds the Sembats and the Renaudels, the Vanderveldes and the Mussolinis, the Lenschs and the Eberts, the Plekhanovs and the Hendersons called upon the proletarians of every country to cut each other's throats, the nascent International raised the banner of the class struggle to the finish, of the tireless struggle for the overthrow of capitalism. Facing the banner of the sacred union, it raised the banner of the emancipatory civil war. Defining its task, Zinoviev wrote as early as January 1915: "We must raise the standard of civil war. Either the International will adopt this watchword, or it will continue to vegetate miserably." These words, which sounded the death knell of the Second International nearly thirty years ago, constitute today the most eloquent commentary on the dissolution of the Third International. Stalin has renounced raising the banner of world civil war against the bourgeoisie; he has replaced it with that of the sacred union in the democratic countries. He thus condemns the International to "vegetate miserably." Yesterday, the banner of the Communist International was that of Zimmerwald and Kienthal, that of the handful of men who remained, in spite of everything, faithful to their class, faithful to the sole programme of progress and humanity, the programme of socialist revolution. It was the banner of Lenin, of Trotsky, of Zinoviev, of Loriot, of Rosmer. It was that of Liebknecht proclaiming, alone against a hundred and ten: "The main enemy of every proletariat is in its own country. It is its own bourgeoisie." For this banner, Stalin has substituted the disgusting banners of imperialist democracy, the hollow phrases borrowed from the well-fed exploiters of Wall Street and the City, from the bloody executioners of India and Cuba. For the doctrine of the class struggle, he has substituted the chatter of the Atlantic Charter, intended to cover up the trusts' will to control the sources of raw materials and world markets, to justify the right of the victorious imperialists to dispose of peoples. The dissolution of the Communist International consecrates Stalin's passage into the camp of imperialism. But Stalin's decision is not only the crowning of twenty years of abandonment of principles and capitulation before imperialism. It poses the problem of the whole future of the revolution. At the very moment when the capitalist world is cracking on every side, when war and misery are stirring up the revolt of the masses, at the very moment when everything calls for proletarian revolution and when the revolutionary International must more than ever prepare to play its role, Stalin's act constitutes a veritable betrayal, a stab in the back of the proletariat at the very moment when it is preparing for battle. The bureaucracy chooses precisely the hour when civil war is imminent to disband the army of civil war. It thereby divides and dislocates the ranks of the workers, gives capitalism a supreme chance of survival, places new obstacles in the way of the triumph of the revolution which alone, however, could save humanity from barbarism and decadence and lead it once more onto the path of progress and civilisation.
The Hour of Revolution Has Struck
Everywhere throughout the world, the army of the revolution is rising and seeking to unite its forces. The colonial peoples are rising up against imperialist oppression. The coolies of China, the peasants of India, the miners and black workers on the African construction sites, the Arab herdsmen thrown into the hells of oil, the proletarians of Chile and Colombia, the agricultural labourers of Argentina, the rubber-gatherers of the Amazon, bruised by the war, more exploited than ever, are preparing to have done with the domination of big capital and to wrest the national independence of their countries through social revolution, through the expropriation of English, French, Japanese or American imperialism, and of their own bourgeoisie, sold out to imperialism. Henceforth imperialism will tolerate no ambiguity whatsoever on Stalin's part in these countries; it will demand of him that he give full support to the regime of barbarous dictatorship and shameless exploitation of the proletariat and the peasantry. The Communist Parties will then become the watchdogs of imperialism in the colonies. They will strive relentlessly to break the national liberation movement of the colonial peoples, just as they strove, under the Popular Front, to break the Algerian People's Party, to break the movement of the Action Committees in Indochina. Already, for a year now, in India, the Communist Party, under the pretext of democratic-front unity, has been playing the role of strikebreaker: as though the independence of India were not to constitute the most resounding defeat of the oppressors of all countries.
The colonial masses will definitively reject the parties of treacherous social-imperialism: they will unite under the banner of the Fourth International, faithful, from Mexico to Chile, from Indochina to Ceylon, from the Union of South Africa to Algeria, to the cause of the emancipation of the colonial peoples.
Deceived and duped by their governments, the masses of the democratic countries believed they were fighting for more liberty and more well-being. But the war has brought only the gag for the press and censorship, the restriction of the right to strike, under the threat of guns, the liquidation of parliamentary institutions themselves, the rise in prices, the fall in real wages, long working weeks; meanwhile the great financial enterprises accumulate enormous profits, the most reactionary elements of the bourgeoisie take the offensive, the conservative military men and technicians display their incapacity. The result is still more suffering and more blood shed for the proletariat. Each new day of war shows more clearly the gulf that separates the war aim of the proletariat, which can only be socialism, world revolution, from the real war aims of the bourgeoisie: the hollow phrases of the Atlantic Charter are forgotten, giving way to the worst of secret diplomacies, to the worst reactionary plot. For the right of peoples to self-determination, Churchill and Roosevelt, in agreement with Stalin, have substituted the right of imperialism to dispose of peoples; for the equitable distribution of raw materials, they have substituted the monopoly of the great international trusts; for the struggle against tyranny, they have substituted the struggle "against disorder and anarchy," that is to say, against revolution; for the struggle against poverty, they have substituted the miserable constructions of the Beveridge Plan and others, which aim solely at making the masses themselves bear the necessary burden of capitalist crises. Every day of war thus increases the antagonism opposing the masses of the democratic countries to their bourgeoisie: the uninterrupted chain of strikes in England, the United States, and Australia draws the working masses up against the coalition of employers, the state, and the reformist bureaucrats, preparing tomorrow's revolutionary explosion.
When Stalin dissolves the International at the very moment when, for the first time in the democratic countries, a profound mass current is turning toward it, he thereby gives an assurance to Churchill and Roosevelt against revolution in their own countries. He opens the road to the employers' offensive against the American workers, and, not content with making possible the existence of a ferociously reactionary legislation against strikes, he condemns the struggle of American workers for their most elementary rights.
The decision taken in Moscow will inevitably lead to the dissolution of the Communist Parties and their integration into the reformist parties. Stalinism will thus take its place under the banner that was formerly its own, that of class collaboration and the sacred union.
This does not mean, of course, that Stalin will renounce exercising, in the various countries, pressure on diplomacy by means of paid and salaried agents. But increasingly these agents will be recruited from among the politicians in search of contracts, the journalists in search of a public, the society women in search of a new fashion; the era of the International is definitively succeeded by the era of the Friends of the USSR, the era of the Pritts and the Corliss Lamonts, the Stafford Crippses and the Merciers, the Pierre Cots and the Alvarez del Vayos. Whatever the price Stalin is willing to pay to attach honourable personages to himself, in the end he can count only on their betrayal at the decisive moment. Likewise, the national orientation of the last Stalinist nuclei in the Allied countries will in the end make of them the lackeys of their own imperialism, even against the Soviet Union. The words spoken by E. Browder, leader of the American CP, in 1938 — "In case of war between the United States and the Soviet Union, I would naturally serve my own country, the United States, against the USSR" — take on their full significance today: either the Russian bureaucracy will completely capitulate before the demands of American imperialism, or the latter will impose capitulation by arms, with the help of the American Stalinist leaders. To believe that at the last moment, if absolutely necessary, one could still appeal to the action of the workers, is merely to prepare a new bloody defeat for the proletariat: hurled, were they to listen to Stalin, from the worst opportunism into the most ephemeral of adventures, the best fighters of the working class would be delivered up to merciless repression, without the slightest benefit either for the workers of their own country or for the Soviet Union.
The masses of the democratic countries do not want to repeat the experience of the Popular Front; they want to go further; they want to make the revolution. It is only under the banner of the Fourth International that they will be able to realise their aspirations. It is only under its banner that, through the struggles for their class objectives, they will be able to bring true aid to the Soviet Union.
In England, in the United States, in Australia, the Fourth International will unite under its banner the deceived and duped masses, exploited and despoiled, bruised and bled, and lead them toward the seizure of power.
Throughout the whole of Europe, revolt is rumbling. In every country the masses, strengthened by the certain defeat of German imperialism, are preparing to sweep away, along with the reactionary and corrupt regimes born under the protection of Nazi bayonets, the domination of the bourgeoisie and of finance capital: the military defeat of Germany must give the signal not only for the liquidation of National Socialism but also for that of the entire capitalist order in Europe. The masses, in scattered waves, are beginning to move into action; throughout the whole continent the movements answer one another: general strike in Oslo, strike in Warsaw, strike in Prague, general strike in Holland, in Belgium; bands of partisans in the Balkans, bands of réfractaires in France; demonstrations in Italy, in Germany, in Hungary; strikes in Portugal, the rising of a new wave in Spain. Everywhere the masses are animated by a single desire: they want a radical change to accompany the liquidation of this war. The masses want revolution.
Anglo-American imperialism brings counter-revolution. The masses want to break definitively with capitalist dictatorship. Anglo-American imperialism wants to substitute its own dictatorship for that of German capitalism. The masses want to have done with the Pétains, the Francos, the Horthys, and the regimes of the gauleiters; they want to establish the power of workers and peasants; Anglo-American imperialism brings in its baggage-train Giraud, Sikorski, and Queen Wilhelmina; it multiplies negotiations with Franco and Salazar, deals with Mannerheim, shady bargains with the Vatican, dubious combinations with the reactionaries of Ankara. The dissolution of the International signifies nothing less than the capitulation of Grenier before de Gaulle and of de Gaulle before Giraud, in spite of all the triumphant communiqués; nothing less than the united front with Franco-Salazar; nothing less than the adoption of the watchword: "All power to the capitalist ministers!" It signifies the total subordination of working-class action to the military action of the Allies, the will to subject the struggle for demands to strategic perspectives, to place the weapon of the strike in the hands of generals rather than workers' delegates; the will to draw the proletariat into the path of reconstituting the bourgeois army rather than creating workers' militias; the will to subordinate the military action of the partisans to the strategic plans drawn up in London and Washington; the will not to organise and unify, to push forward the discontent of the masses, but to compress it until the moment when it can be used under the banners of imperialism. Exasperated by years of famine, poverty and suffering, of repression and bombardment, the masses are already beginning to act. Preoccupied with preventing disorder and anarchy, rebellions and revolution, preoccupied with dividing up Europe before invading it, the Allied general staffs, on the contrary, are assembling, with a patient slowness, enormous masses of men and matériel at the gates of Europe, subordinating their military action to their reactionary political plans. In attempting, through the dissolution of the Comintern, to subject the masses of Europe to the Anglo-American general staffs, the Stalinist bureaucracy is not only betraying tomorrow's revolution; it is directly responsible today for the prolongation of the masses' suffering. Having, by leading the world proletariat from defeat to defeat, made the imperialist war inevitable, Stalin, by his new betrayal, further contributes to inflicting long months of increased suffering on the masses and to barring the road to a revolutionary outcome.
The starving, tortured, and bled proletariat of Europe can impose a rapid end to its sufferings only by breaking definitively with world imperialism, by repudiating all alliance with its own bourgeoisie, by rejecting Stalin's policy of the sacred union. The true liquidation of fascism through the liquidation of capitalism, true freedom through the dictatorship of the proletariat — it is only under the banner of the Fourth International that the masses can impose this.
Throughout the whole continent, the sections of the Fourth International in Poland, in Spain, in Belgium and Greece, in France and in Germany, are fighting for the socialist emancipation of Europe.
There is no country in the world where the masses have consented to sacrifices as heavy as in the Soviet Union. These sacrifices, the Russian workers and peasants made because, in spite of the bloody methods of the bureaucracy, in spite of the growing share of profit it was extracting, they wanted to defend their state, the workers' state born of October, still alive despite every deviation and degeneration, because they wanted to preserve collective ownership of the factories, cooperative working of the land. In no other country would the heroism of Sevastopol and Odessa, the rally at Rostov, the resistance of Leningrad, of Moscow, of Stalingrad, have been conceivable. But the Stalinist bureaucracy has never ceased to call into question each of the conquests of the masses: every victory has been an occasion to reinforce, within the USSR itself, reactionary tendencies, to bar the road to any new manifestation of the initiative of those masses who had just saved the proletarian fatherland. The dissolution of the Communist International constitutes, along this path, a particularly decisive step, in breaking the last formal link uniting the USSR to the world proletarian revolution, in making National Socialism the official doctrine of the Soviet state; Stalin is digging his own grave; he leaves the field internally free to the most reactionary tendencies, to the bureaucrats grown fat on the black market, to the millionaire kolkhoz peasants, to the caste of officers. The dissolution of the Communist International constitutes the best theoretical and practical justification of the Vlasovs and the Boutenkos, whether in the pay of German imperialism or of American imperialism. It prepares, through the liquidation of the bureaucracy, the fall of the last vestiges of October under the blows of the Russian agents of imperialism. But the Soviet masses have not consented to such enormous sacrifices for the workers' state to be replaced by an imperialist exploitation of the colonial type. To the programme of bourgeois counter-revolution of imperialism, the masses oppose the programme of political revolution; they want to drive the bureaucracy from power, to take the administration of the economy into their own hands by means of workers' and peasants' committees. This programme, which is that of the return to the tradition of October, is that of Trotskyism, that of the Fourth International.
Thus there is not a single country in the world that is not ripe for the seizure of power by the proletariat. There is not a single one that does not call for world proletarian revolution. There is not a single one in which the proletariat is not gathering for the struggle, not one in which the working class is not looking for the world party that will lead it to victory. It is this very moment that Stalin chooses to go over to the enemy, to range himself definitively under the banner of imperialism. The gulf that separates the classes now passes between the Russian bureaucracy and the proletariat; the only role that its agents can henceforth play within the working class is that of super-Noskes of world counter-revolution, of bloody executioners of the workers' vanguard.
The Hour of the Fourth International Has Struck
But Stalin, no more than Churchill or Roosevelt, no more than Hitler or Franco, can halt the class struggle. He has killed the Third International with his own hands. Already the Fourth International is rising to replace it. The Fourth International is not merely a hope, it is not merely a wish that may perhaps take shape tomorrow. It already exists, fights, suffers, and struggles in more than thirty countries. Tomorrow the masses will gather beneath its banner, and tomorrow it will triumph!
The Fourth International is not, and can never be, an instrument conceived by Stalin for some monstrous manoeuvre or other. When Hitlerite propaganda insinuates such a thing, it lies deliberately; it would like to cast onto the implacable partisans of world proletarian revolution the dishonour and shame attached to the name of Stalin. This crude manoeuvre will be foiled: the masses already know that the Fourth International is Trotsky's International; they know that it inscribes on its banner, together with the most determined struggle for the defence of the USSR, the most merciless combat against the treacherous and parasitic bureaucracy of Stalin.
The Fourth International was born in the course of a twenty-year struggle for the Bolshevik programme and principles. Emerging in Russia from the struggle for industrialisation and for democracy, forged in the combat against the theory of socialism in one country, united around the conception of permanent revolution, its initial nucleus strove for ten years to work, within the Communist International, among the militants gathered at Lenin's call, toward the formation of international Bolshevik cadres. But when, in 1933, the opposition could not prevent the German Communist Party from capitulating without a fight, when Stalin had shown that his sole desire was to prevent the workers' vanguard from drawing the lessons of the most terrible defeat the proletariat had ever suffered, it raised high and firm, throughout the world, the banner of the Marxist-Leninist Fourth International.
The struggle for the Fourth International was then the struggle to gather the whole revolutionary vanguard around the Bolshevik programme. Through the betrayed revolution in Spain, through the aborted revolution in France, the movement for the Fourth International strengthened its cadres, refined its programme, separated the centrists-in-word from the revolutionary Bolsheviks in deed. In 1938, affirming, despite the defeat in Spain, its confidence in the final victory of the proletariat, the Fourth International, world party of the socialist revolution, hurled its challenge at imperialism and the coming war. Since then, the struggle has not paused for a single instant: through every defeat, through every turn, scorning every slander and every threat, the Fourth International has continued on its way.
Not for a single instant has it mixed its banner, the banner of socialism, with those of imperialism, those of war and barbarism; not for a single instant has it made a deal with the adversary; not for a single instant has it renounced its programme, the programme of world proletarian revolution and of the Socialist United States of the World. Not for a single instant has it renounced the struggle for the defence of workers' interests, the only struggle from which world civil war against capital and the triumph of revolution can emerge. Hundreds, thousands of its members have paid with their lives for their unshakable fidelity to their programme and their class: from Joffe to Blumkin, to Erwin Wolf, to Rudolf Klement, to Ignace Reiss, to Leon Sedov, to Grant Dunne, to Jean Meichler, to Léon de Lee, to Léon Lesoil — the list is long of those of its own who have given their lives for the workers' cause; and Leon Trotsky, dying at his post of combat under the blows of one of Stalin's assassins, after a whole life devoted to the service of the working class, is the most glorious symbol of the implacable revolutionary will that animates the Fourth International.
Thousands of "Trotskyists" suffer in the concentration camps of Germany, in the isolators of Siberia, in the prisons of Vichy; James P. Cannon, secretary of the International, undergoes the democratic repression of Roosevelt; Ta Thu Thau, the heroic Indochinese revolutionary, lives in exile; everywhere, in India, in England, in Brazil, in Poland, in Greece, repression has struck the Fourth International. This terrible martyrology is not only the moving testimony of the devotion of Bolshevik-Leninist militants to their class. It shows better than any long argument that the Fourth International exists; however weak it may still be, however few its cadres may still be, it is none the less the world vanguard, the advance detachment of the international working class: in every country of the world, unshakable militants fight beneath its banner, showing the way to victory.
Certainly, neither their sufferings nor their struggles give the militants of the Fourth International the vanity to believe that tomorrow, by some miracle, they will have the exclusive right to lead the masses into battle. The task they set themselves, on the contrary, is to unite beneath their banner all the militants of the workers' vanguard.
That is why they address themselves today to all the militants of the Communist International. For you, the banner of the Communist International was the banner of world revolution, the banner of uncompromising struggle against the bourgeoisie, the banner of the struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat, the banner of the victorious soviets under Lenin. It is for this cause that many of your own gave their lives; for this cause that you have suffered; it is this cause that you intend to see triumph. The Stalinist bureaucracy may betray your ideal; you intend to remain faithful to it. The hour has come when we must together rebuild the world party of revolution. The hour has come when we must together fight to unite the masses beneath its banner, the banner of the World Republic of Soviets. The hour has come when we must, in common struggle, through common and democratically discussed experience, gather together the great world army, united and disciplined, of socialism.
Communist comrades, revolutionary militants, the First International gave the proletarian movement its programme and its banner. The Second International rallied the broad working masses around the socialist idea. The Third International raised over the world the victorious banner of the October insurrection. With the Fourth International, you will carry off victory, you will establish socialism!
Against the imperialist war! For the Socialist United States of the World! Against world capitalist reaction and its agents and "allies," the social-democratic and Stalinist bureaucracies! For world revolution! Against the sacred union! For the class struggle and the proletarian insurrection! For the defence of the socialist gains of the USSR against its enemies, external and internal! Forward under the banner of Marx, of Lenin, of Trotsky, the banner of the Fourth International!
The European Secretariat of the Fourth International June 1943