19–26 May 1940 (New York), Emergency ("Extraordinary") Conference of the Fourth International Issuing body: Fourth International, World Party of the Socialist Revolution
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The emergency conference of the Fourth International, World Party of the Socialist Revolution, meets at a turning point of the second imperialist war. The phase of probing and preparation, of relative military inactivity, is over. Germany has unleashed all the furies of hell in a vast offensive to which the Allies are in turn responding with all their forces of destruction. Henceforth the life of Europe, and of humanity as a whole, will for a long time be determined by the course of the imperialist war and by its economic and political consequences.
The Fourth International considers that the moment has come to state openly and clearly its point of view on this war and its participants, how it judges the war policies of the various workers' organizations, and, most important of all, what is the way out leading to peace, freedom, and abundance.
The Fourth International does not turn to the governments that have plunged the peoples into the massacre, nor to the bourgeois politicians who bear responsibility for these governments, nor to the labour bureaucrats who support the bourgeoisie at war. The Fourth International turns to the workers, men and women, to the soldiers and sailors, the ruined peasants and the enslaved colonial peoples. The Fourth International has nothing in common with the oppressors, the exploiters, the imperialists. It is the world party of the workers, the oppressed, the exploited. It is to them that this manifesto is addressed.
THE GENERAL CAUSES OF THE PRESENT WAR
Technology is infinitely more powerful today than at the end of the war of 1914-1918, while humanity is far more impoverished. Living standards have fallen in country after country. On the eve of the present war, agriculture was in a worse state than it had been when the last one broke out. The agricultural countries were ruined. In the industrial countries, the middle classes had been economically devastated, and a permanent "under-class" of unemployed — modern pariahs — had come into being. The domestic market had shrunk. The export of capital had been reduced. In the present epoch, imperialism has shattered the world market, dividing it into spheres, each dominated by a particular power. While the world's population has grown considerably, the world trade of the hundred and nine states on our planet has fallen by almost a quarter in the decade preceding the present war. The volume of foreign trade of certain countries has been reduced by half, by a third, by a quarter.
The colonial countries have suffered both from their own internal crisis and from that of their metropolitan power. Backward nations that only yesterday enjoyed a semi-freedom are today reduced to slavery (Ethiopia, Albania, China). Every imperialist country must possess its own sources of raw materials, above all for war, that is, in view of a new struggle for raw materials. In order to enrich themselves further, the capitalists are destroying and devastating everything that labour has accumulated over the centuries.
The world of decadent capitalism is overpopulated. Admitting a hundred refugees becomes a major problem for a world power such as the United States. In the age of aviation, telegraph, radio, and television, travel from one country to another is paralysed by passports and visas. The period of the withering-away of foreign trade and the decline of domestic trade is also that of the monstrous intensification of chauvinism, and in particular of anti-Semitism. Nascent capitalism had freed the Jewish people from the ghetto and made of them an instrument of its commercial expansion. Today capitalist society in its decline strives to squeeze the Jewish people out of every pore: twenty million individuals out of a world population of two billion — that is, one percent — can no longer find a place on our planet. Despite the vast unused expanses and the marvels of technology, which have conquered the skies as they once conquered the earth, the bourgeoisie contrives to turn our planet into an atrocious prison.
LENIN AND IMPERIALISM
On 1 November 1914, at the start of the first imperialist war, Lenin wrote: "Imperialism has staked the fate of European civilization. Unless a series of victorious revolutions occurs after this war, further wars will follow." The fairy tale of "a war to end all wars" is a hollow and pernicious dream. Workers, remember this prediction! The present war — the second imperialist war — is no accident. It does not stem from the will of this or that dictator. It was foretold long ago. Its origin flows inexorably from the contradictions engendered by international capitalist interests. Contrary to the official fables forged to drug the people, the principal cause of the war, like that of all the other social ills — unemployment, the high cost of living, fascism, colonial oppression — lies in the private ownership of the means of production and in the bourgeois state that rests upon these foundations.
Thanks to the present level of technology and of the skill of the workers, it is entirely possible to create adequate conditions for the material and spiritual development of the whole of humanity. It would only be necessary to organize economic life in each country, and across the whole planet, correctly, scientifically, and rationally, in accordance with a general plan. But so long as the principal productive forces of society remain in the hands of the trusts, that is, of isolated capitalist cliques, the struggle for markets, for sources of raw materials, for the administration of the world, will inevitably assume an ever more destructive character. State power and control over the economy can be wrested from the hands of these rapacious imperialist cliques only by the revolutionary working class. Such is the meaning of Lenin's warning that, "unless a series of victorious revolutions" occurred, a new imperialist war would inevitably follow. The various predictions and promises that were made have been put to the test of events. The fairy tale "of a war to end wars" has proved to be a lie. Lenin's prediction has become a tragic truth.
THE IMMEDIATE CAUSES OF THE WAR
The immediate cause of the present war is the rivalry between the old and wealthy colonial empires — Great Britain and France — and the belated imperialist plunderers, Germany and Italy.
The nineteenth century was an epoch of undisputed hegemony for the oldest capitalist power, Great Britain. It is more or less true that from 1815 to 1914 the "British peace" reigned — not without a few isolated military explosions. The British fleet, the most powerful in the world, played the role of policeman of the seas. But that epoch belongs to the past. From the end of the last century, Germany, armed with modern technology, began to advance toward first place in Europe. Across the Atlantic, an even more powerful country, formerly a British colony, arose. The most important economic contradiction leading to the war of 1914-1918 was the rivalry between Great Britain and Germany. The entry of the United States into the war was a preventive measure. Germany could not be allowed to subjugate the European continent.
Defeat cast Germany into complete impotence. Dismembered, surrounded by enemies, ruined by war indemnities, weakened by the convulsions of civil war, she appeared out of the running for a long period, if not forever. It was France that momentarily played first fiddle in Europe. In the end the balance-sheet of the war worked out, for victorious England, as a heavy liability: growing independence of the dominions, colonial independence movements, loss of naval hegemony, the diminishing importance of the fleet as aviation developed.
Relying on the force of inertia, England attempted, in the very first years following victory, to continue playing the leading role on the world stage. The conflicts opposing her to the United States began to take on a threatening character. It could even have seemed that the next war would pit the two Anglo-Saxon states, both of which aspired to world domination, against one another. However, England quickly became convinced that her specific economic weight would not allow her to fight the colossus across the ocean. The naval-parity agreement she concluded with the United States meant a formal renunciation of the naval hegemony she had in fact already lost. The substitution of tariffs for free trade meant that Great Britain was openly admitting the defeat of her industry on the world market. Her renunciation of the policy of "splendid isolation" led to the introduction of compulsory military service. Thus all the sacrosanct traditions were swept away.
France too displayed, on a smaller scale, a similar disproportion between her economic weight and her position in the world. Her hegemony over Europe rested on the temporary conjuncture of circumstances created by the annihilation of Germany and the artificial arrangements of the Treaty of Versailles. The size of her population and the economic foundations of this hegemony proved to be quite inadequate. When the hypnosis of victory dissipated, the real relation of forces was revealed: France turned out to be much weaker than she had appeared, not only to her friends but also to her enemies. Seeking protection, she essentially became Great Britain's newest dominion.
The regeneration of Germany, based on first-rate technology and organizational capacities, was inevitable. It came sooner than might have been thought possible, in large part thanks to the support that England gave to Germany against the USSR, against the excessive claims of France, and, on a second level, against the United States. Such international combinations had more than once proved fortunate for capitalist England in the past, as long as she remained the strongest power. Once her power waned, she proved incapable of banishing the spirits she herself had summoned.
Armed with a more modern, more flexible technology of superior productivity, Germany once again began to drive England out of very important markets, particularly in south-eastern Europe and Latin America. Unlike the nineteenth century, when competition among capitalist countries developed on the basis of an expanding world market, today's economic arena of struggle is shrinking so much that only a few fragments of the world market remain open to the imperialists, and they tear these fragments from one another.
The initiative for a new partition of the world, now as in 1914, naturally belonged to German imperialism. Taken by surprise, the British government first tried to find a way out that would exclude war, through concessions at the expense of others (Austria, Czechoslovakia). But this policy was short-sighted. "Friendship" with Great Britain was for Hitler only a brief tactical phase. London had already conceded to Hitler more than he had expected to obtain. The Munich agreement, by means of which Chamberlain hoped to seal a lasting friendship with Germany, led on the contrary to an acceleration of the rupture. Hitler could no longer expect anything from London; any further expansion of Germany would threaten Great Britain's own vital lines. Thus the "new era of peace" proclaimed by Chamberlain in 1938 led, within a few months, to the most terrible of all wars.
THE UNITED STATES
While Great Britain has, from the very first months of the war, expended all her efforts in blocking the positions vacated by Germany on the world market, the United States has almost automatically ousted Great Britain from them. Two-thirds of the world's gold is concentrated in American vaults. The remaining third is flowing toward the same place. England's role as banker to the world has been cast into the past. Nor does it fare any better in other fields. While the British fleet and merchant marine have suffered heavy losses, American shipyards are building vessels on a colossal scale that will ensure United States naval predominance over England and Japan. The United States is evidently preparing to adopt the principle of "two-power standard" (possessing a fleet more powerful than the combined fleets of the two next strongest powers). The new air-fleet programme likewise aims to ensure United States superiority over the rest of the world.
Yet the industrial, financial, and military strength of the United States, the leading capitalist power in the world, in no way ensures the flourishing of American economic life; on the contrary, it gives the crisis of its social system a particularly pernicious and convulsive character. Employment can no more be found for two billion in gold than for millions of unemployed. The theses of the Fourth International, "The Fourth International and the War," published six years ago, already foresaw: "American capitalism runs up against the very same problems that in 1914 pushed Germany onto the road to war. For Germany it was a question of 'organizing' Europe. History is leading humanity straight toward the volcanic eruption of American imperialism."
The policy of the New Deal and of the "good neighbour" were the last attempts to postpone the explosion of the social crisis by remedying it through concessions and agreements. After the bankruptcy of this policy, which squandered tens of billions, nothing was left to American imperialism but to resort to that of the "iron fist." Under whatever pretext and whatever slogan, the United States will intervene in the terrible fray in order to maintain its world domination. The order and the date of the struggle that will unfold between American capitalism and its enemies are not yet known, perhaps not even in Washington. War with Japan would be a struggle for "living space" in the Pacific Ocean. War in the Atlantic, even if in the immediate instance directed against Germany, would be a struggle to capture England's inheritance. A potential German victory over the Allies hangs like a nightmare over Washington. In possession of the European continent and of the resources of its colonies, with European arms factories and arsenals at its disposal, Germany, especially if acting in concert with Japan, would constitute a mortal danger to American imperialism. The titanic battles now unfolding on the fields of Europe are, in this sense, no more than preparatory episodes to the struggle between Germany and America. France and England are merely bastions of American capitalism on the other side of the Atlantic. If England's frontier lies on the Rhine, as the British Prime Minister affirms, then American imperialism may well affirm that the frontier of the United States lies on the Thames. In feverishly preparing public opinion for the coming war, Washington displays noble indignation over the fate of Finland, Denmark, Holland, Belgium. With the occupation of Denmark, Greenland has unexpectedly become a geological fragment of the Western hemisphere and, by a fortunate coincidence, turns out to contain deposits of cryolite indispensable to aluminium production. Nor does Washington lose sight of enslaved China, unsupported Philippines, orphaned Dutch East Indies, or the sea lanes. Thus philanthropic sympathy for oppressed nations, and even geological considerations, help draw the United States into the war.
American armed forces could only intervene successfully so long as France and the British Isles remain solid bases of support for them. Should France be occupied and German armies appear on the banks of the Thames, the relation of forces would change entirely, to the detriment of the United States. It is such considerations that compel the United States to hasten, but which also compel it to ask: has the opportune moment not already passed?
Against the official attitude of the White House stand the noisy protests of American isolationism, which is itself only another variety of the same imperialism. The section of capitalists whose interests are particularly bound up with the American continent, Australia, and the Far East calculate that, in the event of an Allied defeat, the United States would automatically acquire a monopoly for its own benefit, not only in Latin America but also in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. As for China, the Dutch East Indies, and the East in general, it is the conviction of the entire ruling class that war with Japan is, in any case, inevitable in the near future. Under the guise of isolationism and pacifism, an influential section of the bourgeoisie is working out a programme for the continental expansion of the United States and preparing for the struggle against Japan; the war against Germany for world domination, which fits into such a plan besides, is merely postponed; as for the petty-bourgeois pacifists of the type of Norman Thomas and his colleagues, they are nothing but the choirboys of one of the imperialist clans.
Our struggle against United States intervention in the war has nothing in common with isolationism and pacifism. We say openly that the imperialist government is incapable of avoiding plunging the country into war. The discussions within the ruling class turn only on the question of when to enter the war and against whom to strike the first blow. To hope to keep the United States neutral by means of newspaper articles and pacifist resolutions is to try to hold back the tide with a broom. The real struggle against war can only be the class struggle against imperialism and an unremitting denunciation of petty-bourgeois pacifism. Only revolution could prevent the American bourgeoisie from intervening in the second imperialist war or from undertaking a third imperialist war. All other methods are nothing but charlatanism or stupidity, or a mixture of the two.
THE DEFENCE OF THE "FATHERLAND"
Nearly a century ago, when the national state still represented a relatively progressive factor, the Communist Manifesto proclaimed that the proletarians have no fatherland. Their sole aim was the creation of a fatherland of the exploited embracing the entire world. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the bourgeois state, with its armies and its tariff barriers, became the worst brake on the development of the productive forces, which demand a far greater expanse. A socialist who today invokes the "fatherland" plays the same reactionary role as that once played by the Vendée peasants who took up the defence of the feudal regime — that is, of their own chains.
In recent years, and even in recent months, the world has watched, astonished, at how easily states vanish from the map of Europe: Austria, Czechoslovakia, Albania, Poland, Denmark, Holland, Belgium. The political map has been recast with a speed unmatched at any period except perhaps at the time of the Napoleonic wars. Then it was a matter of surviving feudal states that had to give way to the bourgeois national state. Today it is a matter of surviving bourgeois states that must give way to the socialist federation of peoples. As always, the chain breaks at its weakest link. The imperialist bandits leave as little room for small independent states as the malignant competition of trusts and cartels leaves for small independent industrialists and shopkeepers.
Because of her strategic position, Germany considers it advantageous to attack her principal enemies by way of small neutral countries. Great Britain and France, on the contrary, find it more advantageous to preserve themselves through the neutrality of the small states, and to let Germany drive them, by her blows, into the "democratic" allied camp. The substance of the matter is not changed by these differences in strategic method. The small satellites are being reduced to dust between the steel jaws of the great imperialist powers. The "defence" of huge fatherlands demands the destruction of a dozen small and medium-sized fatherlands.
However, even where the great states are concerned, it is by no means a question for the bourgeoisie of defending the fatherland, but rather of markets, foreign concessions, sources of raw materials, and spheres of influence. The bourgeoisie never defends the fatherland for the sake of the fatherland; it defends private property, privileges, profits. Whenever these sacred values are threatened, the bourgeoisie immediately embarks on the path of defeatism. Such was the path of the Russian bourgeoisie, whose sons, after the October revolution, fought and are still ready to fight in every army in the world against what was once their own fatherland. To save its capital, the Spanish bourgeoisie turned to Hitler and Mussolini to seek their military aid against its own people. The Norwegian bourgeoisie helped Hitler invade Norway. It has always been thus, and it will always be thus.
Official patriotism is nothing but the mask of the exploiters' interests. Class-conscious workers throw off this mask with contempt. They do not defend the bourgeois fatherland but the interests of the exploited and the oppressed of their own country and of the whole world. The theses of the Fourth International state: "To the reactionary slogan of 'national defence' it is necessary to counterpose the slogan of the revolutionary destruction of the national state. To the madhouse of capitalist Europe it is necessary to counterpose the programme of the Socialist United States of Europe, as a stage on the road to the Socialist United States of the World."
THE STRUGGLE FOR "DEMOCRACY"
No less mendacious is the slogan of a war of democracy against fascism. As if the workers had forgotten that it was the British government that helped Hitler and his gang of executioners seize power! The imperialist democracies are in reality the greatest aristocracies in history. England, France, Holland, Belgium rest upon the enslavement of colonial peoples. American democracy rests upon the control of the enormous wealth of an entire continent. All the efforts of these "democracies" are directed toward the preservation of their privileged possessions. The imperialist democracies unload a considerable part of the burden of war onto the shoulders of their colonies. The slaves are compelled to furnish blood and gold to enable their masters to go on being slave-owners. The small capitalist democracies, deprived of colonies, are nothing but satellites of the great empires, gleaning a share of their colonial profits. The ruling classes of these states are at every moment ready to renounce democracy in order to preserve their privileges.
In the case of tiny Norway, the inner mechanisms of democratic decline were once again revealed to the entire world. The Norwegian bourgeoisie simultaneously employed a Social Democratic government and fascist police, judges, and officers. At the first serious shock, the democratic heads were swept away, and the fascist bureaucracy, which immediately found a common language with Hitler, became master of the house. With various national variations, the same experience unfolded in Italy and Germany, in Austria, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and a number of other states.
At the moment of danger, the bourgeoisie has always known how to strip the democratic ornaments from the real apparatus of its rule, which thus appears as the direct instrument of finance capital. Only the incurably blind are capable of believing that the English and French generals and admirals are waging war against fascism.
The war has not halted the process of transformation of democracies into reactionary dictatorships. On the contrary, before our very eyes, it has brought that process to completion.
Within each country, as on the world stage, war immediately strengthens the most reactionary groups and institutions. The general staffs — those nests of Bonapartist conspiracy — the malevolent dens of the police, the bands of hired patriots, the churches of every faith are all immediately thrust to the fore. The Vatican court, home of obscurantism and hatred among men, is today courted from every side, especially by a Protestant, President Roosevelt. Material and spiritual decline always trails in its wake police oppression and an increased demand for religious opium.
Seeking to secure the advantages of a totalitarian regime, the imperialist democracies ensure their own defence by pursuing the working class with redoubled energy and by persecuting revolutionary organizations. They use the threat of war, and now war itself, first and foremost to crush their enemies at home. Without variation or hesitation, the bourgeoisie follows the rule: "The main enemy is in our own country."
As is always the case, it is the weakest who suffer most. In the present slaughter of peoples, the weakest are the countless refugees of every country, and among them the revolutionary exiles. Bourgeois patriotism manifests itself first of all by the brutal treatment of defenceless foreigners. Before concentration camps for prisoners of war were built, all the democracies had built concentration camps for revolutionary exiles. The governments of the entire world, and particularly that of the USSR, have written the darkest chapter of our epoch in the manner in which they have treated refugees, exiles, the homeless. We send our warmest greetings to our imprisoned and persecuted brothers, and we say to them: do not lose courage. It is from the prisons and concentration camps of capitalism that the greater part of the leaders of tomorrow's Europe and of tomorrow's world will emerge!
THE NAZIS' WAR SLOGANS
Hitler's slogans do not generally withstand examination. The struggle for "national unification" has long been revealed as a lie, since Hitler has converted the national state into a multi-national state, trampling underfoot the freedom and unity of other peoples; the struggle for "living space" is nothing but camouflage for imperialist expansion, that is, for a policy of annexation and plunder; the racial justification for this expansion is a lie. National Socialism changes its racial sympathies and racial antipathies according to strategic considerations. A somewhat more stable element of fascist propaganda is perhaps anti-Semitism, to which Hitler has given a zoological form, discovering the true language of "race" and "blood" in the barking of the dog and the grunting of the pig. It was not for nothing that Friedrich Engels proclaimed anti-Semitism "the socialism of fools"! The only trait of fascism that is not pure imposture is its will to power, to subjugation, to plunder. Fascism is a chemically pure distillation of imperialist culture.
The democratic governments that, in their time, hailed Hitler as the champion of the anti-Bolshevik crusade, today see in him a sort of unpredictable Satan spewed up from the depths of hell, who violates the sanctity of treaties, frontiers, rules, and regulations. If Hitler did not exist, the world would bloom like a garden. Wretched lie! This German epileptic, with a calculating machine in his skull and unlimited power in his hands, no more falls from the sky than he rises from hell. He is nothing other than the personification of all the destructive forces of imperialism. Just as Genghis Khan and Tamerlane appeared to weaker pastoral peoples as destructive scourges of God, while in fact only expressing the need of all pastoral tribes to conquer wider pasturelands and to plunder the sedentary regions, so Hitler, shaking the old colonial powers to their foundations, is merely giving fuller expression to the imperialist will to power. Through Hitler, world capitalism, driven to despair by its own impasse, has begun to plunge a sharpened sword into its own flanks.
The butchers of the second imperialist war will not succeed in turning Hitler into a scapegoat for their own sins.
It is at the bar of the tribunal of the proletariat that all present rulers will answer. In the dock, Hitler will merely occupy the first place among the criminals.
GERMAN PREPONDERANCE
Whatever the outcome of the war, German preponderance has already manifestly asserted itself. Admittedly, Hitler has not managed to unleash any secret "new weapon." But the perfection of all the various existing weapons, and their precisely coordinated combination on the basis of the most highly rationalized industry, gives German militarism an enormous weight. Military dynamism is closely bound up with the particular features of a totalitarian regime: unity of will, concentrated initiative, secrecy of preparation, suddenness of execution. Moreover, the Versailles peace did the Allies a disservice. After fifteen years of German disarmament, Hitler was compelled to build an army from scratch, thanks to which the army was freed from all routine and was not obliged to drag along outdated technology and equipment. Tactical training draws on new ideas founded on the latest results of technology. It is probable that only the United States is destined to surpass the German war machine.
The weakness of France and Great Britain was foreseeable. The theses of the Fourth International, drafted in 1934, state: "The collapse of the League of Nations is indissolubly bound up with the beginning of the collapse of French hegemony over the European continent." The document further declares "that the British governments are less and less capable of putting their plans into effect," that the British bourgeoisie is "alarmed by the disintegration of its empire, the revolutionary movement in India, the instability of its positions in China." The strength of the Fourth International lies in the fact that its programme is able to withstand the test of great events.
English and French industry, thanks to the assured flow of colonial superprofits, allowed itself for a long time to fall behind both in technology and in organization. Moreover, the so-called "defence of democracy" by the socialist parties and trade unions created an extremely privileged political situation for the English and French bourgeoisies. Privileges always breed laziness and stagnation. If Germany today displays such colossal preponderance over France and England, the lion's share of this responsibility must fall on the social-patriotic defenders of democracy who prevented the proletariat from timely wresting England and France out of their atrophy through a socialist revolution carried out in due time.
"THE PEACE PROGRAMME"
To make up for the enslavement of peoples, Hitler promises to establish a "German peace" over Europe for a period of several centuries. Hollow mirage: the British peace that followed the victory over Napoleon could not have lasted a century — let alone a thousand years! — except that Britain was the pioneer of a new technology and of an ever-advancing system of production. Despite the power of her industry, present-day Germany, like her enemies, is the typical representative of a doomed social system. Hitler's victory would not in reality mean peace, but the beginning of a new series of bloody conflicts on a world scale. By overturning the British Empire, by reducing France to the state in which Bohemia and Moravia find themselves today, by drawing on the European continent and its colonies, Germany would undoubtedly become the leading power in the world. At her side, Italy might, at best, and not for very long, seize control of the Mediterranean basin. But to be the leading power in the world does not mean being the only power. The struggle for "living space" would merely enter a new phase.
The "new order" that Japan is preparing to establish, relying on a German victory, envisions the extension of Japanese domination over most of the Asian continent. The Soviet Union would find itself encircled between a Germanized Europe and a Japanized Asia. The entire American continent, together with Australia and New Zealand, would fall under the leadership of the United States. If we do not forget the Italian empire, of a provincial character, the world would be temporarily divided into five "living spaces." But imperialism, by its very nature, abhors any sharing of power. To secure his freedom of manoeuvre against America, Hitler would first have to settle his accounts in blood with his friends of yesterday, Stalin and Mussolini. Japan and the United States would not remain disinterested observers in this new struggle. The third imperialist war would be waged not by national states nor by empires of the old type, but by entire continents. Hitler's victory today would mean not a thousand years of "German peace" but a bloody chaos lasting many decades, if not centuries.
But an Allied triumph would produce no more radiant a result. A victorious France could only re-establish its position as a great power through the dismemberment of Germany, the restoration of the Habsburgs, the Balkanization of Europe. Great Britain could only once more play a leading role in European affairs by furbishing anew her traditional game of playing off the contradictions between Germany and France on one hand, and between Europe and America on the other. This would mean a new edition, ten times worse, of the Versailles peace, with effects far more pernicious for the weakened organism of Europe. To which must be added that an Allied victory without American aid is improbable, while the United States would this time demand, for its assistance, a far higher price than during the last war. Debased and exhausted Europe, the object of Herbert Hoover's philanthropy, would become the bankrupt debtor of its saviour across the Atlantic.
Finally, if we suppose the least probable variant — namely, the conclusion of peace by exhausted adversaries in accordance with the pacifist formula "neither victors nor vanquished" — this variant would mean the restoration of the international chaos that existed before the war, but on the basis of bloody ruins, exhaustion, and bitterness. Within a short period, all the old antagonisms would resurface with explosive violence and burst forth in new international convulsions.
The Allies' promise to create, this time, a democratic European federation is the crudest of all the pacifist lies; the state is not an abstraction but the instrument of monopoly capitalism. So long as the trusts and banks have not been expropriated for the benefit of the peoples, the struggle between states is just as inevitable as the struggle between the trusts themselves. A voluntary renunciation, by the most powerful state, of the advantage that its strength confers on it, is as ridiculous a utopia as a voluntary sharing of capital among the trusts. So long as capitalist property is preserved, a "democratic federation" would be nothing other than a repetition, even worse, of the League of Nations, containing all its vices with only its illusions removed.
In vain do the imperialist masters of destiny attempt to revive a programme of salvation that has been utterly discredited by the experience of past decades. In vain do their petty-bourgeois lackeys reheat pacifist panaceas long since transformed into caricatures of themselves. Advanced workers will not be fooled. Peace will not be concluded by the forces now making war. The workers and soldiers will impose their own programme of peace.
DEFENCE OF THE USSR
Stalin's alliance with Hitler, which raised the curtain on the world war and led directly to the enslavement of the Polish people, resulted from the weakness of the USSR and the panic of the Kremlin in the face of Germany. Responsibility for this weakness falls on none other than the Kremlin itself, on its domestic policy, which dug an abyss between the ruling class and the people, and on its foreign policy, which sacrificed the interests of the world revolution to those of the Stalinist clique.
The seizure of eastern Poland, the price of the alliance with Hitler and a guarantee against that same Hitler, was accompanied by the nationalization of semi-feudal and capitalist property in Western Ukraine and Western Byelorussia. Without this measure, the Kremlin would not have been able to incorporate the occupied territories into the USSR. The October revolution, strangled and profaned, thereby made known that it was still alive.
In Finland, the Kremlin did not manage to accomplish a social upheaval of the same order. The imperialist mobilization of public opinion "in defence of Finland," the threat of direct intervention by England and France, Hitler's impatience — who had to seize Denmark and Norway before French and British troops made their appearance on Scandinavian soil — all these factors compelled the Kremlin to abandon Sovietizing Finland and to confine itself to seizing the indispensable strategic positions.
The Soviet population, without doubt, violently condemned the invasion of Finland. Nevertheless, advanced workers understood that the crimes of the Kremlin did not strike from the agenda the question of the existence of the USSR. The latter's defeat in the course of the world war would mean not only the overthrow of the totalitarian bureaucracy but also the liquidation of the new forms of property, the collapse of the first experiment in planned economy, and the transformation of the entire country into a colony — that is, the cession to imperialism of colossal natural resources that would enable it to survive until the third world war. Neither the peoples of the USSR nor the working class as a whole desires such an outcome.
The resistance offered by Finland against the USSR was, despite all its heroism, no more an act of defence of national independence than was the subsequent resistance of Norway against Germany. The Finnish government itself understood this when it preferred to capitulate to the USSR rather than turn Finland into a military base for England and France. Our full recognition of the right of every nation to self-determination does not alter the fact that, in the course of the present war, this right weighs scarcely more than a feather. We must determine the fundamental line of our policy in accordance with fundamental factors and not with circumstances of tenth-rate importance. The theses of the Fourth International state: "The idea of national defence, especially when it coincides with the idea of the defence of democracy, can easily be used to dupe the workers of small neutral countries (Switzerland, to a certain extent Belgium, the Scandinavian countries). Only a dull petty bourgeois like Robert Grimm, from a remote Swiss village, could seriously believe that the world war into which he will be dragged can be a means of defending the independence of Switzerland." These words take on a particular significance today. They apply no less to the social-patriots of the Robert Grimm type, those pseudo-revolutionary petty bourgeois who believe it possible to determine proletarian strategy regarding the defence of the USSR according to tactical episodes such as the invasion of Finland by the Red Army.
The campaign that world bourgeois public opinion launched over the Finnish-Soviet war was extremely eloquent in its unanimity and its fury; neither the previous perfidy nor the previous violence of the Kremlin had aroused the bourgeoisie's indignation, for the whole of world political history is written in terms of perfidy and violence. Their fear and indignation were aroused by the prospect of a social upheaval in Finland identical to that provoked by the Red Army in eastern Poland. What was at stake was a new threat to capitalist property. The anti-Soviet campaign, which was in every respect of a class character, once again revealed that the USSR, by virtue of the social foundations laid by the October revolution — on which even the existence of the bureaucracy itself ultimately depends — remains a workers' state that terrifies the bourgeoisie of the whole world. The episodic agreements between the bourgeoisie and the USSR do not change the fact that, "on the historical scale, the contradiction between world imperialism and the Soviet Union is infinitely deeper than the antagonisms opposing the various imperialisms to one another" ("The Fourth International and the War").
Many petty-bourgeois radicals, who only yesterday were still ready to consider the Soviet Union as the axis of the "democratic" forces against fascism, have suddenly discovered, now that their own fatherlands are threatened by Hitler, that Moscow — which is not coming to their aid — pursues an imperialist policy and that there is no difference between the USSR and the fascist countries.
A lie! every class-conscious worker will answer. There is a difference. The bourgeoisie appreciates this social difference better and more profoundly than these radical weathervanes. Certainly, the nationalization of the means of production in a single country, and especially in a backward country like the USSR, does not in itself ensure the building of socialism. But it is capable of strengthening the conditions favourable to socialism, namely, the planned development of the productive forces. To turn one's back on the nationalization of the means of production on the pretext that it does not by itself ensure the well-being of the masses is tantamount to condemning a granite foundation to destruction on the pretext that it is impossible to live without walls or roof.
The class-conscious worker knows that a victorious struggle for total emancipation is inconceivable without defending the conquests already won, however modest they may be. All the more must one defend this colossal conquest, planned economy, against the restoration of capitalist relations of production. Those who cannot defend the old positions will never conquer new ones.
The Fourth International can defend the USSR only by the methods of revolutionary class struggle. Teaching the workers to understand correctly the class character of the state — imperialist, colonial, workers' — and the mutual relations existing between these types of states as well as their internal contradictions, will enable the workers to draw correct practical conclusions for each given situation. While waging a tireless struggle against the Moscow oligarchy, the Fourth International categorically rejects any policy liable to aid imperialism against the USSR.
Defence of the USSR coincides in principle with preparation for the world proletarian revolution. We absolutely reject the theory of socialism in one country, that brain-child of ignorant and reactionary Stalinism. Only the world revolution can save the USSR for socialism. But the world revolution inevitably entails the eviction of the Kremlin oligarchy.
FOR THE REVOLUTIONARY OVERTHROW OF THE STALINIST BONAPARTIST CLIQUE
After basely flattering the "democracies" for five years, the Kremlin revealed its contempt for the world proletariat by concluding an alliance with Hitler and helping him strangle the Polish people; it wallowed in shameful chauvinism on the eve of the invasion of Finland, and displayed no less shameful military incompetence in the struggle that followed; it loudly promised to "emancipate" the Finnish people from the capitalists, only to capitulate fearfully to Hitler afterward. Such has been the performance of the Stalinist regime at history's critical hours.
The Moscow trials had already shown that the totalitarian oligarchy had become an absolute obstacle to the country's development. The growing and complex demands of economic life cannot be accommodated within the bureaucratic straitjacket. Yet the gang of parasites is in no way prepared to make any concession whatsoever. Struggling to hold onto its positions, it is destroying everything best in the country. It cannot be believed that a people who made three revolutions in twelve years has suddenly fallen into stupidity. It is stifled and disoriented, but it observes and reflects; the bureaucracy reminds it daily of its own existence through its arbitrary domination, its oppression, its rapacity, and its bloodthirsty desire for vengeance. Hungry workers and kolkhoz labourers whisper to one another with hatred about the extravagant caprices of ferocious commissars. For Stalin's sixtieth birthday, the workers of the Urals were forced to labour for a year and a half over a gigantic portrait of the hated "Father of the Peoples," made of precious stones, an undertaking worthy of Xerxes or Cleopatra. A regime capable of indulging in such abominations cannot fail to excite the hatred of the masses.
Foreign policy corresponds to domestic policy. Had the Kremlin government expressed the real interests of the workers' state, had the Comintern served the cause of world revolution, the popular masses of tiny Finland would inevitably have gravitated toward the USSR, and the invasion by the Red Army would either have been altogether unnecessary or would have been accepted at once by the Finnish people as a revolutionary act of emancipation. In reality, the Kremlin's entire prior policy alienated the Finnish workers and peasants from the USSR. While Hitler was able to count on the aid of what is called a "fifth column" in the neutral countries he invaded, Stalin found no support of any kind in Finland, despite the tradition of the 1918 insurrection and the long experience of the Finnish Communist Party. Under these conditions, the invasion by the Red Army had the direct and manifest character of an act of military violence. Responsibility for this act of violence falls entirely and indivisibly upon the Moscow oligarchy.
War is the bitter test of a regime. As a consequence of the first period of the war, the international position of the USSR, despite deceptive successes, has already manifestly worsened. The Kremlin's foreign policy has alienated broad layers of the world working class and of the oppressed peoples from the USSR. The strategic bases of support occupied by Moscow will represent only a third-rate factor in the conflict of world forces. Meanwhile, Germany has obtained the most important and most industrialized part of Poland and acquired a common border with the USSR — that is, a gateway to the East. Through Scandinavia, Germany dominates the Baltic Sea, turning the Gulf of Finland into a kind of tightly-corked bottle. Embittered Finland is falling under Hitler's direct control. In place of weak neutral states, the USSR now confronts a powerful Germany on the other side of its Leningrad frontier. The weakness of the Red Army, decapitated by Stalin, has been demonstrated to the entire world. Centrifugal national tendencies within the USSR have intensified. The prestige of the Kremlin leadership is declining. Germany in the west, Japan in the east, now feel infinitely more confident than before the Kremlin's Finnish adventure.
From his meagre arsenal, Stalin could draw only a single response to the threatening warning of events. He replaced Voroshilov with an even emptier nonentity: Timoshenko. As always on such occasions, the purpose of this manoeuvre is to divert the people's and the army's anger away from those most responsible for their misfortunes, and to place at the head of the army a man who is trustworthy precisely because he is insignificant. The Kremlin has once again shown itself to be the central lair of defeatism. Only by destroying this lair can the security of the USSR be safeguarded.
Preparing the revolutionary overthrow of the Moscow ruling caste is one of the principal tasks of the Fourth International. This task is neither simple nor easy. It demands sacrifice and heroism. Yet humanity has entered an epoch of great convulsions; these convulsions will deal the Kremlin oligarchy repeated blows that will shatter its totalitarian apparatus, will arouse the working masses' confidence in themselves, and will thereby facilitate the formation of the Soviet section of the Fourth International. Events will work in our favour, if we are capable of assisting them.
THE COLONIAL PEOPLES IN THE WAR
By creating enormous difficulties and dangers for the metropolitan centres of imperialism, the war opens vast possibilities for the oppressed peoples. The rumble of cannon in Europe announces that the hour of their liberation is near. If a programme of peaceful social transformation is utopian for the advanced capitalist countries, a programme of peaceful liberation for the colonies is all the more doubly utopian. On the other hand, the last remaining half-free backward countries have been enslaved before our very eyes (Ethiopia, Albania, China). The present war as a whole is a war for the colonies. Some are pursuing their conquest, others claim to retain them and refuse to give them up. But on neither side is there the slightest intention of freeing them voluntarily. The declining metropolitan centres are compelled to squeeze as much as possible out of their colonies while giving back as little as possible in return. Only the revolutionary, direct struggle of the enslaved peoples can clear the road to their emancipation.
In the colonial and semi-colonial countries, the struggle waged for national independence, and consequently for "defence of the fatherland," differs from that in the imperialist countries. Thus the revolutionary proletariat of the entire world gives unconditional support to the struggle of China or of India for their independence, for this struggle, "by wresting the backward peoples from the Asiatic system, from particularism and from foreign chains, strikes powerful blows against imperialism" ("The Fourth International and the War").
At the same time, the Fourth International knows, and openly warns in advance, the backward nations that their belated national states can no longer count on an independent democratic development. Surrounded by a decadent capitalism and entangled in imperialist contradictions, the independence of a backward state can only be half-fictitious, and its political regime, under the pressure of internal class contradictions and external pressure, will inevitably fall into a dictatorship directed against the people, analogous to the regime of the People's Party in Turkey or of the Kuomintang; the same will hold true tomorrow for the regime of Gandhi in India; the struggle for the national independence of the colonies is, from the point of view of the revolutionary proletariat, nothing but a transitional stage on the road that draws the backward countries toward the international socialist revolution.
The Fourth International erects no watertight bulkheads between backward and advanced countries, between democratic and socialist revolutions. It combines them and subordinates them to the world struggle of the oppressed against the oppressors. Just as the sole revolutionary force of our epoch is the international proletariat, so the only programme genuinely capable of doing away with all social and national oppression is the programme of permanent revolution.
THE GREAT LESSON OF CHINA
The tragic experience of China constitutes a great lesson for the oppressed peoples. The Chinese revolution of 1925-1927 had every chance of winning. A unified and transformed China would then have constituted a powerful fortress of freedom in the Far East. The entire destiny of Asia, and to a certain degree of the whole world, might have been different. But the Kremlin, lacking confidence in the Chinese masses and seeking the friendship of the generals, used all its authority to subordinate the Chinese proletariat to the bourgeoisie and thus helped Chiang Kai-shek crush the Chinese revolution. Disappointed, disunited, weakened, China lay open to Japanese invasion.
Like every doomed political regime, the Stalinist oligarchy is henceforth incapable of learning the lessons of history. At the outset of the Sino-Japanese war, the Kremlin once again placed the Communist party under Chiang Kai-shek's servitude, crushing in the bud the revolutionary initiative of the Chinese proletariat. This war, now nearing its third anniversary, could long ago have ended in real catastrophe for Japan, had China conducted it as a genuine people's war, resting on an agrarian revolution and setting the Japanese soldiery ablaze in the fire of its own conflagration. But the Chinese bourgeoisie fears its own armed masses more than its Japanese conquerors. If Chiang Kai-shek, the sinister executioner of the Chinese revolution, is compelled by circumstances to wage the war, his programme still rests, as before, on the oppression of his own workers and on compromises with the imperialists.
The war in East Asia will be increasingly bound up with the imperialist world war. The Chinese people will be able to achieve independence only under the leadership of a young proletariat, ready for sacrifice, whose indispensable self-confidence will be reborn thanks to the resurgent world revolution. This proletariat will know how to trace a firm line of orientation. The course of events places on the agenda the development of our Chinese section and its transformation into a powerful revolutionary party.
TASKS OF THE REVOLUTION IN INDIA
In the very first weeks of the war, the Indian masses exerted growing pressure, forcing the opportunist "national" leaders to speak an unaccustomed language. But woe to the Indian people if they place their trust in fine words! Behind the mask of the slogan of national independence, Gandhi has already hastened to proclaim his refusal to create difficulties for Great Britain during the present severe crisis. As if the oppressed had never, anywhere or at any time, been able to free themselves without exploiting the difficulties of their oppressors!
Gandhi's "moral" repugnance to the use of violence simply reflects the fear of the Indian bourgeoisie before its own masses. This bourgeoisie has excellent reasons to presume that British imperialism will drag it down in its own collapse. For its part, London warns that at the first sign of disobedience it will employ "all necessary measures," including of course aviation, which is lacking on the western front. There is a clearly organized division of labour between the colonial bourgeoisie and the British government. Gandhi needs the threats of Chamberlain and Churchill in order to paralyse the revolutionary movement with a greater chance of success.
In the near future, the antagonism between the Indian masses and the bourgeoisie promises to become all the sharper as the imperialist war increasingly turns, for the Indian bourgeoisie, into a gigantic commercial enterprise. By opening up an exceptionally favourable market for raw materials, it can rapidly promote Indian industry. If the complete destruction of the British Empire severs the umbilical cord linking Indian capitalism to the City of London, the national bourgeoisie will quickly seek a new patron in Wall Street. The material interests of the bourgeoisie determine its policy with the same force as the laws of gravitation.
So long as the liberation movement is controlled by the exploiting class, it will remain incapable of breaking out of the impasse. The only means capable of welding the whole of India together is agrarian revolution, pursued under the banner of national independence. A revolution led by the proletariat will be directed not only against British domination but also against the Indian princes, the foreign concessions, the notables of the national bourgeoisie, and the leaders of the National Congress, as well as against the leaders of the Muslim League. It is a pressing task for the Fourth International to create a stable and powerful section in India.
The treacherous policy of class collaboration, by which the Kremlin, over the last five years, helped the capitalist governments prepare for war, was abruptly abandoned by the bourgeoisie as soon as it ceased to need a pacifist disguise. But in the colonial and semi-colonial countries — not only in China and India but in Latin America — the imposture of "popular fronts" continues to paralyse the labouring masses, converting them into cannon fodder for the "progressive" bourgeoisie and thereby creating a native political base for imperialism.
THE FUTURE OF LATIN AMERICA
The monstrous growth of armaments in the United States is preparing a violent solution to the complex contradictions of the Western hemisphere and will soon place point-blank the question of the destiny of the countries of Latin America.
The interlude of the "good neighbour" policy is drawing to a close. Roosevelt, or his successor, will soon brandish the iron fist out of the velvet glove. The theses of the Fourth International state: "South and Central America can free themselves from their backwardness and servitude only by uniting all their states into a powerful federation. This grandiose historical task is destined to be resolved not by a backward South American bourgeoisie, a wholly prostituted agent of foreign imperialism, but by the young South American proletariat, the designated leader of the oppressed masses. Hence the slogan of the struggle against violence, against the intrigues of world capitalism, and against the bloody work of the native comprador cliques is: The Soviet United States of South and Central America." Written six years ago, these lines have today acquired a particularly burning relevance.
It is only under its own revolutionary leadership that the proletariat of the colonies and semi-colonies will be able to seal an invincible collaboration with the proletariat of the metropolitan centres and with the world working class as a whole. Only this collaboration can lead the oppressed peoples to a complete and definitive emancipation through the overthrow of imperialism throughout the world. A victory of the international proletariat will allow the colonized countries to spare themselves the long and painful stage of capitalist development by opening to them the possibility of arriving at socialism in intimate collaboration with the proletariat of the advanced countries.
The perspective of permanent revolution in no way means that the backward countries must wait for a signal from the advanced countries, or that the colonial peoples must patiently wait for the proletariat of the metropolitan centres to liberate them. Heaven helps those who help themselves. The workers must develop the revolutionary struggle in every colonial or imperialist country where favourable conditions are established, and thereby set an example for the workers of other countries. Only initiative and activity, resolve and boldness, can truly give substance to the slogan: "Workers of all countries, unite!"
THE RESPONSIBILITY IN THE WAR OF THE TRAITOROUS LABOUR LEADERS
The victory of the Spanish revolution could have opened an era of revolutionary upheaval throughout Europe, and thereby prevented the present world war. But this heroic revolution, which contained within itself every possibility of victory, was smothered in the embrace of the Second and Third Internationals, with the active cooperation of the anarchists. The proletariat found itself impoverished of another great hope and enriched with the lessons of another monstrous betrayal.
The powerful movement of the French proletariat in June 1936 revealed exceptionally favourable conditions for the revolutionary conquest of power. A French soviet republic would immediately have acquired revolutionary hegemony in Europe, created revolutionary repercussions in every country, shaken the totalitarian regimes, and thereby spared humanity the present imperialist carnage with its countless victims. But the utterly vile, cowardly, and treacherous policy of Léon Blum and Jouhaux, actively supported by the French section of the Comintern, led to the collapse of one of the most promising movements of the last decade.
The strangling of the Spanish revolution and the sabotage of the proletarian offensive in France, these two tragic facts, stand at the threshold of the present war. The bourgeoisie has convinced itself that, with such labour "leaders" at its disposal, it could go forward along any path whatsoever, even that of a new slaughter of the peoples. The leaders of the Second International prevented the proletariat from overthrowing the bourgeoisie when the first imperialist war broke out. The leaders of the Second and Third Internationals helped the bourgeoisie unleash the second imperialist war. Let it become their tomb!
THE SECOND INTERNATIONAL
The war of 1914-1918 shattered the Second International at a single blow into two camps separated by the trenches. Every socialist party defended its own fatherland. Several years after the war, these enemy brothers, experts in betrayal, were reconciled and proclaimed a mutual amnesty.
Today, the situation within the Second International has, on the face of it, radically changed. All its sections, without exception, are politically on one and the same side of the military lines, in the camp of the Allies; some because they are in democratic countries, others because they are émigrés from belligerent or neutral countries. German Social Democracy, which followed a contemptible chauvinist policy under the banner of the Hohenzollerns during the first imperialist war, is today a "defeatist" party in the service of France and England. It would be inexcusable to believe that these hardened lackeys have become revolutionaries. There is a simpler explanation. Wilhelmine Germany offered the reformists ample opportunities for personal sinecures in the parliaments, the municipalities, the trade unions, and other posts besides. The defence of Germany was the defence of a well-filled trough, into which the labour bureaucracy plunged its snout. "Social democracy remains patriotic so long as the existing regime assures it of profits and privileges," we said in our theses six years ago. The Russian Mensheviks and Populists were patriots even under the tsar, when they had their own factions in the Duma, their own newspapers, their own trade-union officials, and hoped for further progress along this road. Now that they have lost all this, they have adopted a defeatist position toward the USSR.
The present unanimity of the Second International is thus explained by the fact that all its sections hope that the Allies will preserve their posts and their incomes in the labour bureaucracy of the democratic countries, and will restore these posts and incomes in the totalitarian countries. Social democracy is incapable of going beyond its impotent dreams of patronage by the "democratic" bourgeoisie. These political invalids are utterly incapable of struggle, even when their own interests are at stake.
This fact was revealed as clearly as possible in Scandinavia, which appeared to constitute the safest sanctuary of the Second International, and where all three countries had for many years been governed by a moderate, realistic, reformist, and pacifist social democracy. Socialism there was what these gentlemen called conservative royal democracy, plus the state church, plus paltry social reforms made possible for a time by the limitation of military expenditure. Backed by the League of Nations and protected by "neutrality," the Scandinavian governments counted on years of quiet, peaceful development. But the imperialist masters paid no attention to their calculations. They were forced to dodge the blows of fate. When the USSR invaded Finland, all three governments proclaimed themselves neutral toward Finland. When Germany invaded Denmark and Norway, Sweden proclaimed its neutrality toward both victims of aggression. Denmark managed to declare itself neutral with respect to itself. Norway, at the mouth of the cannons of her guardian England, alone made a few symbolic gestures of self-defence. These heroes were entirely willing to live off their democratic fatherland but felt little inclination to die for it. The war they had not foreseen swept away, in passing, the hopes of a peaceful revolution under the reign of king and God. The Scandinavian paradise, last refuge of the hopes of the Second International, turned into one small sector of the general imperialist hell.
The Social Democratic opportunists know only one policy, that of passive adaptation. Under the conditions of decadent capitalism, no other road is left to them than to surrender their positions one after another. They have gradually gnawed away at their already wretched programme, gradually scaled down their demands, and even renounced them altogether; they have continuously retreated, to the point where nothing remained for them but to take refuge in a rat-hole. But even there, the pitiless hand of the imperialists drags them out by the tail. Such is the brief history of the Second International. It is dying under the blows of the present war for the second time and, it must be thought, this time forever.
THE THIRD INTERNATIONAL
The policy of the degenerate Third International, a mixture of crude opportunism and unbridled adventurism, exerts on the working class an influence even more demoralizing, if possible, than that of its elder sister, the Second International. The revolutionary party builds its entire policy on the class consciousness of the workers; the Comintern concerns itself only with contaminating and poisoning that class consciousness.
The official propagandists of each of the belligerent camps sometimes quite correctly denounce the crimes of the opposing camp. Goebbels reveals a good number of truths about British violence against India. The English and French press has written many penetrating things about the foreign policy of Hitler and Stalin. However, this one-sided propaganda is itself the worst poison of chauvinism. Half-truths are the most dangerous kind of lies.
The entire present propaganda of the Kremlin belongs to this category. After five years of the basest and crudest flattery addressed to the democracies, when all "communism" was reduced to a monotonous denunciation of the fascist aggressors, the Comintern suddenly discovered, in the autumn of 1939, the criminal imperialism of the western democracies. Since then, not one further word of condemnation for the destruction of Czechoslovakia and Poland, the seizure of Denmark and Norway, and the repugnant bestialities inflicted by the Hitlerite gangs on the Polish and Jewish peoples! Hitler was transformed into a peace-loving vegetarian, continually provoked by the western imperialists. The Franco-British alliance was no longer mentioned in the Comintern press except as "the imperialist bloc against the German people." Goebbels himself could not have cooked up anything better! The émigré German Communist party burned with love for its fatherland; and, since the German fatherland has not ceased to be fascist, it followed that the German Communist party adopted a social-fascist position. The time had finally come when the Stalinist theory of "social fascism" was incarnated in reality.
At first glance, the conduct of the French and English sections of the Communist International appears diametrically opposed. In contrast to the Germans, they were forced to attack their own governments. However, this sudden defeatism was not internationalism but a disfigured variety of patriotism. These gentlemen consider that their fatherland is the Kremlin, on which their well-being depends. Many French Stalinists behaved with undeniable courage under the blows of persecution, but the political content of this courage was tainted by their idealization of the rapacious policy of the enemy camp. What could French workers think of this?
Revolutionary internationalists have always been depicted by reaction as agents of the external enemy. The Comintern created such a situation for its French and English sections that it furnished the best grounds for such an accusation, and thereby forcibly drove the workers into the patriotic camp, or else condemned them to confusion and passivity.
The Kremlin's policy is simple: to sell the Comintern to Hitler along with oil and manganese. But the doglike servility with which these people lend themselves to being sold irrefutably testifies to the internal corruption of the Comintern. Its agents have neither principles, nor honour, nor conscience left; all that remains to them is a supple spine. But people with supple spines have never yet led a revolution.
Stalin's friendship with Hitler will not last forever, nor even for long. Before this manifesto reaches the masses, the Kremlin's foreign policy may undergo a fresh turn. In that case, the character of Comintern propaganda will change too. If the Kremlin draws closer to the democracies, the Comintern will once more dig out of its warehouses the Brown Book of National Socialist crimes. But this will not mean that its propaganda will take on a revolutionary character. In changing its label it will remain just as servile as before. A revolutionary policy demands, above all, that the masses be told the truth. But the Comintern lies systematically. We turn to the exploited of the whole world and say to them: do not believe the liars!
THE SOCIAL DEMOCRATS AND STALINISTS IN THE COLONIES
Parties bound to exploiters and to privileges are organically incapable of waging an honest struggle on behalf of the most exploited layers of the workers and the colonial peoples. Thus the true face of the Second and Third Internationals is revealed with special clarity in their attitude toward the colonies.
Acting as counsel for the slave-masters, and as a shareholder participating in the profits of slavery, the Second International possesses not a single section in the colonies, if we set aside a few chance groups of colonial officials, especially French Freemasons, and, in general, a few "leftist" careerists who live off the native population. Having renounced in good time the "unpatriotic" conception of turning the colonial population against the "democratic fatherland," the Second International has earned for itself the privilege of supplying the bourgeoisie with Colonial Ministers — that is, with slave overseers (Sidney Webb, Marius Moutet, and others).
The Third International, which began with a courageous revolutionary appeal to all the oppressed peoples, has itself quickly and completely prostituted itself on the colonial question. A few years before Moscow found it opportune to conclude an alliance with the imperialist democracies, the Comintern put forward the slogan of national emancipation not only for Ethiopia and Albania but also for Austria. But for the English and French colonies it confined itself modestly to wishing for a few "reasonable" reforms. The Comintern then defended the Indians, not against Great Britain, but against possible attacks by Japan, and Tunisia against the claws of Mussolini. Now the situation has abruptly changed.
Complete independence for India, Egypt, Algeria! — Dimitrov will accept nothing less. Arabs and Blacks have rediscovered their best friend in Stalin, not counting, of course, Mussolini and Hitler. The German section of the Comintern, with the characteristic impudence of this gang of parasites, defends Poland and Czechoslovakia against the plots of British imperialism. These people are capable of anything and ready for anything: a new turn in Kremlin orientation, back toward the western democracies, would once more bring them to respectfully petition London and Paris for the granting of liberal reforms to their colonies.
In contrast to the Second International, the Comintern, thanks to its great tradition, exercises an undeniable influence in the colonies, but its social base has changed in line with its political evolution. At present, the Comintern rests, in the colonial countries, upon the layer that constitutes the traditional base of the Second International in the metropolitan centres. The crumbs that fall, one by one, from colonial superprofits have allowed imperialism to create the appearance of a native labour aristocracy in the colonial and semi-colonial countries. Insignificant compared with its model in the metropolitan centres, it nonetheless stands out from general poverty and tenaciously defends its privileges. The labour aristocracy and bureaucracy of the colonial and semi-colonial countries, along with state officials, furnish particularly servile recruits to the Kremlin's "friends." One of the most repugnant representatives of this type in Latin America is the Mexican lawyer Lombardo Toledano, whom the Kremlin has rewarded for his intimate services by elevating him to the decorative post of president of the Latin American Trade Union Federation.
By posing without evasion the questions of the class struggle, the war creates for these tricksters and weathervanes a very difficult position, one that true Bolsheviks must exploit in order to sweep the Comintern out of the colonial countries once and for all.
CENTRISM AND ANARCHISM
By testing everything that exists and rejecting everything that is rotten, the war represents a mortal danger for the surviving Internationals. A considerable part of the Comintern bureaucracy, especially in the event of a change of course by the Soviet Union, will infallibly turn toward its own imperialist fatherland. The workers, on the contrary, will move ever further to the left. Under such conditions, splits and ruptures are inevitable. Numerous symptoms also point to the possibility of a rupture within the "left" wing of the Second International. Centrist groups of various origins will emerge, break away, create new "fronts," "camps," and so on. Yet our epoch will discover that centrism is an untenable position. The pathetic and tragic role played in the Spanish revolution by the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (POUM), the most serious and most honest of the centrist organizations, will always remain a terrible warning in the memory of the advanced proletariat.
But history loves repetitions. The possibility cannot be excluded of new attempts to build a new international organization on the model of the two-and-a-half International, or this time, of a "three-and-a-quarter" International. Such initiatives deserve attention only insofar as they reflect far deeper processes occurring within the working masses. But it can be affirmed in advance with certainty that centrist "fronts," "camps," and "Internationals," lacking any theoretical foundation, any revolutionary tradition, and any finished programme, will be nothing but ephemeral. We shall help them along with a merciless criticism of their indecision and their pusillanimity.
This sketch of the bankruptcy of the old workers' organizations would be incomplete if we failed to mention anarchism. Its decline constitutes one of the most undeniable phenomena of our epoch. Even before the first imperialist war, the French anarcho-syndicalists found a way to become the worst opportunists and servants of the bourgeoisie. During the last war, most of the international anarchist leaders became patriots. In the heat of the civil war, the Spanish anarchists took posts in bourgeois ministries. Anarchist phrase-mongers deny the state so long as it has no need of them. But at the hour of danger they become, just like the Social Democrats, agents of the capitalist class.
The anarchists entered the present war without a programme, without a single idea, under a banner sullied by their betrayal of the Spanish proletariat. Today they are incapable of offering the workers anything but patriotic demoralization seasoned with humanitarian lamentations. In seeking to draw closer to those anarchist workers who are genuinely ready to fight for the interests of their class, we shall at the same time ask them to break completely with those leaders who, in war as in revolution, serve as errand boys for the bourgeoisie.
THE TRADE UNIONS AND THE WAR
While the magnates of monopoly capitalism dominate the official organs of state power and control them from above, the opportunist leaders of the trade unions stand on the steps of state power, building support for it among the working masses. It would be impossible for them to perpetuate this dirty work so long as workers' democracy is maintained within the unions. Hence the internal regime within the unions, following the model of the bourgeois state regime, has become increasingly authoritarian. In wartime, the trade-union bureaucracy definitively becomes the military police of the army general staff within the working class.
But no amount of zeal will save it. War brings nothing but death and destruction to the present reformist trade unions. The youngest union members are being mobilized for the slaughter. They are replaced by children, women, and old people — that is, by the layers least capable of resistance. Every country will emerge from the war in such a state of ruin that the standard of living of the workers will be thrown back a hundred years. Reformist trade unions are only possible under a regime of bourgeois democracy. But the first institution destined for defeat in the course of the war will be thoroughly rotten democracy. In its final ruin it will drag down with it all the workers' organizations that served as its support. There will be no more room for reformist unions. Capitalist reaction will destroy them without mercy. Workers must be warned of this prospect at once, and loudly enough for everyone to hear.
A new epoch demands new methods. New methods demand new leaders. The unions can be saved by one route only: by transforming them into fighting organizations dedicated to victory over capitalist anarchy and imperialist banditry. The unions will play a prominent role in the building of the socialist economy, but on the prior condition that the capitalist class be overthrown and the means of production nationalized. The unions will avoid being buried under the ruins of the war only if they engage on the road of the socialist revolution.
THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL
The proletarian vanguard is the irreconcilable enemy of imperialist war. But it does not fear this war. It accepts battle on the arena chosen by the enemy class. It enters the arena with its banner unfurled.
The Fourth International is the only organization that correctly predicted the general course of world events, that foresaw the inevitability of a new imperialist catastrophe, denounced the pacifist impostures of the bourgeois democrats and of the petty-bourgeois adventurers of the Stalinist school; the only one that fought the policy of class collaboration carried out under the name of "popular fronts," pilloried the treacherous role of the Comintern and of the anarchists in Spain, irreconcilably criticized the centrist illusions of the POUM, and continuously hardened its cadres in the spirit of revolutionary class struggle. Our wartime policy merely continues, while reinforcing it, our peacetime policy.
The Fourth International builds its programme on the granite foundations of Marxist theory. It rejects the contemptible eclecticism that currently dominates the ranks of the official labour bureaucracy of the various camps, and which most often serves as a mask for their capitulation to bourgeois democracy. Our programme is set out in a series of documents accessible to everyone. Its spirit can be summed up in two words: proletarian dictatorship.
OUR PROGRAMME IS FOUNDED ON BOLSHEVISM
The Fourth International stands wholeheartedly and completely on the foundations of the revolutionary tradition of Bolshevism and of its organizational methods. Let the petty-bourgeois radicals yelp against centralism. A worker who has taken part even once in a strike knows that no struggle is possible without discipline and firm leadership. Our whole epoch is permeated with the spirit of centralism. Monopoly capitalism has carried economic centralization to its ultimate limits. State centralism on the fascist model has taken on a totalitarian character. The democracies are increasingly striving to match this model. The trade-union bureaucracy mercilessly defends its powerful machine. The Second and Third Internationals have shamelessly used the state apparatus in their struggle against the revolution. Under these conditions, the elementary guarantee of success requires that revolutionary centralism be counterposed to the centralism of reaction. It is indispensable to have a proletarian vanguard organization welded together by iron discipline, a genuine selection of hardened revolutionaries, ready for sacrifice and inspired by an invincible will to conquer. To prepare the offensive carefully and assiduously, and, when the decisive hour strikes, to launch all the forces of the class onto the field of battle without hesitation — only a centralized party that does not hesitate itself is capable of teaching this to the workers.
Frivolous sceptics like to make much of the degeneration of Bolshevik centralism into bureaucratism. As if the entire course of history depended on the structure of a party! In fact, it is the fate of the party that depends on the course of the class struggle. But in any case, the Bolshevik party was the only party that proved in action that it was capable of accomplishing the proletarian revolution. It is precisely such a party that the international proletariat needs today. If the bourgeois regime emerges unpunished from the war, every revolutionary party will undergo degeneration. If the revolution triumphs, the conditions that engender degeneration will disappear.
Under conditions of triumphant reaction, of disillusionment and exhaustion of the masses, in a political atmosphere poisoned by the pernicious decomposition of the traditional organizations of the working class, amid a heap of difficulties and obstacles, the development of the Fourth International will necessarily be slow. Isolated attempts, at first sight broader and more promising, to unify the left wing have been made more than once by centrists who scorned our efforts. Yet all these pretentious attempts were reduced to dust before the masses even had a chance to retain their names. Only the Fourth International continues, with obstinacy, with persistence, and with growing success, to swim against the current.
We have withstood the test!
What characterizes a truly revolutionary organization, above all, is the seriousness with which it carries out and tests its political line at every new turn of events. Centralism is fertilized by democracy. In the fire of war, our sections passionately discuss every question of proletarian policy, test their methods, and shed, along the way, those unstable elements who joined us only out of opposition to the Second and Third Internationals. Parting ways with fellow-travellers on whom one cannot rely constitutes an inevitable overhead cost in the formation of a genuine revolutionary party.
The overwhelming majority of our comrades in the various countries have withstood the war's first test. This fact is of inestimable significance for the future of the Fourth International. Every rank-and-file member of our organization has not only the right but the duty to now consider himself an officer of the revolutionary army that will be created in the very fire of events. The eruption of the masses onto the revolutionary stage will suddenly reveal the insignificance of the opportunist, pacifist, and centrist programmes. A single genuine revolutionary in a factory, a mine, a union, a regiment, on a warship, is worth infinitely more than a hundred pseudo-revolutionary petty bourgeois stewing in their own juice.
The politicians of the grand bourgeoisie are far better able to appreciate the role of the Fourth International than our petty-bourgeois pedants. On the eve of the break in diplomatic relations, the French ambassador, Coulondre, and Hitler, seeking in the course of their last conversation to frighten one another with the consequences of the war, fully agreed in recognizing that the "only real victor" would be the Fourth International. As hostilities began in Poland, the major press in France, Denmark, and other countries reproduced dispatches claiming that in the working-class districts of Berlin, posters had been put up on the walls reading: "Down with Stalin! Long live Trotsky!" This meant: "Down with the Third International! Long live the Fourth International!" When a demonstration was organized by the most resolute workers and students of Prague on the anniversary of national independence, the Nazi "protector," Baron von Neurath, issued an official statement holding Czech "Trotskyists" responsible for the demonstration. The Prague correspondence appearing in the newspaper edited by Beneš, the former President of the Czechoslovak Republic, confirms the fact that Czech workers are becoming "Trotskyists."
Up to now, all these facts are only symptoms. But they clearly indicate the direction of the evolution. The new generations of workers whom the war will drive onto the road of revolution will rally under our banner.
THE PROLETARIAN REVOLUTION
The fundamental conditions for the victory of a proletarian revolution have been established by historical experience and clarified by theory:
1. the bourgeois impasse and the consequent confusion of the ruling class;
2. acute discontent and efforts toward a decisive change within the ranks of the petty bourgeoisie, without whose support the grand bourgeoisie cannot maintain itself;
3. consciousness of an intolerable situation and readiness for revolutionary action within the ranks of the proletariat;
4. a clear programme and firm leadership of the proletarian vanguard;
these are the four conditions necessary for the victory of a proletarian revolution.
The principal reason for the defeat of many revolutions is rooted in the fact that these conditions rarely reach the necessary degree of maturity at the same moment. Throughout history, war has often been the mother of revolution, precisely because it shakes outmoded regimes, weakens the ruling classes, and hastens the growth of revolutionary indignation among the oppressed classes.
Already, the disorientation of the bourgeoisie, the alarm and discontent of the popular masses, are intense, not only in the belligerent countries but also among the neutrals; these phenomena will intensify with every month of war. In the course of the last twenty years, it is true, the proletariat has suffered defeat after defeat, each graver than the last; it was disappointed by its old parties and entered the war undeniably depressed. But one should not overestimate the stability and staying power of such moods. Events created them; events will dispel them.
War, like revolution, is made first and foremost by the youngest generation. Millions of young people, unable to find their way into the factory, began their lives as unemployed and thereby remained on the margins of political life. Today they are finding their place there, or will find it tomorrow: the state organizes them into regiments and thereby furnishes them with excellent ground for revolutionary unification; without a doubt, the war will also shake the apathy of the older generations.
THE PROBLEM OF LEADERSHIP
There remains the question of leadership to examine. Will the revolution not be betrayed once again, because two Internationals stand in the service of imperialism while genuinely revolutionary elements constitute only a tiny minority? In other words, will we succeed in forming, in time, a party capable of leading the proletarian revolution? To answer this question correctly, it is necessary to pose it correctly. Naturally, this or that uprising may end, and certainly will end, in defeat for lack of a mature revolutionary leadership. But this is not a matter of a single uprising. It is a matter of an entire revolutionary epoch.
The capitalist world has no way out, unless one considers a prolonged death agony to be such. It is necessary to prepare for long years, if not decades, of war, uprisings, brief intervals of truce, new wars and new uprisings. A young revolutionary party must take such a perspective as its basis. History will furnish it with enough occasions and opportunities to test itself, to accumulate experience, and to mature. The faster the ranks of the vanguard unite, the shorter the epoch of bloody convulsions will be, and the less destruction our planet will suffer. But the great historical problem will not, in any case, be resolved before a revolutionary party has placed itself at the head of the proletariat. The question of tempo and of time intervals is of enormous importance. But it changes neither the general historical perspective nor the direction of our policy. The conclusion is simple: it is necessary to carry out, with tenfold energy, the task of educating and organizing the proletarian vanguard. This is precisely wherein lies the task of the Fourth International.
Those commit the gravest error who, seeking to justify pessimistic conclusions, simply point to the sad consequences of the last war. In the first place, the last war engendered the October revolution, on whose lessons the world workers' movement lives today. Secondly, the conditions of the present war differ profoundly from those of 1914. The economic position of the imperialist states, including the United States, is infinitely worse today, and the destructive power of the war infinitely greater than was the case a quarter of a century ago. There is thus ample reason to expect, this time, a far more rapid evolution and a far more decisive reaction on the part of workers and soldiers.
The experience of the first war has not failed to affect the masses profoundly. The Second International drew its principal strength from the still almost intact democratic and pacifist illusions of the masses. The workers seriously hoped that the war of 1914 would be the last war. Soldiers sacrificed their lives to spare their children a new massacre. It was only thanks to this hope that men were able to withstand the war for more than four years. Today nothing remains of these democratic and pacifist illusions. The peoples endure the present war without any longer believing in it, without expecting anything from it but new chains. This applies also to the totalitarian states. The older generation of workers who bore the burden of the first imperialist war, and who have not forgotten its lessons, is far from having been eliminated from the arena. The next generation, which came of age during the last war, still hears ringing in its ears the false slogans of patriotism and pacifism. The priceless political experience of these layers, currently crushed under the weight of the war machine, will reveal its full strength at the moment when the war compels the exploited masses to rise openly against their government.
SOCIALISM OR SLAVERY
Our theses ("The Fourth International and the War," 1934) state: "The exposure of the entirely reactionary, decadent, and murderous nature of modern capitalism, the collapse of democracy, of reformism, and of pacifism, and the proletariat's pressing and burning need to find a way of salvation out of inevitable ruin, place the world revolution once more on the agenda with renewed force."
Today it is no longer a question, as it was in the course of the nineteenth century, of simply ensuring a swifter and healthier development of economic life; today it is a question of saving humanity from suicide. It is precisely the acuteness of the historical problem that makes the ground give way completely beneath the feet of the opportunist parties. The revolutionary party, on the contrary, finds an inexhaustible source of strength in the consciousness that it expresses an inexorable historical necessity.
Moreover, it is not permissible to place on the same plane the present revolutionary vanguard and the isolated internationalists who raised their voices at the beginning of the last war. Only the Russian Bolshevik party then represented a revolutionary force. But even it, in its overwhelming majority, with the exception of a small émigré group around Lenin, did not manage to free itself from its national blinkers and rise to the perspective of world revolution.
The Fourth International, numerically and above all thanks to its preparation, occupies a position infinitely more advantageous than that of its predecessors at the outset of the last war. The Fourth International is the direct heir of Bolshevism in its full flowering. The Fourth International assimilates the tradition of the October revolution and has translated into theory the experiences of the richest historical period, that which elapsed between the two imperialist wars. It has faith in itself and in its future.
War, let us recall once again, enormously accelerates political development. Great tasks that only yesterday seemed years, even decades, away may appear directly before us within two or three years, or even sooner. Programmes founded on the ordinary conditions of peacetime will remain suspended between heaven and earth. The programme of transitional demands of the Fourth International, on the other hand, which seemed so "unreal" to short-sighted politicians, will reveal its full significance in the course of the process of mobilizing the masses for the conquest of state power.
At the start of the new revolution, the opportunists will once again attempt, just as they did twenty-five years ago, to impress upon the workers the idea that it is impossible to build socialism on ruins and devastation. As if the proletariat were free to choose! One necessarily builds upon the foundations that history provides. The Russian revolution showed that workers' power can raise up even a very backward country, drawing it out of the deepest poverty. Still greater miracles are open to the proletariat of the advanced countries. War destroys buildings, railways, factories, mines, but it cannot destroy technology, science, professional skills. Having created its own state, correctly organized its own ranks, put back to work the technicians inherited from the bourgeois regime, and organized production according to a unified plan, the proletariat will not only restore, within a few years, everything the war has destroyed, but will also create the conditions for the greatest flourishing of culture on the foundation of solidarity.
WHAT IS TO BE DONE?
This manifesto is adopted by the emergency conference of the Fourth International at the moment when, after having submerged Holland and Belgium and crushed the initial resistance of the Allied troops, the German armies are rolling like a tide of fire toward Paris and the Channel. In Berlin, they are already hastening to celebrate victory. In the Allied camp, alarm is turning to panic. We have neither the means nor the need to engage in strategic speculation about the coming stages of the war. In any case, Hitler's prodigious superiority has, for the present, set its seal on the political physiognomy of the entire world.
"But is not the working class, under present conditions, obliged to help the democracies in their struggle against German fascism?" This is how the question is posed by broad petty-bourgeois circles, for whom the proletariat always remains merely an auxiliary instrument of this or that bourgeois faction. We reject this policy with indignation. There is naturally a difference between political regimes within bourgeois society, just as there is a difference in comfort between the various carriages of a train. But when the entire train is being hurled into an abyss, the distinction between a decadent democracy and a murderous fascism disappears in the face of the collapse of the capitalist system as a whole.
By his victories and his bestialities, Hitler naturally provokes the sharp hatred of workers throughout the world. But between this legitimate hatred of the workers and giving aid to their weaker but no less reactionary enemies, there lies an unbridgeable gulf. The victory of British and French imperialism would be no less frightful for the ultimate destinies of humanity than that of Hitler or of Mussolini. Bourgeois democracy cannot be saved. By helping their own bourgeoisie against foreign fascism, the workers would only accelerate the victory of fascism in their own country. The task that history poses is not to support one part of the capitalist system against another, but to have done with the system as a whole.
THE WORKERS MUST LEARN THE MILITARY ARTS
The militarization of the masses is intensifying every day. We reject the grotesque pretension of suppressing militarization through hollow pacifist protests. All the great questions will be decided in the near future, weapons in hand. The workers will not fear weapons: on the contrary, they will learn to use them. Revolutionaries no more separate themselves from the people in war than in peace. A Bolshevik strives to become not only the best trade unionist but also the best soldier.
We do not wish the bourgeoisie to push onto the battlefields, at the last hour, soldiers who have not been trained, or only half-trained. We demand that the state immediately provide workers and the unemployed with the opportunity to learn the handling of the rifle, the grenade, the machine gun, the cannon, the aeroplane, the submarine, and other instruments of war. Special military schools are needed, functioning in conjunction with the trade unions, so that workers may become qualified specialists in the military art, capable of assuming positions of command.
THIS WAR IS NOT OUR WAR!
At the same time, let us not forget for a single instant that this war is not our war. In opposition to the Second and Third Internationals, the Fourth International builds its policy not on the fortunes of the arms of the capitalist states, but on the transformation of the imperialist war into civil war, a war of workers against capitalists, on the overthrow of the ruling classes of every country, on the world socialist revolution. Defeats on the front, the destruction of national capital, the occupation of territories, the ruin of individual states represent, from this point of view, nothing but tragic episodes on the road that leads to the reconstruction of modern society.
Regardless of the course of the war, we carry out our fundamental task; we explain to the workers the irreconcilable opposition between their interests and those of blood-thirsty capitalism; we mobilize the exploited against imperialism; we spread the unity of workers of all belligerent and neutral countries; we call for the fraternization of workers and soldiers in every country, as well as the fraternization of soldiers with the soldiers on the opposite side of the front; we mobilize women and youth against the war; we pursue a constant, persistent, tireless preparation of the revolution in the factories, in the workshops, in the villages, in the barracks, at the front, and in the fleet.
Such is our programme. Proletarians of the world, there is no other road than that of union under the banner of the Fourth International!