One central, practical consequence flowing from the political resolution submitted to this congress by the United Secretariat Majority overshadows all others—that is, that the sections of the Fourth International must make a radical turn to immediately organize to get a large majority of our members and leaders into industry and into industrial unions.
This task links the four line resolutions we are going to vote on. It flows from the analysis of the world situation developed in the political resolution that we discussed. So I'm not going to review in detail the structural, demographic, and economic changes behind this decision.
The resolution points to the growing weight of the proletariat in all three sectors of the world revolution. It points to the urban explosions and proletarian forms of organization that have been, and will continue to be, the focus of revolutionary upsurges in the years ahead.
Combined with these structural factors behind the turn are: on the one hand, the long-run stagnation that the world capitalist system faces and the antilabor offensive it engenders; and, on the other, the undefeated working class that the bourgeoisie faces going into this crisis. To this capitalist crisis must be added the growing crisis of world imperialism.
All this makes the world situation more, not less, explosive. It means that uncontrolled forces—spurred either by the actions of the oppressors or those of the oppressed—can be set into motion. We've seen this in Iran and Nicaragua. And this explosive potential is not limited to the semicolonial world.
Superimposed on these factors is another very important conjunctural factor, the world recession of 1974-75. This downturn, the first generalized recession on a world scale since the 1930s, came on top of the events that had transpired since 1968. What this definitively set in motion throughout the world is an intensifying austerity drive by the ruling class against the working class, against all the oppressed, and against the political rights the masses need to organize and fight back. This is not just a tactical or short-run policy of the rulers. It is a fundamental policy that economic realities force them to carry out.
The ultimate target of the rulers' austerity drive is the industrial workers, for the very same reason that the industrial workers have been at the center of our strategy since the founding of Marxism—their economic strength; their social weight; the example they set for the whole class; the power of their unions to affect the wages, conditions, and thus the entire social framework of the class struggle; their resulting potential political power vis à vis the enemy class; the obstacle they pose to rightist solutions by the bourgeoisie. The industrial workers are both the source of most of the rulers' surplus value and the ultimate enemy that the rulers must defeat if the entire economic and social crisis of their system is to be turned around.
The ruling class cannot afford, and will not allow, these industrial workers to organize solidarity with fellow workers, with the oppressed, and with their allies throughout the world. It cannot afford, and will not allow, the industrial workers to develop trade-union democracy so that the power of the working class can be organized and used.
In other words, the rulers will not allow without a mighty battle the evolution of a class-struggle left wing in the labor movement.
This ruling-class offensive brings down increasing pressure on the entire working class, on national minorities, on women, on every exploited and oppressed person fighting for their rights. It intensifies pressures on small vanguards seeking to chart a course forward toward the victory of the working class. Everyone who is seeking the revolutionary road, a class-struggle perspective, everyone who is seeking progressive alliances, feels this pressure. It is a fundamental aspect of the austerity drive, of the offensive of the rulers—and one that will be magnified as the offensive deepens.
As we discussed yesterday, the only possible reversal of the capitalist crisis, in the judgment of the political resolution, is through a large and decisive enough defeat of the industrial working class to rationalize and re structure capital, to attack with force every upsurge of the colonial peoples, and thus open a new period of expansion. What conclusions must we draw from this?
That a political radicalization of the working class—uneven and at different tempos from country to country—is on the agenda.
That the rulers' offensive will force big changes in the industrial unions.
And that the key for revolutionists is to be there, in and part of the decisive sector of the working class, prior to these showdowns.
It is there that we will meet the forces to build the Fourth International, to build workers parties. It is there that we will meet the young workers, the growing numbers of women workers, the workers of oppressed nationalities, and the immigrant workers. It is inside the industrial working class that revolutionary parties will get a response to our program and recruits to our movement.
In light of all these factors it's also important to step back and look at the turn from a broader historical point of view. Our movement's current social composition is totally abnormal. This is a historical fact, not a criticism. In fact, far from being a criticism, it was our movement's ability to recruit from the new generation of radicalizing youth—from the early sixties on—that today poses the possibility of making this turn. And this possibility now coincides with a pressing political necessity.
Only parties not only proletarian in program, but in composition and experience, can lead the workers and their allies in the struggles that are on the agenda.
Only parties of industrial workers will be able to withstand the pressures, including the ideological pressures, of the ruling class. And these pressures will increase.
Only such parties will have their hand on the pulse of the working class, and thereby not misread their own attitudes, ignorance, and moods as those of the workers. In other words, only parties of industrial workers can move forward and outward.
Only parties of workers that have been tested in action by the workers themselves, long before the decisive showdowns, can decisively grow and chart a way forward. Only that kind of party can attract and link up with the militant class-struggle currents that will break loose as the crisis of the reformist leaderships and centrist organizations deepens.
Marxism's Proletarian Heritage
We are not blazing a new trail in this regard. In the history of the Marxist movement, the most proletarian parties have been the best parties—the most revolutionary, the least economist, the most political. Go back to the Bolsheviks. Go back to Rosa Luxemburg. Go back to the goals the Fourth International set for itself, with the advice and leadership of Trotsky, at the end of the 1930s.
In fact, it is the proletarian tradition and orientation of the Fourth International that enabled us to arrive where we are today as a unified revolutionary organization on a world scale—an organization that has cadres to make this turn. And it's the turn—universally organized and carried out—that is the only way to preserve and enrich our proletarian orientation.
At the same time, it is crucial to recognize and state clearly that the turn is not a continuation of what we've been doing. It is the way we can continue our proletarian orientation, but to carry out this turn on a world scale we must make a break with what we've previously been doing. That's why we call it a turn.
This turn will dictate no tactics. Our tactics and campaigns in each country are dictated by the class struggle, by the conflict of class forces. But the turn affects every single one of our tactics, all of our political work, all of our institutions, and every single mode of party functioning. The turn is not a sufficient condition to take advantage of the opportunities before us and to meet the crises facing our class. But it is a necessary precondition for the next steps forward. Failing that, we can make no progress.
This is what the world political resolution lays out as the central task for the entire Fourth International: to organize and lead the overwhelming majority of our cadres into industry and the industrial unions "without further delay."
"The goal," according to the resolution, "is parties of experienced worker-Bolsheviks who act as political leaders of their class and its allies."
It goes without saying that we will not carry out the turn in exactly the same way in every country or part of the world, whether we have ten members or a thousand. But for the political and organizational reasons we've discussed, the turn is a universal one for our international movement, in all three sectors of the world revolution. That needs to be understood, so that we can carry out this task as a disciplined world party.
There comes a time when a political problem, a sociological fact, and a leadership decision coincide. This is one of those times. To put our movement in a position to move forward politically, we must simultaneously take our cadres and our program into the decisive sections of our class. Otherwise, we'll become part of the growing crisis of leadership in the world labor movement, rather than part of its solution.
Experiences and Lessons
The resolution was drafted a little more than a year-and-a-half ago. Since that time, our movement has had a great deal more experience with the turn. We've already had the chance to test our conclusions and develop a richer knowledge of the facts than we possibly could have had when we first adopted this resolution. This report and discussion will help us take cognizance of these experiences and changes and, if adopted, report them in printed form to our entire movement.
Of course, there is unevenness from one country to the next in the current stage of implementing the turn. There are differing stages in the development of the political situation in various countries. Some important experiences have been unique to a single section or a single industry. We can put those aside for today's discussion.
But there is also an entire set of experiences that are common everywhere that we have seriously begun the turn—from Iran to Canada, from Sweden to New Zealand. These common lessons are decisive everywhere that we have significant forces in the Fourth International. They are lessons for the practical leadership of the next step forward in carrying out this common task.
What are these lessons of the last few years?
First. There is no possible way to make the turn unless the leaders of the party lead. This means that the leadership must analyze and effectively intervene in the unfolding of the class struggle, so that both the political basis of the turn and its practical application are always presented clearly to our cadres.
Comrades cannot be ordered or shamed to make the turn. They have to be politically convinced, inspired, and organized by the leadership. The membership is waiting to be led on this turn. That's our universal experience.
But this can only be accomplished if the leadership itself goes into industry. Our goal is not just to get a majority of the membership into industry, but a majority of our elected leadership bodies as well, on a local and national level. Only such a leadership can carry through the turn.
Second. The turn has to be approached collectively, not individually. The party must lead comrades into industry. They're not doing it on their own. They're not sent in someplace and then left to fend for themselves. Every time we've done that, we've reaped the whirlwind. We've lost comrades to demoralization, to opponents, to the Stalinists. The turn is a conscious party task, not a routine task of a small group of comrades individually.
Connected with this, we've found everywhere that what is decisive in making the turn and practicing politics in industry is not what comrades accomplish as individuals, but what they accomplish as fractions and as part of the party. Comrades with different strengths and weaknesses work together as a disciplined unit of the party, learning from their joint successes and errors.
Third. Experience has taught us that there is no gradual way of accomplishing the turn. Of course, the turn takes place over a period of time. Comrades go into industry in successive waves, not all at once.
But the turn cannot be presented or implemented as a gradual, routine, or partial campaign. It must be organized and led as a decisive act by the entire organization. Whenever it has been tried any other way, the turn stalls to a halt and recoils, rather than going forward in waves. If we don't recognize this and act on that basis, we will fail; we will not carry out the turn.
When we gather the statistics from each national leadership for the next meeting of the International Executive Committee, we will get a feel for how much progress we're making—country by country—in leading a big majority of comrades into industry.
Fourth. In every single country where we've made progress with the turn, we've learned—sometimes from false starts—that there can be no such things as exempted jobs, or categories of jobs, or exempted layers in the party. Such exemptions always end up as excuses not to carry out the turn, not to participate in the turn. Trade unionists who are now working jobs outside of industry have a particularly important role to play in personally leading party cadres into industry and bringing their experiences to bear in building our fractions. They can provide essential political and practical leadership.
I think we've now by passed a false debate—the debate over the public versus private sectors. What's important is not whether comrades are paid by the government or a private employer. What's important is whether or not we are in factories, mines, mills, transport centers, communication centers—whether in the private or public sector. Our goal is to get into industry, to become part of the industrial working class.
We don't begin by looking for where most women currently are working or where the bureaucracy is weak, although these factors can play a role in target ing particular industrial sectors. We look for where our class is concentrated and where class battles will, by necessity, open up in the coming period. That's where decisive class-struggle leadership will be needed and where we must go. That's the line of the resolution.
We are looking for the natural leaders of the working class—those who are looked to for leadership by other workers. Some of them have already been elected to union posts, but our eyes are not on official leaders at any level. We'll win the best of them by going after the young rebels in the working class. They will be decisive for us and for our class in the coming period. That's who we're after.
Fifth. This recognition of the centrality of young workers drives home the importance of launching, rebuilding, or helping to strengthen revolutionary youth organizations. Having a youth organization—and one that is fully geared into the industrial turn—becomes more important, not less important, as we concentrate our cadres in industry and the industrial unions.
The world Marxist movement has traditionally recognized the need for proletarian youth organizations as a central party-building instrument. As growing numbers of young industrial workers are repel led by capitalism and attracted to radical ideas and alternatives, this need becomes more pressing. There will be a separate report on the youth work of the international later in the Congress, so I won't attempt to develop this point. But we're learning that we must consciously recognize this as an indispensable part of the turn in order to tap the opportunities before us and make the maximum gains for our parties among radicalizing workers.
What Not to Expect
Our initial experiences with the turn have also taught us what we should not tell comrades to expect.
We can't promise rapid recruitment. That depends on a whole series of other factors—the unfolding of the class struggle, the stage of class politicization, and the capacities of the party.
While we make no promises that the turn will solve other problems facing the party, we can guarantee that the turn puts us in the best position to solve those problems and take advantage of opportunities. And without the turn, we can guarantee disaster.
Finally, we can't promise that the turn will be painless or easy. It's not, because its unlike any other thing we normally do and have become accustomed to. It's not a change in political line or a correction of a political error. It's not a shift in tactics. It's not the launching of a new campaign.
The turn means a change in the life of thousands and thousands of comrades. That's different. And that takes leadership.
Everywhere that we've begun to carry out the turn in a systematic and thorough way, there have been some losses of individual comrades. There are comrades for whom the turn sharply poses the question of what they are doing with their lives, what their personal commitments and priorities are. Then, the party also inevitably makes some errors and false starts. And some other comrades drop away.
But the more important lesson that we've learned is that the turn saves comrades. It prevents demoralization and turns around the malaise that sets in when our parties don't have the necessary political and organizational moorings in the heart of our class. It provides a perspective, and a realistic base from which to move our work forward. Unsuspected capacities in comrades have come to the fore when they get into industry as part of a strong fraction.
That's one of the most crucial aspects of the turn, and another reason why it must be carried out quickly and led decisively.
Some Organizational Conclusions
From our initial experiences, we have also drawn some conclusions on important organizational questions connected with the turn. And all the organizational forms of our parties have to be subordinated to carrying out the turn.
One. Comrades who go into industry have to function as fractions, as a unit, as a collective team—whatever the particular term may be in different sections. They have to have formal structured ways to make decisions democratically, to be tied together politically, to work out problems, and to integrate and develop new comrades that go into industry or are recruit ed there.
If this does not happen, we can isolate, demoralize, and finally lose comrades. They begin to feel personally responsible for making party gains and personally to blame for any failures or setbacks. We carry out work in every other arena collectively, and that's how we must carry out the turn. It is crucial to organize and lead comrades through fractions. And the party leadership must pay close attention to their work.
Two. As we get more and more comrades into industry, it is crucial to pay close attention to maintaining the basic units of the party—branches, or whatever a section may call them—as rounded political bodies. They must be of sufficient size and organized politically so that the comrades in them obtain something there that they cannot get through the industrial fractions or in other way. That is, these basic party units must provide the rounded political experience, leadership, Marxist education, and political discussion that comrades can only get from the party as a whole.
Failure to do this can even exacerbate the problem of how to combine what is often called trade-union or factory work with more general socialist political activity.
Of course, this doesn't solve any of our tactical problems of how to link factory work, trade-union work, with other party tasks and campaigns. Those will be solved concretely in each section and specific situation.
But the lesson that comrades in industry must also be active members of rounded political units of the party—in which they have regular and systematic political decision-making power and responsibilities—is a key one for avoiding unnecessary pitfalls.
Three. The turn both necessitates and helps accomplish further professionalization of the party. The turn makes more immediate and real our concept that every comrade, every worker-Bolshevik, is a professional revolutionist. The need to have a professional apparatus, the willingness of comrades to be full time, the need for professionalism at every level of the organization—all this becomes more necessary as we become parties of industrial workers.
At the same time, it is important to avoid any concept that there are two categories of party members—those in industry and those not in industry. All party members have equal rights and equal responsibilities. The turn in no way establish es a category of second-class membership for comrades who for whatever reason are not currently working an industrial job.
Four. The turn also brings into sharper focus the question of leadership norms and general party norms, which must be re viewed to make sure they are in step with our advance along the historical line of march of our class.
Trotsky wrote a series of letters about these matters to the American Trotskyists in the years leading up to the fight with the petty-bourgeois opposition in the late 1930s, when the party was carrying out an industrial turn. Most of these letters dealt with the leadership question. He listed some key characteristics of proletarian leaders and proletarian attitudes: Seriousness toward your organization and its leadership. Subordinating personal considerations in putting the party first. Having a professional attitude toward it. Being deadly opposed to cynicism, gossip, bureaucratism, super-sensitivity to criticism, and other such things common in petty-bourgeois circles. And above all, looking at things not as me and mine, but as us and ours.
These were not just moral lectures. Trotsky considered changes along these lines—and the open recognition of the need for such changes—to be a precondition to building proletarian parties and a revolutionary international.
In one 1937 letter, Trotsky wrote: "I have re marked hundreds of times that the worker who remains unnoticed in the 'normal' conditions of party life reveals remarkable qualities in a change of the situation when general formulas and fluent pens are not sufficient, where acquaintance with the life of workers and practical capacities are necessary."
In a letter several days later, Trotsky spoke of the need to educate the party in a spirit that "rejects unhealthy criticism, opposition for the sake of opposition." The key to this, he said, is "to change the social composition of the organization—make it a workers organization. ... [Workers] are more patient, more realistic. When you have a meeting of 100 people and between them 60-70-80 are workers, then the 20 intellectuals, petty bourgeois, become ten times more cautious on the question of criticism. It's a more serious, more firm audience."
The petty bourgeois intellectuals' tendency to criticize for the sake of criticism, says Trotsky, is a way to "muffle their inner skepticism."
"The young workers," he says, "will call the gentlemen-skeptics, grievance mon gers, and pessimists to order."
Full-timers in a revolutionary organization, Trotsky stressed, "should have in the first place a good ear, and only in the second place a good tongue." And as the party begins to recruit industrial workers, Trotsky warned, it must "avoid a great danger: namely that the intellectuals and white-collar workers might suppress the worker minority, condemn it to silence, transform the party into a very intelligent discussion club but absolutely not habitable for workers."
Awareness of these questions of attitudes is not only a necessity if we are to carry out the turn to the end; but by driving through the turn, we will have the greatest chance to alter the orientation, combat alien attitudes, and improve the atmosphere and functioning of our parties. We will begin acting as parties of industrial workers.
Educate, Agitate, Organize
Five. The education of the party. As comrades begin the turn, they learn and relearn our program, learn and relearn Marxism. They are constantly challenged to explain and popularize our ideas to their co-workers. So we are obligated to expand and pay more careful attention to political education.
This is one safeguard against the susceptibility among comrades to move away from being political when this turn is being carried out. All history tells us this is a danger.
Six. Improving our newspapers and turning them more and more into workers' papers. It is through our party press that we can speak to the largest number and broadest layers of workers. Its how we explain why the need for the labor movement to begin thinking socially and acting politically is a life-or-death question.
Our own members are the single most important audience for the party press, along with those in our class and among the oppressed who look to us for political analysis and leadership. What we put in our newspapers, and how we explain things, helps us train our cadres as worker. Bolsheviks rather than radical trade unionists. It helps steel the party against economist tendencies to reduce the struggles of the allies of our class—women, the oppressed nationalities, and so on—to union struggles or to struggles between employees and employers. It helps combat any false ideas that international or other broad political questions cannot be presented to workers at any given period.
Seven. The turn makes more important, not less important, the building of campaign parties—parties that carry out centralized, political campaigns dictated by the national and international class struggle. We need parties that speak politically to the workers through our actions and our political campaigns, not primarily through how we relate to issues or struggles on the job. As the turn is made, these party campaigns are vital safeguards against rightist and economist pressures that have historically affected revolutionists in the working class. If there is one thing that the turn does not change, it is our absolute opposition to any spontaneist concepts of how to build the party and attract workers to it.
Eight. We have begun to learn valuable lessons about the relationship of the turn to our participation in building the struggles of women, oppressed nationalities, and around issues such as nuclear power or international solidarity. We've learned not to confuse our trade-union or factory fractions with our fractions set up to lead work in various other particular struggles.
Of course, there is an interlink. There is a crossover of membership. But we can't reduce one organizational form to the other to carry out our work. To do so simply reflects internally the wrong tendency to reduce the struggles of women, of oppressed nationalities, and of other mass struggles to battles in the factories or the unions. Our turn is a turn outward, not inward.
Struggles that develop inside and outside the labor movement need to be combined and thereby mutually strengthened. Our turn, and the political factors underlying it, greatly expand the possibilities and openings for industrial workers and their unions to be brought into other struggles. We participate in these struggles not only as activists and leaders in them, but more and more as conscious revolutionary leaders of the labor movement.
Our goal is to hasten the convergence of the working class, its struggles, and its organizations with the battles of all the oppressed. We can say in all truthfulness to the oppressed, "Your struggles must not be subordinated to any other struggle." It's only a revolutionary leadership of the working class that can say this and act on that basis. This is crucial to the ability of the working class to forge needed and lasting alliances with all sections of the oppressed in a common battle against the exploiters.
Nine: We have discovered that where the turn has been driven through, women comrades and comrades of the oppressed nationalities have developed more confidence in the party and more confidence in themselves as leaders of their class, their particular struggles, and above all, as leaders of the party.
The turn brings out the best in comrades.
Our turn toward the industrial working class and unions also points in the direction of helping to solve the crisis of leadership in the movements of women and the oppressed nationalities. Today, these struggles confront a crisis of class perspectives. They need to develop a proletarian composition, orientation, and leadership to move their struggles forward. As partisans and participants in these struggles, we will help accelerate the resolution of the leadership crisis from our base in industry, involving our co-workers in these movements and fighting to bring the power of the labor movement behind them.
Iran and Nicaragua
This brings us to the central campaigns and political tasks before the Fourth International, based on discussions we've had in the United Secretariat.
In outlining these tasks, we should first point to the tremendous effort our world movement has mounted to save the lives of our imprisoned Iranian comrades. This is among the proudest chapters of the International over the entire last period. It is the most effective emergency campaign we've ever carried out. Not only did we save the lives of the comrades, but these efforts had a direct and extremely progressive impact on the Iranian revolution. Protest messages appeared regularly in the Iranian press, forcing the government to make a public response. The Iranian comrades have reported on the reaction of their co-workers in industry to the case and to the broad international support in the world labor movement.
As the events of the past few days have demonstrated, the political focus of this effort now will be shifting. With the new deepening of the Iranian revolution, our best defense of the comrades will be the active solidarity that our world movement can help mobilize with the demand of the Iranian people for the extradition of the shah, and the publicity we can give to the role of our Iranian comrades as anti-imperialist fighters with a revolutionary internationalist program to lead the struggle to victory. The more the revolutionary us purge there mounts, the better will be the situation for our imprisoned comrades.
In this showdown between the Iranian masses and U.S. imperialism, our world movement has a vital role to play in educating about and building opposition to the threat of U.S. military aggression. We can help the Iranian people get out their message to the world working class about the crimes of the shah and about their struggle for a just social system free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist domination.
We have a similar responsibility and opportunity concerning events in another part of the world—that's the campaign in solidarity with the Nicaraguan revolution. We are demanding massive aid to help the Nicaraguan people reconstruct their devastated country—aid on a government level, from the mass workers organizations, and from other institutions. Our aim is to help organize, both inside and outside the labor movement, a united-front solidarity campaign to carry out this campaign. This is a burning, immediate need of the Nicaraguan revolution, as shown by the international appeals of the new Sandinista government.
We are convinced that supporters of the Nicaraguan revolution must prepare for major conflicts there in the not-too-distant future. American imperialism will not simply sit back and allow the Nicaraguan workers and peasants to move forward to the second workers state in the Americas. As the struggles that pose that question are deepened, we will have to be prepared for the possibility of intervention—in one form or another—on a massive enough scale to try to per serve capitalist property and restore bourgeois political power. World events and the relationship of class forces, both inside and outside Nicaragua, may preclude direct U.S. intervention. But we cannot assume that. Like the Nicaraguan masses, we must be prepared for direct U.S. or U.S.-backed military moves. That's our special responsibility.
We correctly point to the current tactics of the Nicaraguan and imperialist bourgeoisie, which revolve around small aid to domestic capitalists there to help them buy time. The aim is to try to chip away at the gains, the institutions, and the confidence of the proletariat in Nicaragua.
But we must be under no illusions that the revolutionary process in Nicaragua is subject to the control either of the bourgeois forces on the right, or the FSLN and revolutionary forces on the left. Sections of the Nicaraguan exploiters will continually provoke conflicts and crises, just as initiatives by the workers and peasants can unexpectedly drive the process forward. Regardless of the current tactics of the bourgeoisie, conflicts will continue to erupt, as the capitalists continually probe the capacities of the revolution to withstand their resistance and move forward.
As political leaders, we will be called upon to lead—not only our own forces, but all those who want to defend Nicaragua.
This will be the central worldwide campaign of the Fourth International. We want to participate in united-front solidarity committees. We want to take this issue into the unions, women's organizations, and organizations of the oppressed nationalities.
This campaign must also be prominently featured in our press week in and week out. This means not only coverage of solidarity events in our countries. People will be inspired to become partisans of this campaign as they become more and more aware of the inspiring things that are happening in Nicaragua, and our press hasan indispensable role to play in helping to counter the capitalists' media blackout of the revolution. This is one of the most powerful ways we can build solidarity with Nicaragua and spur activists to participate in the solidarity campaign.
We also must intertwine this effort with defense of Cuba against the imperialist blockade and against the military threats that will escalate as the conflicts in Nicaragua deepen. The Carter administration is already intensifying its military pressure against Cuba in retaliation for its solidarity with Nicaragua, and other anti-imperialist struggles in the Caribbean and Central America. Washington is warning Cuba that it will not tolerate any interference with imperialist plans in Nicaragua. That is the meaning of the moves allegedly in response to Soviet troops in Cuba—the mock assault on Guantánamo, strengthening U.S. naval presence in the Caribbean, attempts to form an inter-American military force for the region, and so on.
Indochina
Another important international campaign centers on Indochina. This will be primarily a propaganda campaign carried out through our press, not an action campaign such as that around Nicaragua.
A major counterrevolutionary drive by imperialism is under way in Indochina today. Using starvation as a political weapon, and cloaked behind a pretense of providing humanitarian aid, the imperialists are engaged in major arming and encouragement of an alliance between the reactionary military regime in Thailand and opposition forces to the current Kampuchean government that range from Pol Pot's army to the Khmer Serei.
Pierre Rousset has drawn up a short memorandum outlining the main themes of this campaign. I am going to read this outline, and we propose to adopt it as part of this report on the tasks of our world movement:
"The framework:
• defense of the Indochinese revolutions in the face of growing imperialist pressure, in which the Pnompenh regime and Vietnamese troops are today fighting imperialist-backed forces;
• defense of the Indochinese workers regimes in face of pressure from the Chinese bureaucracy;
• the struggle to dismantle the entire U.S. imperialist military network in Southeast and East Asia and full support to the revolutionary struggles in the region.
"Concrete axes of the campaign:
"• For urgent massive aid to the Indochinese countries, with no political strings attached. This is especially urgent for Kampuchea, where financial, medical, food and general material help must be sent to Pnompenh to save the Kampuchean people from starvation and disease, as well as helping to rebuild their country and revive the socioeconomic activities that have collapsed. An end to the economic blockade imposed on Vietnam by U.S. imperialism and an end to the embargo of food and economic aid begun this year by Japan and the European imperialist powers.
"• End the brutal imperialist use of the food weapon! The imperialists' fraudulent international "humanitarian" campaigns around the Kampuchean and Vietnamese refugees must be exposed.
"• The Kampuchean refugees in Thailand and around the Thai border must be saved from starvation. But this humanitarian aid must in no case be used as a cover to give material aid to the combined combat forces of the Khmer Rouge on the one hand, and of the Khmer Serei, Khmer Serika, and Sihanoukists on the other hand, as is presently the case. We oppose any such aid. "Thailand, the Thai regime, and the Thai army must not be used as a staging ground to attack the Indochinese countries, through either the Laotian or Kampuchean borders.
"In any conflict that is fundamentally between proimperialist military forces and workers governments and states, revolutionaries cannot and do not remain neutral. They place themselves unequivocally on the side of the threatened workers regimes.
"• Diplomatic recognition of the Vietnamese, Laotian, and Kampuchean governments. Representatives of the Pol Pot-Khieu Samphan army must be thrown out of international bodies such as the United Nations."
These are the outlines we propose for our campaign around Indochina.
Stop Nuclear Power
The fourth task we want to point to is the antinuclear campaign. This will not be organized internationally in the same way as the Nicaraguan campaign, since it depends much more on the particular stage of the movement from country to country. Nonetheless, we want to coordinate on a world scale our participation in this internationally important struggle. This is currently the single largest mass protest movement growing in the world, and it is even spreading from the advanced imperialist countries to the semicolonial countries.
Our goal is clear: to shut down all nuclear reactors now! We want to involve the labor movement in this struggle. We believe that this is a question of survival for the working class, and we take on the rightist demagogy of many class-collaborationist labor leaders who try to convince workers that nuclear power means jobs and progress, when it actually means radiation and the constant peril of mass destruction.
We want to participate and provide leadership to antinuclear campaigns, committees, and coalitions in our various countries. We want to use our growing base in industry to help strengthen the movement by involving industrial workers in this fight. We believe that the labor movement has a big stake in throwing its power behind the struggle to shut down the reactors.
This movement also provides a growing base of opposition to the rapidly expanding arsenal of the imperialist powers. In some countries, there have been large protests around this issue, as well. How to draw the connection between these two issues differs on the tactical level from country to country and situation to situation.
The antinuclear movement provides an important political opportunity for the entire Fourth International. As we've already begun to see, it will be one of the greatest sources of cadres for our movement and our youth groups in the coming period.
Of course, there are many other important campaigns. For example, around abortion rights and other women's liberation activities; this will be taken up in a full agenda point here at the Congress. There are also the struggles of immigrant workers, the oppressed nationalities, peasants and small farmers, and so on.
In the time allotted, however, we wanted to draw special attention to just one other emergency effort that our movement on a world scale has already been involved in and must continue to champion. That is the powerful campaign organized in defense of Petr Uhl and other victims of the Czechoslovakian bureaucracy.
This is not simply a solidarity or emergency defense campaign, which would be sufficient justification. There is something more involved, however. This kind of effective solidarity with dissidents in the bureaucratized workers states is today the single most important step the international as a whole can take toward winning cadres to the Trotskyist movement in Eastern Europe—and we can add China as well.
Some Questions and Answers
I want to end on some questions that have been raised about the turn.
Is it mechanical? Is it a gimmick? Is it a factory obsession?
Well, I guess you could say we have a certain obsession about getting large fractions of comrades into great concentrations of industrial workers. We might quibble over the word. But we plead guilty.
Is it mechanical? Yes, in a certain sense. The mechanics of actually driving through the turn are a precondition for politically carrying it through.
Is it a gimmick? No. It's not a gimmick. Unless our entire political analysis is wrong.
The leadership of the Fourth International, the International Executive Committee, must lead the turn.
It must lead through political analysis, in order to situate the turn in the unfolding world class struggle.
It must lead by more of its members going into industry.
It must lead through coordination of the turn on a world scale, facilitating the exchange of experiences and information among the national leaderships and comrades in industry in different countries.
This means that the IEC, like all other leadership bodies of our movement, will have to begin organizing its work differently. The agendas of its meetings will have to change. The questions it must consider and deliberate on will broaden.
For example, the next IEC meeting must concretely look at the statistics on the progress of the turn and assess their political and organizational implications.
The only way the success of the turn can be measured is to look honestly and cold-bloodedly at the figures—the number and percentage of comrades in industry in each section, the number of functioning industrial fractions, the number of leadership cadres who are carrying out the turn. Only by review ing these figures can we assess the progress in carrying out the central decision of this Congress. This is what we must do at the next IEC meeting.
The more successful we have been in drawing the lessons and implementing the resolution, the quick er the turn per se will be behind us. The turn is a radical tactical move necessitated by the historical development of our movement and the current stage of world politics. It is an abnormal response to an abnormal situation—a situation in which the big majority of our members in every section have not been industrial workers. Once this historically necessary tactic has been carried out—once the abnormal situation of our current social composition and arena of work has been changed—the turn will be behind us. In the United States we talk about the "withering away of the turn." If it is carried out to the end, the tactic ce as es.
Several comrades have told me, "Don't forget to point out that our movement faces a crisis, that we have a great number of problems." There's an important factor to remember in connection with this. The problems we face don't reflect decisive setbacks for the working class such as those in the 1930s—the rise of fascism and world war—or a political retreat such as that in the 1950s.
The crises and problems we face are ultimately rooted in our need to prepare for challenges and opportunities posed by an ascending class struggle and a situation in which the balance of forces on a world scale is shifting to our class. These struggles have not been decided. The biggest ones are still to come. And they are going to bring forward new forces from our class and its allies.
Building a Mass World Party
Given these revolutionary prospects, the turn is also decisive in putting the Fourth International in the position to accomplish what will be the most important challenge in building a mass world party of socialist revolution.
Everywhere we exist in the world today, we have only small propaganda groups. To accomplish the tasks we've set for ourselves, we must be able to turn to layers of revolutionists that come from other directions and other traditions—revolutionists of action, such as the layer that came out of the Cuban revolution or the Nicaraguan revolution today, left currents that arise from the crisis in the union movement and the reformist parties. Our capacity to link up with them, to attract them to our program and convince them of its necessity, to merge our forces and theirs into a common political and organizational framework—this is the only way we can build a mass world party. It can't be done simply through recruitment to our sections.
But this historic task can only be accomplished by organizations rooted in industry and composed of industrial workers.
We often point out that even relatively small revolutionary parties can grow tumultuously during mass upheavals, being forged out of the fighters that come forward out of these class battles. This is true. It is what happened to the Bolsheviks in 1917.
But this can only be true for parties of industrial workers who have already been tested in action and have experience and respect in the workers movement. It cannot happen from outside the heart of the working class. Those who are on the outside when such developments occur will simply be by passed; the opportunity will be lost.
This is the goal of the turn. To place our cadres where they must be to build workers parties that are capable of growing out of the big class battles that we know are on the agenda throughout the world. Otherwise, our program, which the world proletariat needs to chart a course to victory, will remain a lifeless document rather than a guide to mass revolutionary action.
We make no guarantees that the turn will bring us correct tactics, timing, or political savvy in meeting opportunities such as this. No promise whatsoever. These matters will be up to the comrades on the spot in each section and each new situation. We simply guarantee that these decisions cannot be made correctly without the turn, without parties composed in their overwhelming majority of industrial workers.
Finally, we should dispense with one myth. I was struck by it when reading a document that contains an exchange between leaders of the British Socialist Workers Party and comrades from the International Marxist Group. The British SWP warns that several years ago their American organization tried to place the big majority of its comrades into industry, and the experience ended in disaster. Here's what they had to say:
Now, while we completely agree with the objective, the solid implantation of revolutionaries in the industrial working class, we believe that the method proposed to achieve it can only lead to disaster. 'Proletarianisation' or 'industrialisation'—ie transplanting ex-students into industry is only a substitute, and a dangerous one at that, for the real task of building workers' parties.
'Industrialisation' has certain superficial attractions. It yields quick results—it leads to significant increases in the number of manual workers among the members. These results are however achieved at a high price. The petty-bourgeois comrades sent into industry are forced to adapt to their new environment. Their first priority is to make themselves acceptable to their work-mates. The natural consequence is that they play down, or completely conceal their politics and concentrate upon making themselves effective trade unionists. A gulf opens up between their life as revolutionaries and their life as worker militants. Within the workplace their priority is not to win over other workers to revolutionary politics, to sell the party's paper, to present a programme of struggle against the bosses, but to establish themselves as good militants pure and simple. Within the organisation they often become a conservative force, tending, for example, to take what they believe to be a 'super-proletarian' (ie reactionary) line on questions of, for instance sexual oppression, and to adopt generally economistic positions.
At the same time, 'industrialisation' tends to create two tiers of membership within the organisation. There are the 'worker-Bolshevik cadres' who have made the transition from petty bourgeois to 'proletarian' and who therefore tend to regard themselves as an elite, and the rest, who exist, not to build the party and rank-and-file organisations in their own workplaces, but to 'service' the 'proletarians'. Work in the white-collar unions and among students, far from negligible spheres of activity, tends to suffer severely under this sort of regime.
We are not in vent ing this scenario. It has happened in odd instances within our own organisation. It happened to the International Socialists in the United States, where 'industrialisation' created a paper which hardly mentioned politics, a bloated full-time apparatus, a conservative layer of 'proletarian is ed' students and, at the bottom, demoralised white-collar workers and students. The end result is that the organisation has dissolved itself into various rank-and-file union caucuses and a monthly propaganda magazine.
The conclusion the British SWP draws from this experience is: Don't go into industry. The turn is wrong.
We say just the opposite. We say the reason the IS experience led to failure and it was abysmal—was because of the program and leadership of the organization that carried it out. The reason it failed is that this organization counterposed going into industry and "union work," on the one hand, to the development of a politically rounded workers paper, Marxist education, and systematic political campaigns, on the other. When they made the turn, the leadership consciously depoliticized all party institutions.
If such false counter positions are made, then the turn will fail. You do lose comrades. And you can't recruit and hold politicizing young workers. When the party is falsely told to choose between an effort to get comrades into industry and carrying out organized political campaigns, then, of course, colonization will fail.
But we have a totally different approach. We don't think that comrades who have been recruit ed from and trained in important protest movements and struggles of the oppressed will become less political, less feminist, less opposed to nuclear power when they become industrial workers and union militants. We believe and our experience already confirms—that comrades become more confident and more effective in all these struggles.
Ultimately, underlying opposition to the turn—whether consciously or not—is the idea that somehow workers are inherently less revolutionary, less political, and more prejudiced than other sectors of the population. That's absolutely false.
We are convinced that workers are not less political than other sectors of the population. To the contrary, we're convinced that as the struggles of all the oppressed deepen, industrial workers will more and more take the lead.
But to carry out the turn, we have to face facts. We have to look cold-bloodedly, honestly, and thoroughly at our current size, composition, and problems. There are no tricks or formally correct definitions that can help us become parties that are proletarian in composition as well as program. We have to start from our real composition, so we can judge the real tasks and opportunities before us.
Meeting the Opportunities
There is no reason for pessimism. We should look at the crisis we face and the problems we confront as reflections of a period that is opening in which we can resolve them. The turn will give us the political perspectives we need to grow and move forward.
On a world scale, we are the only organized revolutionary alternative for the labor movement. Every other international current has failed.
We are convinced that in making the turn to the industrial working class, we must simultaneously build a world party and our national sections. We cannot build revolutionary workers parties anywhere in the world without the simultaneous struggle to build the world party.
And that world party cannot and will not be built unless its components are workers parties, rooted in industry, in countries throughout the world.
In driving through the turn, we open the door to the entire next stage in constructing the international party of socialist revolution that is needed by the working class to topple world capitalism.