Issuing body: European sections of the Fourth International (adopted unanimously, "somewhere in occupied Europe")
---
1. The nation is the territorial framework within which capitalism took its rise. The achievement of national unity was one of the essential aims of the bourgeois revolution, and as such was indissolubly linked to the agrarian and democratic demands. Through national unity, the bourgeois revolution aimed at the creation of a single market cleared of feudal particularisms, a springboard toward a world market and a preserve reserved for national capitalism (protectionism).
Starting from these fundamental necessities of the development of bourgeois society, the petty-bourgeois intellectuals built up a whole ideological edifice essentially characterized by the encounter of two contradictory tendencies: on the one hand, a tendency reflecting capitalism's aspiration to dominate the world market, cosmopolitanism, the constitution of a world civilization; on the other, national sentiment, the reawakening of national cultures corresponding to the national character of the frameworks of production. These two tendencies, entirely reconcilable so long as new outlets open up for capitalism, come into violent conflict from the moment capitalism has seized hold of the whole of the world market.
2. In the epoch of liberal capitalism, the circulation of wealth already had an international character, but the process of production unfolded above all within the national framework. In the epoch of imperialism, by contrast, capitalism breaks the national frameworks of production one after another. The maintenance and expansion of capitalist profit can no longer henceforth be sought in the conquest of new outlets. The imperialist epoch is that of the export of capital and the import of dividends; the export of capital means nothing other than the export of industrial and banking enterprises.
Thus new modes of international relations take shape. The new economic-political organization of the world finds its condensed expression in the notions of "Commonwealth" or "Lebensraum": a preferential zone for the export of capital, protected by a series of economic and political barriers, within which national states continue to subsist. Their political independence is not in principle affected, but they tend increasingly to be reduced to a state of economic vassalage that renders their political independence more and more illusory.
3. With the world market divided up, its capacity for absorption under the capitalist regime exhausted, the world divided into reserved zones for the export of capital, relative overproduction and crises having become the most constant mode of existence of capitalism, each imperialism has no resource left but to attempt to impose by force a new distribution of investment zones and markets, to attempt to increase, at the expense of rival imperialisms, the number of economically vassalized countries.
Thus the period of imperialism is characterized by the permanence of wars — now muffled, now brutal, now local, now worldwide — all of them aimed at a new partition of the world, at drawing formerly independent countries into the economic orbit of an ever-shrinking number of imperialist powers. Thus imperialism, while breaking the national frameworks of production, prodigiously multiplies national oppression.
Imperialism has cracked open the national frameworks of production: production has become an international process in its very essence. Just as, by expropriating thousands of capitalists and concentrating economic wealth, it has prepared the passage of the economy into the hands of the proletariat, so too it has laid the foundations of an international organization of production, in which the suppression of capitalist profit will make it possible to abolish the exploitation of man by man and to make everyone benefit from the labour of all.
Because it is the exacerbated incarnation of the thirst for capitalist profit, imperialism turns industrial concentration, the directed economy, and the international organization of production to the worst reactionary ends. Only the proletarian revolution can break the infernal circle of crises and wars; only socialism, by organizing production, consumption, and the circulation of wealth on an international scale, can remove the cause of wars; only the world revolution, by breaking the yoke of imperialism, can put an end to national oppression, through the Socialist United States of the World. That is why revolutionaries, while supporting the just national demands of oppressed peoples, never for a moment forget that there is no solution to the national question except through the international proletarian revolution.
4. Thus national demands take on a new significance in the epoch of imperialism.
On the one hand, in the backward countries (colonies, semi-colonies), the anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist demands merge with the agrarian, democratic, and national demands into the tasks of the proletarian revolution. Begun under the leadership of the bourgeoisie, with national and democratic objectives, the revolutionary struggle in the colonial countries can be carried through to its logical conclusion only under the leadership of the revolutionary party of the proletariat, through soviet democracy, and as a link in the chain of the world proletarian revolution: socially and historically, the revolutionary struggle thus takes on a permanent character that indissolubly binds every revolutionary struggle to the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat of the great capitalist countries for power.
On the other hand, particular relations of vassalage have arisen over the last twenty years between capital-exporting capitalist countries and capital-importing capitalist countries. On one side, the nations of Central Europe and Latin America have seen their economies dominated by the great international trusts, their small and medium bourgeoisie ruined for the benefit of foreign finance capital, with the active and self-interested assistance of the bankers of the great national bourgeoisie, their political life reduced to violent clashes between the puppets of this or that imperialism. On the other side, in order to facilitate its domination, in order to throw a few crumbs to the vassalized bourgeoisies, the great powers, through boundary changes and absurd carve-ups of the map of the continents, have handed over to powerless bourgeoisies set up as nations the task of dominating and oppressing the weaker and economically more backward nations; thus the "prison of peoples" has been divided into a series of narrow, dark dungeons in which the Czechs have bullied the Slovaks, the Poles the Ukrainians, the Serbs the Croats.
The revolution that Hitler's "new order" brings on this point is the elevation to the role of warders in the service of Germany of the economically most backward nations of Europe — Slovakia, Croatia, Hungary, Finland, Bulgaria. But this promotion of agrarian countries to the rank of powers poorly conceals the absolute domination of the German trusts and banks over the whole of central and eastern Europe, just as the phrases about inter-American solidarity cannot hide the shameless exploitation to which American capitalism, having eliminated its rivals one by one, today subjects the labour and the wealth of Latin America.
Finally, through these wars, nations that were imperialist powers find themselves in turn subjected to the domination of a handful of great world powers whose number keeps diminishing. In the wake of the war of 1914-1918, the victorious great powers strove to reduce the fragmented former Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Italy to a state of political and economic subjection, through the complex interplay of annexations, treaties, war debts, and great international loans. France itself, from a position in the front rank among the allies, gradually found itself pushed back into the rank of a secondary power. The new imperialist war has accelerated this process: it has definitively reduced Italy to the rank of a vassal, ended France's role as a first-rank imperialist power, definitively torn from England its domination of the world market. Thus not only are the proletariat and the small peasantry of the entire world subjected to the domination of a small number of international monopolies, but the small and medium bourgeoisies too find themselves ruined for the benefit of foreign big capital.
5. Imperialism, while breaking the national frameworks of production and opening the way to an international organization of exchange and consumption, prodigiously multiplies national oppression. An enormous number of small nations, as well as large colonial countries, are subjected to more or less open vassalage. Even the countries that retain national independence are subjected to a pitiless economic dictatorship; their agriculture, their industry, their commerce, their public and private finances are all made subject to the implacable control of the American, Japanese, or German trusts and banks. Far from laying the foundations of an international community of peoples, imperialism exacerbates national hatreds and chauvinism, sets peasant populations against those of the towns, brings the most monstrous prejudices and the most abject sentiments back to the surface, sets equally oppressed peoples against one another as each hopes to find some relief from its own slavery by subjecting its neighbour to still more savage oppression.
The petty bourgeoisie of town and country and, with it, the middle bourgeoisie, ruined and despoiled by the great international monopolies, driven from the liberal professions and administrative careers by the rise of demagogues and adventurers ready to sell themselves to the highest bidder, rise up to demand the return of their former splendour, the liquidation of the monopolies, the preservation of their privileges, the struggle against international finance capital in defence of the nation. Thus the rebirth of nationalism is closely bound up with the profound social movement that turns the petty-bourgeois masses against the capitalist order, in the name of capitalism itself. Revolutionary insofar as it aims at the overthrow of the existing order, this movement is reactionary in the utopian objectives it sets itself. Socially incapable of promoting a solution of its own to the crisis of capitalism, the petty bourgeoisie must either rally to big capital against the proletariat and constitute the shock troops of the counter-revolution, or range itself alongside the proletariat in the struggle of the workers and peasants for power and socialism. In itself, the national movement is neither progressive nor reactionary: it will become one or the other only according to the class to which the petty bourgeoisie rallies — reactionary if, alongside big capital, it becomes, against the proletariat, the instrument of the defence and conquest of imperialism; progressive, if it fights alongside the proletariat for the suppression of capitalist exploitation and for socialism.
6. As imperialism makes it less and less possible to conceal this domination beneath the modest veil of liberalism, force of arms appears ever more openly as the instrument for regulating economic relations. In the vassalized imperialist countries, finance capital nonetheless does not shrink from fighting to reclaim its place on the world market. It is compelled to arouse among the masses a movement of exacerbated chauvinism. It appeals to the petty bourgeoisie, promising it crumbs from the imperialist feast if, through its sacrifices, it succeeds in restoring lost greatness on the field of battle. Thus fascism is not merely a preventive action against the development of the revolutionary movement that the tutelage of a defeated imperialism necessarily provokes; it must also inscribe on its programme the rallying, under the banner of an unleashed imperialism (Greater Germany, Greater Italy, Greater France), of the middle classes ruined and despoiled by the domination of the great international monopolies, for the defence of the national monopolies threatened with absorption.
One of the essential tasks of the revolutionary movement in the face of authoritarian reaction is to break the bloc of the petty bourgeoisie with the great imperialist bourgeoisie of its own country, by putting forward revolutionary demands that strike simultaneously at foreign finance capital and at national big capital (nationalization of the key industries and the banks); in the backward countries, these demands must be linked to that of the agrarian revolution, in order to break the bloc of the petty bourgeoisie of town and country with the great landowners.
7. The exacerbation of national feeling has extremely diverse consequences on the ideological plane. They oscillate between a fundamentally healthy reaction against the suppression of political life, against the commercialization of culture, and a racist messianism, designed to justify through a pseudo-philosophy the domination of a few "chosen" financial powers.
Only socialism, by laying the foundations of a new material progress, will be able to prepare a new intellectual flowering of humanity; only it will secure the free administration of peoples according to their linguistic and ethnic traditions, within the framework of a general organization of the world that will admit neither oppressed nor oppressors; only it will permit the free flourishing of cultures and popular traditions within the framework of a new intellectual flowering of humanity, and will call upon every people for its original contribution to the elaboration of a human civilization of a universal character.
8. The right of peoples to self-determination remains the central formula of Bolshevik policy on the national question. Against German imperialism and Hitlerism's arbitrary carving-up of the map of Europe, as against the Churchillo-Gaullist plan for the dismemberment of Germany, revolutionaries counterpose the democratic formula of the free self-determination of peoples.
But this formula remains an empty banality if its social content is not spelled out in the clearest possible way. That is why the following clarifications must never be lost sight of:
a) No freedom can be founded on oppression: "a people that oppresses another cannot itself be a free people." This means, in Hungary, in Bulgaria, full support for the oppressed national minorities. It means that in Serbia, within the ranks of the Chetniks, revolutionaries inscribe on their banner, not the struggle for a Greater Yugoslavia, but the struggle for a free Balkan federation. It means that in France, Belgium, Holland, the struggle for national demands cannot be separated from full support for the struggle of colonial peoples against imperialism;
b) The political independence of peoples is an illusion if it does not rest on economic independence; the right of peoples to self-determination therefore necessarily implies the nationalization of the banks and the trusts, the monopoly of foreign trade. These measures imply that real political power be wrested from the agents of the trusts. It therefore implies the total liquidation of the capitalist system of exploitation, whatever the nationality or race of the exploiters. The political independence of peoples can in the end be secured only through the socialist revolution and the seizure of power by the proletariat;
c) the struggle for economic independence can in no way signify the struggle for an impossible political isolation. The development of the productive forces has made the production and distribution of wealth an international process. The experience of recent years amply demonstrates that autarky is a phenomenon of economic regression. The more geographically limited a country is (Austria), the more economically backward it is (the Balkan countries), the more senseless an economic nationalism would be. That is why the right of peoples to self-determination is nonsensical unless it is linked to the struggle for the international expropriation of the capitalists, to the struggle for the world proletarian revolution.
9. Marxist revolutionaries can therefore neither neglect the justified national demands of the masses, nor set them against the essentially internationalist programme of the proletarian revolution. The Fourth International inscribes on its banner the following slogans:
a) the Socialist United States of the World, an international organization of the world economy freed from capitalism;
b) regional federations (Balkan, Danubian, Iberian, Indian federations, etc.) creating great political and administrative units, uniting different peoples in a single geographic community;
c) national republics and communities, administrative bodies, joined together in federations for the administration of their material interests.
10. The revolutionary party wholly supports the national demands of the masses. It makes its own every slogan that concretely translates the formula of the right of peoples to self-determination: the right for the Polish people, for the Czech people, for the Dutch, French, Belgian, Serbian peoples, to organize themselves into a fully independent and sovereign state, but also the right for the Alsace-Lorraine people, for the Luxembourgish people, for the Ukrainian people, for the Croatian people, for the peoples of Transylvania and Macedonia, to choose, through a freely organized plebiscite, the state to which they wish to be attached, and to determine for themselves the ties that will bind them to it and the degree of their autonomy.
The right for every linguistic community (Bretons or Basques, Flemings or Walloons, Ukrainians or Albanians) to administer itself, to dispense justice, to receive instruction, including higher education, in its own language.
Immediately: evacuation of all territories occupied by the Italian or German or Hungarian army, or by the Gestapo.
Abolition of occupation indemnities, of military requisitions of industrial products and of labour.
The right for all the countries of Europe to organize their economy according to the peacetime needs of the continent. Immediate liberation of all prisoners of war and of all political prisoners or deportees.
Abolition of all racial or antisemitic measures.
Every people of Europe raises this whole set of demands against its own bourgeoisie and against Anglo-American imperialism just as much as against German imperialism.
Revolutionaries know that these demands are in themselves neither reactionary nor progressive. They are formal demands that take on their full value from the class content that fills them. It is therefore important to bind these demands indissolubly to the demands of the proletariat and to the perspective of the socialist revolution. In the immediate term, the democratic demands of the workers, the peasants, and the petty bourgeoisie (the struggle for bread, wages, purchasing power, food supplies) must be linked together. It must be shown that only the class struggle of the proletariat, the action of disciplined masses crowned by the strike, can strike effective blows against the imperialist war machine. The petty-bourgeois masses must be organized around the proletariat (a network of sympathizers based on the workplace, the village, the neighbourhood; embryos of mass committees).
11. The struggle for an independent national state and for a national government has no meaning if the class content of that state and the social bases of that government are not specified. As put forward by Radio London and by the Communist International, this slogan means nothing other than the return to office of politicians without a following and generals without an army, gathered together in London.
It is the return, to Poland, of the antisemitic and anti-Ukrainian colonels. It is the return, to Czechoslovakia, of Beneš, that presumptuous and impotent gendarme of Central Europe; to Belgium, of the renegade Spaak; to Holland, of Queen Wilhelmina and Royal Dutch; to Norway, of King Haakon and the shipowners; to Yugoslavia, of King Peter and the mines of Bor; to Greece, of King George and the Hambros Bank. It is the return, to France, of Herriot, of Paul Reynaud, and of the monarchist generals.
In its Stalinist form, this slogan means nothing other than a Popular Front government extended to the right, a government in which working-class leaders take part in order to safeguard the interests of big capital and the great international monopolies against the working class and the middle classes.
To put forward the slogan of independence without specifying its social content is to lose sight of the fact that an imperialist peace may perhaps restore most of the countries of Europe to their formal independence, but will most assuredly subject them to the worst forms of economic exploitation. The slogan of a bourgeois national government can lead only to the hoisting into power of a clique in the service of a victorious imperialism.
There can be no independent national government other than the government of committees of workers and peasants within the framework of the Socialist United States of Europe. If the party of the proletariat today defends the right of peoples, it also knows that, from 1789 to 1918, every country of Europe accomplished its national revolution; the task is therefore no longer to forge the nation, but to preserve the rights of the nation within the framework of an international organization of the world. This task is that of the proletarian revolution; that is why it alone can give every country a truly national government.
12. These considerations do not, however, exhaust the national problems of present-day Europe. On the contrary, they have value only in defining a distant perspective that entirely escapes the view of the masses. In the immediate term, it is the necessities of the war that determine the attitude of German imperialism: it is according to the sacrifices the war imposes on the masses that the masses first rise up against Hitlerite oppression.
The necessities of the war have not permitted a progressive integration of the economic apparatus of the occupied countries into the structure of German imperialism. On the contrary, they have imposed outright plunder, the ruthless exploitation of industry and agriculture. The consequences are, on the one hand, generalized scarcity, and on the other, a loss of economic substance, a disorganization of the productive apparatus that brings unemployment, rising prices, and, generally speaking, a catastrophic fall in the standard of living of the urban working and petty-bourgeois masses.
At the same time, economic and military necessities impose absolute control over the political life of the occupied countries. Pitiless repression becomes the only possible mode of government in the face of a population that growing material hardship renders more hostile from day to day.
Although this oppression is destined to take more direct forms in the event of a Hitlerite victory, it is no less a very real phenomenon for that. It is felt all the more cruelly by the masses because they see in it the anticipated image of the Hitlerite "New Europe."
Faced with the rising discontent of the masses, the state apparatus of the various capitalist countries of Europe, profoundly shaken by military defeat, can only feel powerless; in the last analysis it is to German bayonets that the various bourgeoisies of Europe must look for protection against revolution. The Hitlerite apparatus of repression becomes the linchpin of the bourgeois order in Europe. Even those capitalists who, by virtue of very definite economic interests, aspire to an Anglo-Saxon victory, understand that such a victory could only come about through a period of chaos that would make possible an irruption of the masses onto the political stage, and must therefore rely on Hitler to protect them in the immediate term against such an eventuality. Conversely, the various bourgeois state apparatuses of Central Europe appear as the guarantors of the continuity of capitalist exploitation, as the maintainers of the imperialist order, ready to hand over real power to one or another of the great powers and playing the role of gendarme for as long as the military decision has not designated the master to whom they must surrender the right to exploit their own people.
Thus the task of revolutionaries in Europe is to bind indissolubly, in each country, the struggle for the overthrow of the national bourgeois state apparatus and for the expropriation of their own bourgeoisie, to the struggle for the overthrow of the Hitlerite apparatus of repression as the keystone of imperialist oppression in Europe.
13. Throughout Europe one witnesses an economic offensive by German finance capital (import of capital, mergers of companies, acquisitions of holdings, etc.). This economic vassalization does not, however, mean in any case the expropriation of national capital, the destruction of the capitalist system and of the secondary imperialisms. German imperialism now aims to merge the enterprises of the various countries into German enterprises, to submerge native holdings within German holdings, to absorb financially the national trusts, cartels, and banks. It aims to break the hegemony of the various capitalisms in their own sectors, but not to infringe upon the rights of capital as such. All the countries of Europe nonetheless retain their economic structure, based on the ever more openly acknowledged preponderance of finance capital and the concern to maintain and expand colonial investments (the Trans-Saharan railway, the Niger loop for France, the Compagnie de l'Est for Holland, etc.).
In France, despite all the demagogy with which the bourgeois parties now adorn themselves, the grip of finance capital on the economy remains uncontested: Baudouin, Pucheu, or Gibrat, men of the great economic interests, follow one another in power. The Worms bank, having driven Laval from power on 13 December, recalls him before preparing him a successor. By Marshal Pétain's own admission, it is the trusts that dominate the industrial organization committees and turn them into so many instruments against the small and medium employers. It is they too who control the food-supply apparatus and use it as cover for the organization of the black market.
At the same time, Anglo-Saxon capital is investing in every enterprise (Syria, Africa, as far as France is concerned) within its reach, buying up shares, and showing the same avidity in the exploitation of Arabs and Blacks as German capital shows in the exploitation of Europe. Thus, despite the violence of the struggle waged among themselves by the various factions of the bourgeoisie, they are unanimous in their determination to preserve and restore, in its former splendour, the exploitation of the masses of Europe and Africa.
14. Preoccupied above all with their immediate fate, the masses pay little attention to the fundamental imperialist content of the programme of the various bourgeois cliques. They would even tend to make the imperialist preoccupations their own, insofar as the importation of colonial produce seems to them capable of offering a solution to the problem of food supplies. But the facts of everyday life demonstrate that the problem of economic relations with Africa and Asia is above all a political problem, and that it admits of no other solution than the establishment, between Europe and the other continents, of relations founded on economic equality.
Africa and Asia will truly be able to contribute to the provisioning of Europe only from the moment they are freed from imperialist oppression and receive disinterested aid from the more economically advanced countries, and are able to put the material riches of their virgin territories to work in the service of the whole of humanity and no longer for the profit of a handful of bank barons. That is why the independence of the colonial countries, and support for their struggle against imperialism, are absolute necessities for the proletariat of France, of Belgium, of Holland, and of the whole of Europe.
Generally speaking, the task of revolutionaries is to show that national oppression is not the result of racial brutality or of a doctrinal perversity, but the very essence of capitalism in the epoch of imperialism. Hitlerite oppression in Europe must be set alongside colonialist oppression in the French, Belgian, Dutch, English, and American colonies. It must be recalled how the Polish, Czech, and Serbian bourgeoisies have crushed and exploited the Ukrainian, Slovak, and Croatian peasants. It must also be shown how the capitalists of the various countries, while proclaiming their national sentiments, profit from the crumbs thrown down by German imperialism, and live and survive politically and economically off the imperialist war.
15. In the various occupied countries, the bourgeoisie seeks above all to find the ways and means that will allow it to maintain and expand its own share of profit, capable of restoring its imperialist grandeur in the fullness of its past glory. All currents and all factions pursue the same end by different means, ranging from horse-trading with the great German trusts and cartels to armed resistance. In each country, the various factions of the national bourgeoisie modestly cloak their policy in the veil of the national interest: in reality, they wish only to secure for themselves the largest possible share of the surplus value produced by "their" proletariat. Only the faction of the bourgeoisie gathered around the phantom government of London, however, which appears to be waging the most vigorous struggle against German imperialism by pursuing the military fight, finds an echo among the petty-bourgeois and working-class masses. The real content of the London governments is expressed by the deep ties binding a large number of Belgian, French, Polish, and Norwegian industrial and financial enterprises to British trusts and banks. This real content of Radio London's nationalism must be pitilessly denounced; every specific fact, every declaration, must be used for a pitiless polemic against the agents of British capitalism. The masses, to tell the truth, harbour no illusions about what Radio London's nationalism represents. In reality, in the absence in each country of proletarian parties that channel their will to struggle in the sense of an independent class struggle, they tend to see the democracies as the immediate instrument of their liberation: by that very fact they are inclined to close their eyes to the imperialist character of the war waged by London and Washington. It is therefore necessary tirelessly to denounce, starting from the facts, the real content of the war waged by the Anglo-Saxons.
The attempts at English expansion at the expense of neutral allied countries must be denounced. The bloody record of oppression by English imperialism in Africa and in the Indies must be recalled. In our propaganda, ample room must be given to the development of the struggle of the Hindu people for their liberation. It must also be recalled by what methods of corruption and blackmail English imperialism has striven to maintain its domination over Europe by setting peoples against one another.
Facts must likewise be accumulated to demonstrate how the North American "great democracy" is proceeding with the financial invasion of South America and of the British Empire. It must be shown how, particularly in the countries of Latin America, this penetration is accompanied by a progressive liquidation of democratic institutions.
It must be tirelessly explained that the true allies of the oppressed peoples of Europe are the English and American strikers, are the peoples of India and China fighting for their freedom, are all those who, throughout the world, wage the class struggle for the overthrow of English and American imperialism — as are also the workers and peasants of the USSR fighting in defence of the first workers' state.
16. But the material ties binding the various European bourgeoisies to British imperialism do not exhaust the whole content of the nationalist cliques taking refuge in London. These are in fact divided into multiple sub-currents and tendencies engaged in extremely violent struggle against one another. Not only do the country-to-country antagonisms inherited from Versailles persist, but the differences of policy and perspective also take on, within this restricted circle, an extremely violent character; on the one hand, the émigrés encompass people from every political horizon, from the reactionary and Bonapartist far right to left-wing socialism; on the other, the convinced nationalists find themselves at odds with the demands of English imperialism and, increasingly, with those of Yankee imperialism.
It must be clearly understood that these very divisions within the bourgeoisie constitute one of the essential weaknesses of London's nationalism. Even in the event of an Allied victory, the various bourgeoisies would be incapable, for a long period, of presenting themselves to the masses with a coherent domestic and foreign programme and of rallying the forces of the petty bourgeoisie against the working class around an imperialist programme.
Only a total defeat of the revolutionary proletariat could allow the various bourgeoisies to make use of the national movement of the masses for the establishment of an authoritarian state.
But the authoritarian state has meaning only as an instrument of the bourgeoisie's struggle for domination of the imperialist market; insofar as an imperialist solution to the war can mean nothing but the partition of the world among the privileged powers, the liquidation of the secondary imperialisms and, still more, the total vassalization of the small nations, any national development in an authoritarian and counter-revolutionary direction will necessarily be struck by the same impotence that today afflicts the movements that have arisen in Europe in imitation of National Socialism.
17. In Europe, the national movement has a character fundamentally different from that of the reactionary and imperialist nationalism of London; it is one of the fundamental forces that are preparing and maturing the revolutionary crisis in Europe. At the present stage, it is quite naturally against the domination in Europe of German finance capital and of the Gestapo that the rage of the small and middle bourgeoisie is turned. The national movement of the masses, far from having strictly nationalist roots, is rooted in one of the most fundamental contradictions of the capitalist system in the epoch of imperialism; it is above all the manifestation, in the form of nationalism, of the radicalization of the petty bourgeoisie, a new expression of the revolt of the middle classes against big finance capital.
On the other hand, in the absence of a revolutionary party rooted in the masses, it has provided a first axis around which the working class, politically and organizationally dislocated by the collapse of the state apparatus of the democracies to which the political and trade-union bureaucracies had bound the fate of the working class, could regroup. The proletariat saw its organizations broken, its militants hunted down; the victory of Hitlerism found it politically disorganized and disoriented. It is thus the petty bourgeoisie that found itself thrust into the front rank of the struggle against German imperialism. The development of the national movement has thus constituted, across the whole of Europe, the first harbinger wave of a new revolutionary rise — a first wave behind which the forces of a new proletarian wave are gathering. The workers' movement has once more set itself in motion, and although its first steps were taken under the outmoded banner of nationalism, this new working-class start constitutes an entirely progressive fact.
Generally speaking, despite the reactionary character of its demands, the national movement can play a progressive role in the revolutionary crisis now being prepared, in that it will thrust the deep masses of the population into the political arena, setting them practically against the domination of imperialism. It is indeed the characteristic feature of great historical crises to throw into the struggle against the existing order those very people who, only the day before, took part in the exploitation of the masses — those who, newly arrived in the struggle against the regime, provide the ranks of the first wave of the revolution.
If, on the other hand, the proletariat, through the national movement, loses its clear consciousness of its own historical goals, this will then constitute a step backward, a terrible threat to the revolution; in the absence of a conscious proletariat, the crisis will once again be resolved in a counter-revolutionary way; but it must always be kept in mind, and it must be explained, that only the working class is capable of bringing, through the seizure of power and the dictatorship of the proletariat, a progressive solution to the crisis into which capitalism has plunged humanity; it must also be understood that the national movement of the masses is, in the present period, one of the most effective levers for the overthrow of capitalism.
18. Precisely because it is, socially and politically, of a petty-bourgeois essence, the national movement can open the way either to the proletarian revolution or to authoritarian imperialist counter-revolution. It depends above all on a correct tactic by the working class whether the middle classes range themselves under the banner of socialism or under the banner of capitalist reaction. The failure of the working-class vanguard would be all the less pardonable in that the relation of forces between the bourgeoisie, the middle classes, and the proletariat, after three years of imperialist war, is evolving entirely in favour of the proletariat. It certainly varies from one country to another according to their economic structure and geographic position: Belgium, Holland, Norway, and still more France, owing to their proximity to the Anglo-Saxon front, their economic dependence on English trusts and banks, the social weight of their bourgeoisie, and the imperialist character of their economic structure, represent the reactionary right wing of the national movement, the wing where imperialism's chances of triumph are serious. Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Serbia, by contrast, represent the left wing; the relative weakness of the bourgeoisie in these countries, the importance of the agrarian question, and the proximity of the USSR are all factors that accentuate the revolutionary character of the national movement in these countries. But the national movement of the countries of Western Europe cannot be separated from that of the countries of the East; the essential feature of the national movement in Europe is that it is directed against one and the same enemy, that it constitutes an indissoluble whole, that the struggle of the Czech or Polish people for revolutionary objectives will be a powerful factor in the radicalization of the petty bourgeoisie in France or Belgium. Likewise, the struggle of the masses of France or Belgium cannot be separated from that of the masses of the Near East or India, from that of the colonial peoples in general. The task of revolutionaries is precisely, by showing the solidarity that exists among all exploited peoples, to weld together the national movement of the colonial peoples with that of the capitalist countries, and thus to give national resistance a truly anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist content.
19. Anglo-American imperialism strives to exploit for its own benefit the national movement of the oppressed masses of Europe, but its actual capacity to make use of it depends above all on the development of the relation of military, economic, and moral forces between the two imperialist camps confronting each other. Now, precisely, the fundamental feature of the international situation is, whatever successes may be won on this or that front, the powerlessness of either belligerent to annihilate the other, and further, the growing exhaustion of the military apparatus, of the apparatus of production and transport, and the slow weakening of morale among the troops and on the home front. For Anglo-Saxon imperialism, the most immediate consequence of this powerlessness is the incapacity to create in the immediate term a second front, which alone could serve as a lever for the effective realization of the sacred union of the European masses with Anglo-American imperialism.
Even should Anglo-Saxon imperialism eventually manage to take the offensive and win the victory, it could only do so after having exhausted its productive and transport capacities to such a degree that it would find it difficult, for a long period, to provide any concrete solution to the aspirations of the masses — and that the masses, once set in motion by it, would turn against its domination.
In the end, the longer the war lasts, the more the progressive possibilities of imperialism will dwindle, and the more, on the contrary, the movement of the masses will take on a revolutionary content, and consequently the relation of forces within the national movement will evolve in favour of the proletariat. Moreover, the growing scarcity of foodstuffs is preparing violent explosions of popular anger, the revolt of the poor and the hungry, not only against the requisitions carried out by the Hitlerite army but also against the hoarders, the speculators, the profiteers and the well-fed; thus a first social distinction begins to enter into the national movement. The continual rise in the price of industrial goods, the growing scarcity of manufactured products, tend to weld the deep masses of the small peasantry to the urban masses. The debasement of wages, the ever more appalling harshness of working conditions, tend to shift the struggle to the workplace. The transfer of the national labour force into German factories tends to prove that only the methods of struggle of the proletariat against national oppression can be effective, because only the proletariat can, in every circumstance and in every place, do battle with imperialism on the very ground onto which it has been pushed. It also tends to shift the axis of the struggle towards Germany itself; by linking itself to the German revolution, the national movement will thereby shed its reactionary character and take on a profoundly revolutionary content.
For all these reasons, the relation of forces between the middle classes, the bourgeoisie, and the proletariat within the national movement tends, even now, to change in favour of the proletariat. Thus, while wholly making the national demands of the masses its own, while taking part in the front rank of the struggle to defend those demands, the revolutionary vanguard must know how to link this struggle to the struggle for economic demands. It must know how to deepen the content of the struggle unceasingly, to place fraternization with German workers, peasants, and soldiers in the forefront of the national struggle. It must tirelessly explain that only the proletarian revolution can actually bring the masses bread, peace, and freedom.
20. In the absence of proletarian parties deeply rooted among the masses, the role of the various European bourgeoisies has resulted, not in the triumph of the revolution, but in that of the fascist counter-revolution. Disorganized and disoriented, hard hit by poverty and unemployment, the proletariat could only regroup in the wake of the petty bourgeoisie's national movement. Its own attempts at legal or illegal regroupment were at first carried out around national preoccupations. But very quickly the workers' movement, throughout Europe, resumed its own physiognomy; although nationalism and anti-fascism remained one of its fundamental characteristics, it very soon turned toward autonomous class action, conducted by the methods proper to the working class. The strikes of Oslo, Amsterdam, the Borinage, the Sudetenland, and the North of France were all so many signs heralding a resumption of working-class struggles. But brutal repression threw the masses back into waiting.
Confusedly, the masses believe that the moment of mass uprising against Hitlerism can only come when the German armies, suffering decisive military defeats, begin to disintegrate. This is an entirely correct appreciation, but it means, first of all, that the European revolution can only emerge from a merciless struggle by the European proletariat, and by the German proletariat in particular, for the defeat of German imperialism, just as the revolution in the democratic countries can only emerge from a pitiless struggle against the imperialist oppression of London and Washington. The masses of the countries oppressed by Hitlerism must wish for, and contribute to, the defeat of German imperialism, to the collapse of the army whose bayonets are the surest guarantors of bourgeois domination in the various countries of Europe.
In advocating the struggle for the defeat of German imperialism, the revolutionary party never ceases to emphasize:
a) the tactic of revolutionary defeatism means above all the continuation of the class struggle of the proletariat, without regard to the military consequences of that struggle. Any defeatist action that claims to have recourse to other means (waiting for the "landing," a putsch, sabotage erected as an end in itself), any defeatist action whose class aims for the proletariat are not clearly defined, can lead only to the triumph of the worst reaction, as was seen in June 1940;
b) revolutionary defeatism does not aim at the victory of one camp to the benefit of the other, but at the defeat of world imperialism; it has meaning only as an international tactic. The defeatism of the oppressed masses of Europe must constitute a permanent appeal to the defeatism of the Anglo-Saxon working masses with respect to their own bourgeoisie, but this appeal can only be heard if the struggle of the oppressed peoples of Europe is directed not only against German imperialism, which Churchill and Roosevelt also claim to be fighting, but also, by each people of Europe, against its own bourgeoisie. To form a sacred union with one's own bourgeoisie, to strengthen the sacred union in the imperialist democracies, is to work to replace German imperialist exploitation with Anglo-American imperialist exploitation.
21. Petty-bourgeois nationalism would not, however, have survived the successive military defeats of the Anglo-Saxon powers, and would have been swept away by the first rise of the working-class forces, despite the brake of repression, had Stalinism not undertaken, with the full power of its resources and the prestige of October, to rehabilitate nationalism within the ranks of the working class itself. At the very moment when the logic of economic development is causing the idea of an international organization of society to dawn even in the consciousness of the petty bourgeoisie itself, Stalinism, in order to defend the most immediate interests of the Russian bureaucracy, strives to spread throughout the ranks of the European proletariat the poison of the narrowest nationalism, of the most abject chauvinism.
It is the duty of every revolutionary organization to wage a pitiless ideological struggle to root out from the working-class ranks nationalist prejudices, the desire for revenge, the hatred of the "Boche," and the whole nationalist and reactionary ideology that Stalinism strives to plant there.
The nationalism of the various European Communist parties is nothing but an ideological alibi to justify the abandonment of all proletarian class action and recourse to purely military methods of struggle; along with nationalism borrowed from the political arsenal of the petty bourgeoisie, individual terror, sporadic sabotage, the action of isolated snipers.
Certainly the class action of the proletariat may, in the final phase of the struggle for power, take a military and insurrectionary form and consequently also that of sabotage, of terror, of partisan action. Certainly it is the duty of the European proletariat to aid, by every means, including military means, in the defence of the USSR. But the proletariat must not for one instant lose sight of the fact that the most effective struggle for saving the conquests of October is the struggle for the overthrow of bourgeois power and the socialist revolution. Any military action that compromises the proletariat's struggle for its own objectives, that ranges it under the banner of some faction or other of the world bourgeoisie, instead of contributing to the emancipation of the proletariat, can only result in the strengthening of imperialism and a mortal threat to the Soviet Union. On the other hand, recourse to forms of isolated military struggle is admissible only if it can, in short order, tip the relation of forces in favour of the proletariat, if the masses are mobilized and ready to extend the action of the partisans, when the bourgeoisie is in retreat and the proletariat welded into a bloc determined to win, when the bourgeoisie's apparatus of repression is riven with deep cracks that need to be widened. Otherwise, this form of struggle can only serve to decimate the working-class vanguard, to keep the broad masses of workers and peasants out of the arena of combat, to justify repression and play the enemy's game.
When, in the Balkans, Stalinism hands over to bourgeois military men (Mihailović) the leadership of the mass struggle and deprives it of any revolutionary objective, it condemns this movement to have no other significance than that of a local front, and sacrifices the peasant masses of the Balkans to the imperialist war aims of London; when, in the western territories, it exhausts itself in isolated attacks against German soldiers, it does nothing but weld the ranks of the German army around its high command, and the ranks of the German proletariat around the regime, and restores to the Hitlerite army the cohesion it is in the process of losing, while justifying German nationalism through a blinkered chauvinism, through a "racism" in reverse that would like to make the German race into the new "Jewish race" of Europe; when it incites sabotage of production and of the harvests, it conceives of this solely from the point of view of military technique and not as a collective class action through which the proletariat and the poor peasants could be mobilized against the bourgeois state.
The policy of Stalinism aims, in the final analysis, only at bringing the national reactions of the masses to their maximum while ignoring their class action, at creating groups of snipers destined to cooperate with the armies of the democracies in the creation of a second European front, and, should the Allies continue to refuse this, to substitute for it in order to relieve the Russian front. This calculation is false from beginning to end.
Not only does it forget that the democracies will not create the second front that Stalin wants, but only their own second front, that they will demand that all armed groups pass under their control and accept their discipline and their aims, but it also systematically refuses to recognize that only the world proletarian revolution, and the international action of the working class to that end, can provide an effective defence of the Soviet Union against world imperialism. The only second front that can force German imperialism to lay down its arms is the internal front, the front of the German revolution. But the German revolution is only possible if the oppressed and exploited peoples of Europe themselves engage on the revolutionary road to power. Terrorism and chauvinism, on the contrary, can only, at the present stage, weld the ranks of the German proletariat around the regime. Under no circumstances can the immediate military objective be placed ahead of the fundamental revolutionary objective; that is why the task of uniting and organizing the working class, of finding the forms of mass action appropriate to the present period, is the fundamental task; everything that diverts the working-class vanguard from this road, to draw it instead into the dead end of individual military action, is criminal in the eyes of the world revolution and of the real defence of the USSR.
22. The nationalism of the masses, the influence that Stalinism retains among them despite a criminal tactic that raises doubts even among its most enthusiastic supporters, despite all the dangers that this attitude entails, is the most striking demonstration of the masses' will to revolution. The great majority of workers and peasants rally to Stalinist policy, demand that the Communist Parties make the socialist revolution in their own country, follow the path of Lenin, the path that has enabled the Soviet armies today to be the sole force resisting Hitler. In the absence of a revolutionary party rooted in the masses, the Communist parties appear to them as the only ones capable of effectively organizing an independent working-class action able to go beyond the stage of national powerlessness and to carry the struggle onto the plane of the continent. Only concrete experience will demonstrate to the masses that the Communist International can neither wish nor be able to organize the revolution in Europe, and that it works instead to consolidate the domination of imperialism. That is why it is only by taking part in the struggle of the masses, by striving to give clear expression to the real objectives for which they wish to fight, by pitilessly combating all those, Stalinists and bourgeois alike, who wish to divert them from their real goals, by opening up, in today's struggle and tomorrow's, whatever the occasion and whatever the slogan, the revolutionary perspective — it is only in this way that the revolutionary party can take root among the masses.
The revolutionary party, in particular, takes part in every insurrectionary action of the masses, whatever its occasion, whoever its leaders and whatever its slogan, whatever its prospects, whatever its chances of victory, provided only that it sets the masses in motion. The task of revolutionaries within the framework of such a movement is to wage a pitiless struggle against every attempt by imperialism to seize control, and to put forward the proletarian solutions that alone answer the deep aspirations of the masses; to counterpose the slogan of the workers' militia and the arming of the masses to that of the reconstitution of the bourgeois army and the action of isolated combat groups; to base the movement on the proletariat of the factories and of the poor backward countries; to confiscate the stocks of the army and of the wholesale merchants for the benefit of the civilian population. In the towns and villages, to wrest power from the reactionary civil and military administrations, to hand power over to committees of workers, peasants, and soldiers, to carry out intense propaganda for fraternization, to warn constantly against military illusions by tracing, at every stage, a truthful picture of the situation, to expose the true character of bourgeois democracy, to open wide the perspectives of the revolution, even beyond a momentary military defeat.
At the present stage, it is inevitable that imperialism will attempt to turn every attempt at mass insurrection to its own advantage. It will succeed in this if the proletariat renounces taking the lead of the movement, if the revolutionary party renounces giving the masses consciousness of their own strength. The proletarian party must therefore never separate its pitiless criticism of imperialism from the positive action aimed at guiding the action of the masses along the path of its own logic, that of the revolution.
It will depend, in each concrete case, on the scale of the real mass movement, on the proximity and real strength of imperialist intervention, and on the social content of the movements, to determine the extent to which the parties must combine two essential activities: political opposition to imperialism, and participation in the mass movement under the banner of proletarian internationalism. Under no circumstances may they be separated from one another.
Even where conditions will be unfavourable to the victory of such a movement — and still more to its evolution in a proletarian direction — only the participation of the vanguard can turn it into a useful experience for the socialist evolution of the proletarian and petty-bourgeois masses. Even if the vanguard is weak, it cannot remain outside such a movement: its abstention would disqualify it; on the contrary, it must strive to forge its cadres in the fire of the struggle and to develop, through it, its influence within the working class.
Theses
In summary, the tasks of the Fourth International in the face of the national movement of the masses in Europe are as follows:
a) to wage a pitiless policy against every manifestation of reactionary chauvinism within the ranks of the petty bourgeoisie and of the working class, to denounce the imperialist aims concealed behind the national propaganda of London and its Stalinist lackeys. Against the idea of a German, English, American, or French hegemony over Europe, against every idea of revenge as much as against the programme of Hitlerite enslavement, to counterpose the programme of the Socialist United States of Europe, which alone will effectively realize the right of peoples to self-determination within the framework of the liquidation of capitalist slavery;
b) to wage tireless propaganda for fraternization. In particular, to organize systematically the fraternization between the occupying troops and the population of the occupied countries, as well as between German workers and foreign workers labouring in Germany;
c) to wage constant agitation and action for all the immediate national demands of the masses, linking them to economic and democratic demands; to open up, through the slogan of workers' control, the perspective of the socialist revolution;
d) to link closely the struggle against national oppression in the metropolis to the struggle of the colonies to shake off the yoke of French, Belgian, or Dutch imperialism, as well as to the struggle of oppressed minorities (Alsace-Lorraine, Macedonia, etc.);
e) to refuse any adherence to governmental and bourgeois bodies, and to bodies of the same nature set up by the Stalinists to serve the plans of imperialism (the Front des Français, the Front de l'Indépendance), and to denounce the imperialist programme of such bodies;
f) with the petty-bourgeois national organizations — wherever they exist — and with the Communist parties, to organize joint actions for concrete and determined objectives: protest movements against repression, against the deportation of workers, against antisemitic measures, against the closure of universities and the persecution of intellectuals, for the organization of solidarity. For the purposes of such actions, the revolutionary party will make contact with these organizations whenever necessary.
But under no circumstances can the revolutionary party renounce appearing with its own distinct physiognomy. On the contrary, it intervenes with its own face and its own programme, and strives to give the struggle an ever more profound social content, to link national struggles to workers' struggles, without, however, making the degree of working-class combativity at any given period a condition for its participation;
g) to be present wherever the working class and the petty bourgeoisie gather, demonstrate, and act, whatever the immediate slogans of the struggle and the ideology of their leaders of the moment may be. Everywhere the workers' organization puts forward its own slogans and strives to steer the movement toward class solutions and forms of proletarian organization. But it never forgets that it is through action itself, and by starting from the immediate concerns of the masses, that it can take root among them;
h) to take part in every national uprising of the masses with the slogans of the Fourth International, in order to divert it from the imperialist path and steer it toward the proletarian path;
i) the revolutionary organization must understand that its task is twofold: on the one hand, to wage an ideological struggle against the current, to wage an unceasing policy against the tendencies that necessarily drag the petty-bourgeois political circles (and, in their wake, the backward strata of the working class) into the muddy channels of chauvinism; on the other hand, to participate fully in the movement that is turning the petty bourgeoisie — and still more the working masses — against big capital, striving to take the lead of it in order to divert it from a new alliance with imperialism and to steer it, through everyday action, along the path of the international proletarian revolution;
j) such an objective can be attained only if the working class itself becomes conscious of its own strength and of its historic task, and succeeds in organizing itself autonomously on the basis of its class programme. This goal remains the essential objective of the World Party of the Socialist Revolution (the Fourth International).
(Theses adopted unanimously in July 1942 by European sections of the Fourth International, somewhere in occupied Europe) in Quatrième Internationale, new series, no. 2, November 1942