Issuing body: Conference for the Fourth International Note in the original: "(Traduit de l'édition allemande)" / "(Translated from the German edition)"
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THE EVOLUTION OF THE COMMUNIST INTERNATIONAL: FROM PARTY OF WORLD REVOLUTION TO INSTRUMENT OF IMPERIALISM (STUDY)
1. The 1914–1918 imperialist world war was the clearest sign that the capitalist mode of production had become a fetter on the forces of production and that objective conditions were ripe for the victory of the proletarian revolution. Yet the Second International, whose bureaucracy had become deeply embedded in bourgeois society over capitalism's long ascending period, betrayed the interests of the proletariat at the decisive moment when war broke out, taking its stand on the defence of the fatherland and the frontiers of the bourgeois nation-state, which had become, just as much as the private ownership of the means of production, a brake on the development of the productive forces.
2. Only a tiny handful of revolutionary Marxists drew, from the outset, from the appalling and lamentable collapse of the Second International the conclusion that a Third International was necessary. Certainly, in most countries oppositions arose against the chauvinist conduct of the social-democratic parties, but these oppositions were chiefly pacifist-centrist in character. At the international conferences of Zimmerwald and Kienthal, the partisans of building the Third International remained in a minority and were treated by all the centrists and social-imperialists as fanatics, utopians and sectarians.
3. The triumph of the Russian revolution of October 1917 was the victory of the revolutionary principles of struggle against the enemy in one's own country, of transforming the imperialist war into civil war, which the handful of revolutionary Marxists — and, in the first place, the leadership of the Russian Bolsheviks — had counterposed since 1914 to the reactionary policy of national defence. The Bolsheviks, having overcome analogous tendencies within their own ranks, broke with the ambiguous, centrist majority of Zimmerwald and raised the banner of the Third International.
4. Alongside the victorious Bolshevik party, only the representatives of a few relatively weak parties and groups gathered at the founding congress of the Third International in March 1919. Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, to whom it would have fallen to occupy a privileged place in this assembly, had just been murdered by the soldiery of the social democrat Noske.
The First Congress took a resolute stand against the reactionary attempt to reconstitute the Second International as it had existed before the war (the Berne conference of the social-democratic and independent parties, February 1919). Instead, it advocated bringing the vanguard together into a homogeneous revolutionary International. The manifestos of the congress relentlessly unmasked the deceptive pacifism of President Wilson and the illusion of the League of Nations — a gathering-place of the capitalist states — championed by the Second International. One of the congress's most important achievements was the restoration of the Marxist teaching on the state as an instrument of class domination, and the denunciation of parliamentary democracy as a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie over the proletariat. Lenin's theses on democracy and dictatorship, adopted by the congress, exposed the counter-revolutionary, bourgeois character of the slogans and abstract principles of "pure", formal democracy — liberty, equality, and so on. They demonstrated, on the basis of Russian experience, the necessity of smashing the apparatus of the bourgeois state and establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat founded on councils (soviets).
5. 1919 was also the year of the Hungarian revolution. Power fell into the hands of the communists and left social democrats following the decomposition of the bourgeoisie and a state of complete confusion. But the Hungarian revolution remained, from the outset, without genuine leadership. The Hungarian Communist Party dissolved itself into the Social Democratic Party, thereby proving that it had never been a true communist party. The Hungarian revolution failed not only because of an unfavourable international situation, but also because of the total incapacity of Béla Kun's leadership on the question of the party and, above all, on the agrarian question. The Communist International, which had only just been founded, was not yet firm enough organisationally to steer the Hungarian revolution onto a different course.
6. The disastrous consequences of the war produced an enormous awakening of class consciousness among the proletarian masses, who were beginning to grasp the treacherous role played by the social-democratic parties. Under pressure from the rank and file of these parties, certain old reformist, social-pacifist leaders of the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD),[1] of the Italian Socialist Party, of the French Socialist Party and of the British Independent Labour Party sought affiliation to the Communist International, without, however, revising their centrist positions. In order to ward off this danger of opportunist tendencies infiltrating the ranks of the CI, the Second Congress of 1920 laid down the twenty-one conditions of admission to the CI, which declared merciless war on the ambiguities, hesitations and indecisiveness and on the sterile social-pacifism of the centrists. They demanded a complete break with all pacifist ideology and conceptions — disarmament, the League of Nations, the international court of arbitration, and so on. In place of the practice, prevalent in the Second International, of loose contact between wholly independent national parties even acting against one another, was substituted the principle of a world party founded on a homogeneous theory and practice, with the aim of creating an international leadership functioning on the basis of democratic centralism.
7. The centrist politicians conciliatory towards the Second International, whose affiliation was made impossible by the decisions of the Second Congress, attempted to form an intermediate "Two-and-a-Half" International (early 1921), a grouping midway between open social-treachery and revolution, comprising the Austro-Marxists, the German "Independents", the French Longuetists, the ILP, among others. The Two-and-a-Half International sought to unite revolutionaries and social-traitors within a single organisation — "the unity of fire and water", to use Karl Liebknecht's phrase. But history left no room for such a halfway solution. The Two-and-a-Half International was reduced to nothing in the course of the struggle between the Second and Third Internationals. Its revolutionary elements turned towards the Third International, while its bureaucratic summit reunified with the Second International at the Hamburg congress of 1923.
8. Opportunist centrism, which had no intention of leading the masses but rather of being led by them, found its complement in ultra-radicalism, which, instead of winning the masses from within by taking part in their organisations, presented them with an ultimatum from without. These ultra-leftists declared themselves opposed to participation in parliamentary elections, in favour of breaking with the existing trade unions and forming "pure" revolutionary unions, and in favour of isolated action by the vanguard. In Germany these tendencies led to the formation of the Communist Workers' Party (KAPD)[2] in 1920. But within the official party — the German Communist Party (KPD) — adventurist tendencies were by no means overcome. This became particularly apparent during the March Action of 1921,[3] when the party, instead of adopting a defensive tactic against the provocations of the social-democratic government, threw its isolated vanguard into an armed offensive doomed to failure. But the greatest danger lay in the temptation of several party leaders — Thalheimer, Frölich, Maslow, Koenen — to theorise the March tactic thenceforth and erect it into a principle. The Third Congress of the CI in 1921 condemned the ultra-left adventures and launched the slogan "To the masses". It started from the observation that the first great post-war wave (1917–1920) was ebbing, that a lull was setting in which had to be used to prepare more thoroughly for the struggles to come. The strategy and tactics of the communist parties were defined in resolutions which retain their full value today. The theses "On the Organisation, the Methods and Action of the Communist Parties" adopted by the congress, although drafted too schematically, too much "in the Russian manner", in Lenin's phrase at the Fourth Congress, nonetheless offer useful suggestions, chiefly concerning the combination of legal and illegal work, the need for a rapid shift from one method of work to another, the organisation of the press, and the building of factory cells.
9. The Fourth Congress of 1922 deepened and gave concrete form to the lessons of the preceding congress. The policy of the New Economic Policy (NEP) in the USSR, which succeeded "war communism" born of the implacable pressure of events, provided experience rich in lessons on the tactical retreats that are necessary even after the seizure of power — an experience that probably retains its value, not only for backward Russia but for the advanced countries as well.
The Fourth Congress has to its credit an enormous work of organisation. In the course of the preceding three years, national sections had been founded on every continent and in almost every country. At the same time the Red International of Labour Unions (RILU) and the Communist Youth International (CYI) were established. In several countries the communist parties found themselves at this time at the head of powerful mass revolutionary actions.
The defeats of the Italian proletariat in 1920 and 1922 were not defeats attributable to the strategic and tactical methods of the Leninist CI, but stemmed from Italian maximalism and, in 1922, from ultra-left Bordigism. The CI strove to combat both these tendencies, but failed to assert itself in time to prevent the victory of fascism.
10. One of the most important achievements of the CI in this period was to emphasise the historic significance of the national liberation movements in the colonial and semi-colonial countries, and its support for the struggle of oppressed nations against imperialist oppression — a task which the Second International had always neglected and had betrayed by the position it took during the world war. The theses "On the National and Colonial Question" of the Second Congress, drafted by Lenin, were resolutely directed against any attempt to attach a communist label to revolutionary liberation movements that were not truly communist. The theses held a temporary collaboration with the revolutionary national movement to be necessary. The task assigned to the communists was not to merge with the nationalist parties, but to preserve absolutely the independent character of the proletarian movement.
11. The year 1923 represents a decisive turning point in the history of the CI. The emergence in the USSR, as a result of the NEP, of new layers of exploiters, together with the general exhaustion of the working class after its prodigious efforts during the years of revolution and civil war, allowed the bureaucracy of the party and state apparatuses — which had grown considerably stronger — to set itself up more and more as an independent social force, as an arbiter standing above the classes. The bureaucracy could conquer political power only through struggle against the proletarian vanguard, against proletarian democracy within the party and the soviets. Such was the social basis of the struggle waged by Stalinism against Trotskyism from 1923 onward. The rise of the bureaucracy coincided with Lenin's grave illness and his withdrawal from political activity. Yet in his last writings — notably in the article "Better Fewer, But Better" and in what has come to be called his "Testament" — Lenin clearly perceived the danger of bureaucratism and saw in Stalin its principal representative, whom it was essential to combat.
12. In Germany, 1923 saw the birth of a new revolutionary crisis. The unresolved consequences of the war, an economic crisis scarcely interrupted by feeble recoveries, the entry of the French army into the Ruhr, the failure of the "passive resistance" mounted by the German bourgeoisie against this invasion, and galloping monetary inflation — all these causes led to an enormous sharpening of class contradictions. Powerful strikes broke out. The factory-council movement became the rallying point of the revolutionary masses. Workers organised themselves into "hundreds" and began to arm themselves. The communists won majorities in several mass trade unions. Confusion reigned within social democracy, and the bourgeoisie was divided. The mass movement reached the point at which its further advance to victory depended on the resolve and appropriate initiative of the revolutionary leadership. But the leadership of the German Communist Party (Brandler, Thalheimer, Walcher, Froelich) proved incapable of accomplishing this historic task, and showed itself to be no more than a social-democratic leadership with a communist tint. It clung obstinately to the united front with social democracy, without understanding that the meaning of the united front is to "take a run-up in order to jump further", and without realising that, once a certain stage is reached, the struggle to win the masses can only be carried forward through direct struggle for power. The leadership of the CI, in which the first symptoms of bureaucratic decomposition were already appearing, likewise proved incapable of leading the KPD along a correct path. The bourgeoisie finally succeeded in concentrating its forces. It proclaimed a state of siege and itself passed to the offensive. The KPD capitulated without a fight. This was a grave defeat for the German and European proletariat, affording European capitalism the chance of a further relative stabilisation.
13. The 1923 defeat brought about a grave crisis within the party, which chose a new "left" leadership: Fischer-Maslow. This leadership failed to grasp the decisive character of the October defeat. Instead of retreating, it embarked on the path of adventurism, which only aggravated the defeat.
In Bulgaria, the CI's section, under the leadership of Kolarov and Dimitrov, likewise let slip a highly favourable revolutionary situation in 1923, and tried to make up for the lost opportunity through a putschist adventure in September 1923, inflicting a fatal setback on the Bulgarian proletariat.
After the German defeat, the CI adopted the adventurist course and transposed it across the whole International. The result was a fresh defeat in Estonia:[4] the Reval insurrection of December 1924.
14. The German defeat, while weakening the positions of the international proletariat and its vanguard, simultaneously strengthened the tendencies towards autonomy of the Soviet bureaucracy. The Fifth Congress of the CI, in 1924, was distinguished above all by the CI's submission to the Russian bureaucracy. The Communist International was, in turn, bureaucratised and placed under the complete dependence of the bureaucratic centre in Moscow.
15. The theory of "socialism in one country", put forward by Stalin, head of the bureaucracy, in the autumn of 1924 — in flagrant contradiction with the whole theory and practice of Marxism-Leninism — served as a prop for the new social layers: the bureaucracy, the kulaks, the specialists, who found in it the ideological expression suited to their narrowly national interests. In place of the international proletariat, the bureaucracy proclaimed itself the bearer of socialism. The CI, created to be the instrument of world revolution, thereby became the tool of the national interests of the Soviet bureaucracy. This fundamental contradiction was henceforth to characterise the CI's centrist policy, a policy oscillating between, on the one hand, unprincipled adaptation to the reformist bureaucracy and bourgeois democracy, and, on the other, putschist adventurism. The social basis of this centrism — the stable pole within this headlong flight — is the Soviet bureaucracy.
16. The CI's two methods of leading the masses — unprincipled adaptation to circumstances and to bourgeois parties, alternating with sudden appeals to the revolutionary instincts of the masses — have their roots in the social role of the Soviet bureaucracy, of which the CI bureaucracy is the docile appendage. The Soviet bureaucracy is socially inclined towards adaptation to the privileged, exploiting layers of Soviet society: kulaks, intellectual strata, the labour aristocracy. However, as soon as developments reach a critical point at which these layers become socially too powerful and threaten to shake the bureaucracy's political hegemony, the latter, in order to save itself, appeals to the masses. In reality it succeeds in setting the proletarian masses in motion — or, more precisely, only a small part of them — solely through the brutal intervention of the whole state apparatus, and notably of the GPU. Internationally, the Soviet bureaucracy and the CI feel drawn towards petty-bourgeois democracy. Yet when the bureaucracy, for national reasons or under the logic of events, comes into conflict with petty-bourgeois democracy, it suddenly attempts to drive the masses into revolutionary actions. But since the CI does not have a state apparatus at its disposal to enforce its ultimatum, the masses remain passive.
This explains the apparent successes of Stalinist policy in the Soviet Union, which so dazzle philistines of every stripe — such as the reactionary English Fabians, Webb and Co., the Romain Rollands, and even the London Bureau of the German Socialist Workers' Party (SAP) and the Independent Labour Party (ILP) — successes set against a backdrop of the CI's catastrophic failures.
17. The adventurist course of 1924–1925 had its opportunist complement in bureaucratic combinations directed straight against the interests of the proletarian vanguard. The founding of the Peasant International (Krestintern), the flirtation with the Croatian Peasant Party of Radić and with the American Farmer-Labor Party of La Follette, were an attempt by the Stalinist bureaucracy to use, on an international scale, tendencies favourable to the kulaks as a counterweight to the proletarian vanguard. The cross-class alliance with the Chinese Kuomintang and the hopes placed in the bureaucracy of the British Trade Unions — all these props of the adventurist course of 1924–1925 — became the essential elements of the openly opportunist orientation of 1925–1927.
18. In 1925–1927 the great explosion of the Chinese revolution occurred. The initial events gave the leadership to the Chinese bourgeoisie and its party, the Kuomintang. The CI bureaucracy identified itself entirely with the Kuomintang and with the military leadership of Chiang Kai-shek. The Chinese Communist Party was compelled to renounce totally any independent policy and to enter the Kuomintang, submitting itself completely to it. The lessons of the Second World Congress were trampled underfoot. To justify this wholly Menshevik policy, use was made of the Bolshevik formula from the 1905 revolution: "the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry." For Lenin this formula had been the algebraic expression of the idea of a fighting alliance of the proletariat and the poor peasantry against the landed aristocracy and the liberal bourgeoisie. The precise form which this dictatorship of the oppressed against the oppressors might take was to be determined by the concrete revolutionary situation. When, in the spring of 1917, opportunist tendencies within the Bolshevik party camouflaged themselves behind the old formula, Lenin abandoned it in his Letters on Tactics of April 1917, as having been superseded by the real course of events. In the hands of Stalinism, Lenin's slogan, directed against the liberal bourgeoisie, served to subordinate the proletariat completely to the liberal bourgeoisie.
The opportunist policy of the Stalinist bureaucracy, crawling before the military bureaucracy and having no confidence in the revolutionary strength of the proletariat, did not, however, prevent the Chinese proletarian masses and the poor peasantry from evolving towards communism, driven by the will to carry through their own October revolution, to redistribute the land, to expropriate the expropriators, and to destroy the militarist bourgeois state apparatus and replace it with soviets.
The Kuomintang bourgeoisie, bound by finance capital to the interests of the landowners and the rich peasantry, opposed the agrarian revolution with all its might. The Chinese communists, welded by Stalinism to the Kuomintang, were thereby prevented from placing themselves at the head of the agrarian revolution. The peasantry was left without revolutionary leadership, and the Chinese revolution was deprived of its most powerful lever.
Stalinism's policy of servile submission did not prevent the Chinese bourgeoisie from settling accounts with the potential danger represented by the rise of communism. The Kuomintang military leadership carried out a counter-revolutionary coup d'état, and Chiang Kai-shek had thousands of disarmed Chinese proletarians — rendered defenceless by Stalinist policy — shot, while in Moscow he was still being hailed as a hero of the revolution. After Chiang Kai-shek's "betrayal" — a betrayal not of the class interests of the Chinese bourgeoisie, but of Stalinist illusions — the bureaucracy advocated alliance with Wang Ching-wei's "left" Kuomintang, in order to repeat with him the same bitter experience it had had with Chiang Kai-shek.
It was only once the defeat had been consummated that the bureaucracy appealed to the proletarian masses, who had just been crushed. The result was the Canton insurrection which — despite its putschist character and its complete isolation, which doomed it to failure — once again demonstrated the class character of the Chinese revolution and proved both the possibility and the necessity of forming soviets and establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat. The criminal character of the whole of Stalinist policy in China was plain for all to see.
19. In the other colonial countries and in East Asia — British India, the Dutch East Indies, Indonesia, Japan, Korea — Stalinism advocated at this time the creation of "peasant and workers' parties" of the Kuomintang type, which would be the very opposite of communist parties. This policy has entirely disorganised and demoralised the proletarian vanguard of these countries and has constituted — in conjunction with the catastrophic defeat of the Chinese revolution — the essential reason why no independent proletarian party has yet been formed in these countries to this day.
20. Alongside the political alliance with the Kuomintang, a political agreement was concluded with the British trade-union bureaucracy, entitled the Anglo-Russian Committee, "to prevent military intervention". Whereas the Leninist tactic of the united front aimed at winning the masses to communism, in this instance the Stalinist bureaucrats had no contact whatsoever with the British masses. The Anglo-Russian Committee confined itself to purely bureaucratic demonstrations, conferences and banquets. The result was to reinforce the authority of the reactionary Trade Union bureaucracy and to bring about the open abandonment by the Third International of the revolutionary minority — the Minority Movement[5] — which had been undergoing promising development. The reactionary nature of the Anglo-Russian Committee became clear during the British General Strike of 1926, shamefully betrayed by the trade-union leaders shielded by the authority of Moscow. The break in relations was not decided by the Russian bureaucracy but was the doing of the British bureaucrats, who chose the moment that suited them.
21. In 1927, the bureaucracy's struggle against the proletarian vanguard in the Soviet Union reached its culmination. It was precisely the catastrophic results of Stalinist policy, confirming the Left Opposition's criticism in every field, that decided the bureaucracy — directly allied with the kulaks and other petty-bourgeois layers — to apply the most brutal methods against the Left Opposition, in contempt of all proletarian democracy. Expulsions from the party, dismissal from posts, arrest, deportation, expulsion from the country, the infiltration of agents provocateurs into the ranks of the Left Opposition, frame-ups and executions paved the way for Stalin's Bonapartist dictatorship.
22. Having leaned, in its struggle against the Left Opposition, on the kulaks and the urban petty-bourgeois layers, the bureaucracy now risked being submerged in turn by these same layers. Reasons of self-defence then led it to turn against the kulaks. Internationally, too, it had become impossible for it to continue its opportunist policy, given the behaviour of its partners: the break in relations by the Trade Union bureaucrats, the counter-revolutionary coups of Chiang Kai-shek and Wang Ching-wei. As for the contradictions with German and French social democracy, these were chiefly nationalist in character, relating to foreign policy. These conditions determined the turn from adaptation to the social-democratic, trade-union and national-democratic (KMT) bureaucracies towards bureaucratic ultimatism and adventurism (see also point 16).
23. The Sixth World Congress, which met in 1928 after a four-year interval, had a dual character. It was marked by the shift from an ultra-right orientation to an ultra-left current, and it prepared the elimination of the right wing which [illegible] in Germany in the first instance, which accordingly corresponded to the [illegible] did not want to depart from the opportunist political line followed in 1925–1927: Bukharin, Rykov, Brandler, Thalheimer, Walcher, Froelich, Kilbom, Lovestone. The programme adopted by the congress is entirely inspired by an eclectic spirit. It canonises the theory of socialism in one country, thereby emasculating the CI. The programme in no way starts from the actual situation of world capitalism as a whole in order to draw from it the conclusion of the necessity of international revolution. It examines, in a pedantic and reactionary manner, the possibility for each country individually to "achieve socialism", thereby opening the door wide to a future social-patriotic disintegration of the CI. As for the colonies and semi-colonial countries — and even, with certain reservations, for use in countries such as Spain, Portugal and Poland — the programme proclaims, across the board, the slogan of the "democratic dictatorship of workers and peasants" in its anti-Leninist content: class fraternisation, which is what caused the Chinese revolution to fail. On questions of strategy and tactics, the programme does not rise above commonplaces. The real experiences of the October triumph and of the immense defeats of the proletariat in Germany, Hungary and China, and the role and significance of the revolutionary party and its leadership, are passed over in silence.
24. In the years that followed, the Stalinist bureaucracy operated — chiefly, though not exclusively — with the other means at its disposal: the ultimatist command of the masses. Without any preparation, in the midst of the relatively peaceful social conjuncture of 1924–1929, a "revolutionary upsurge" was suddenly decreed for the whole world without distinction, under the label of the "Third Period". The disastrous policy of trade-union splitting, and the action of "red" trade-union oppositions conceived as independent unions, were put into effect. Every agreement with social democracy — even a temporary, practical, technical one — was condemned. The theory of social fascism — "social democracy and fascism are not opposites but twins" (Stalin) — was born, and every distinction between parliamentary democracy and fascist dictatorship was denied. Whereas the "ultra-left follies" — in Lenin's phrase — of the first post-war years had been inspired by a sincere revolutionary will, the policy of the Stalinist bureaucrats was now being played out with no regard for the interests of the proletarian masses.
25. The profound economic crisis that broke out in the United States in 1929–1930 shook existing conditions to their foundations, confirming the characterisation given by Lenin in 1917 of Russian capitalism as "the weakest link in the capitalist chain". The policy of adaptation to declining capitalism practised by German social democracy, with its principle of "the lesser evil", together with the bureaucratic degeneration of the German Communist Party, prevented the crisis from leading to a strengthening of the workers' movement. The petty bourgeoisie turned towards fascist demagogy, which preached civil war against the proletariat rather than against the predatory bourgeoisie, and whose aim was to guarantee and intensify capitalist exploitation by destroying all democratic liberties. Even the appearance of this perilous enemy of the proletariat could have become a lever for revolution, provided that the Communist Party had known how to mobilise all proletarian forces against it. But the Stalinist bureaucracy did not even perceive the danger — still less was it capable of combating it. The utterly deranged characterisation of social democracy as "social-fascist" led to adaptation to fascism proper: a programme of "national and social liberation", support for the fascist plebiscite against the social-democratic government of Prussia in 1931. This policy of backing nationalist agitation, together with the bureaucracy's cowardly refusal to engage in combat against the fascist adversary, found support in Soviet foreign policy, motivated purely by conjunctural concerns. What mattered at the time was to preserve the Franco-German contradiction so as to avert the possibility of Western intervention. In principle, Soviet foreign policy was fully entitled to exploit the contradictions between the imperialist powers to its own advantage, but it was an unpardonable crime to sacrifice the interests of the proletarian revolution to conjunctural considerations of foreign policy.
The frivolous and criminal policy of the KPD, for which the CI bears full responsibility, led to a shameful defeat of the German proletariat without a fight at the beginning of 1933. The lamentable collapse of the KPD, confirmed by the sorry outcome of the Saar plebiscite of January 1935, was the definitive proof that the CI had been transformed from a subjective factor of world revolution into an objective obstacle to that revolution. From this fact emerged the absolute necessity of building the Fourth International.
26. The policy of bureaucratic ultimatism found its complement in unprincipled combinations with bankrupt bourgeois politicians, pacifists and novelists — Lord Marley, Henri Barbusse, Romain Rolland, Heinrich Mann — who expressed themselves at the Peace congresses organised by the Stalinists, in the Anti-Imperialist League, and in the Friends of the USSR association. This policy stands in direct opposition to the Leninist tactic of the united front for winning the proletarian masses, and reflects the bureaucracy's deference towards celebrated personalities and its contempt for the revolutionary forces of the masses.
27. In 1934, the internal and external situation of the Soviet Union, following on from the victory of fascism in Germany, forced the USSR to carry out a further turn in the CI's policy. Until then, the Leninist tactic of the united front had been judged counter-revolutionary. Henceforth a close political alliance had to be concluded, wherever possible, not only with social democracy but also with the liberal bourgeoisie. This treacherous capitulation before bourgeois democracy was given the pompous name of the Popular Front.
28. Stalin's declaration to the French premier, Laval, in May 1935, stating that he "fully understood and approved France's policy of national defence", was the signal for the CI's passage into the camp of imperialism. Soviet diplomacy, having joined the League of Nations, thereby obliged the CI to become the champion of the League, of "collective security" — which is in fact merely the security of the imperialist brigands to pursue their brigandage unhindered — and of international arbitration. The CI thus becomes the defender of the most decrepit and threadbare illusions, by means of which imperialism deceives the masses and ripens them for a fresh slaughter of peoples. And this at the very moment when the brutal Italian invasion of Ethiopia clearly demonstrated the utter emptiness and falsehood of the phrase-mongering about collective security.
29. The Seventh World Congress, which finally met in the autumn of 1935, took place under the sign of a break with the last surviving traditions of the CI's early days. The Popular Front and "national defence" — social-treachery and social-chauvinism — were all that this congress, which was, moreover, nothing but a hollow spectacle of bureaucratic puppets, could offer the world proletariat.
30. As the price of their participation in national defence, the Stalinists ask only that the foreign policy of each of their countries not be directed against the USSR. The Franco-Soviet military pact alone was enough to turn the French Stalinists into raving chauvinists, preaching the national reconciliation of all classes, of all political and religious tendencies. The British Stalinists have no other object than to persuade the British bourgeoisie to add its signature to the Franco-Soviet pact. The American section of the CI is already advocating a war of the United States against Japan "to defend the USSR." Although a war of the United States against Japan — accompanied by a correct revolutionary policy on the part of the proletarian party — would open up immense possibilities for the world proletarian revolution, the American Stalinists are already preaching the renunciation of revolutionary class struggle and support for the American bourgeoisie, the most powerful and dangerous imperialist bourgeoisie in the world. In China the Stalinists are prepared to hand over the Chinese proletariat and the poor peasantry once again to the counter-revolutionary leadership of Chiang Kai-shek, on the sole condition that he be ready to turn his bayonets against Japan. In the small countries of Europe the Stalinists now declare themselves the defenders of "national independence." They forget entirely that these countries are links in the imperialist chain and that they too wage war for imperialist ends. As for Czechoslovakia, whose defence touches the Stalinists' hearts in particular, it is not even a national state at all, but a mixture of several nationalities, held together by French imperialism, in which the weak Czech bourgeoisie oppresses, in imperialist fashion, no fewer than six peoples: Slovak, Ukrainian, Polish, German, Jewish, Hungarian. Poland, Romania and Belgium, for their part, oppress national minorities. Holland, Belgium and Portugal are themselves possessors of colonies which they exploit with as little scruple as the great imperialist powers. The Austrian Stalinists declare themselves ready to defend "Austrian independence" — an entirely artificial construct — on the sole condition that the Austrian bourgeoisie (and Franco-British capital) is willing to grant a certain degree of legality to their patriotic propaganda.
The German Stalinists in emigration have become social-patriots in reverse. From nationalist accusers of the Treaty of Versailles, they have turned into defenders of the status quo created by that treaty. It follows from the present position of the German Stalinists that they would transform themselves into authentic social-patriots the very moment the fascist dictatorship in Germany was replaced by another bourgeois regime.
Faced with this monstrous betrayal of the interests of the proletariat, the organisations of the Fourth International remain faithful to the slogan of transforming the imperialist war into civil war. They say no to the defence of reactionary national frontiers, which have already, for decades, been a brake on all progressive development. They set themselves the goal of abolishing them, through the creation of the "Union of Soviet Republics of Europe and the World."
31. Through this social-patriotic transformation of Stalinism, every distinction between the Second International — which continues to exist only artificially, thanks to the degeneration of the Comintern — and the Third International has practically disappeared. It is thus entirely logical that the problem of "organic unity" — the fusion of the Second and Third Internationals — should come more and more to the fore. In countries where reformism still holds a monopoly of the workers' movement (Great Britain, Scandinavia), the parties of the Second International are opposed to organic unity. In Belgium the recent successes of the Stalinists and the setbacks of the Labour Party ought to make the latter more open to fusion. In France, by contrast, it is the PCF which, currently growing at the expense of social democracy, is holding back unity. Nowhere, however, is this any longer a matter of irreconcilable contradictions of principle, but solely one of the bureaucrats' assessment of the relationship of forces. But no matter! Whether "organic unity" comes about or not, advanced workers must have no doubt whatsoever that Stalinism and social democracy "are not opposites but twins," and that both are agencies of putrefying capitalism.
32. The Communist International is currently experiencing a rise which should not be underestimated — no longer as a revolutionary party, but as a social-traitor and social-chauvinist party. Given the immense political tensions everywhere heralding the approach of a new world war, the masses are rushing towards the left and finding only the one door they know: that of the CI. Thus the French Communist Party, at the last elections, was able to more than double its vote and multiply the number of its deputies sevenfold. It was above all the proletarian constituencies of Paris and its suburbs that voted communist. Likewise the Belgian Communist Party, which had always been very weak, achieved a significant success this year in the elections: an increase of more than 100% in its vote compared with 1932, and a tripling of its seats. Certain Stalinist successes have also been registered in Spain, Switzerland and, partially, Czechoslovakia. A rise in other sections — British, Dutch, Scandinavian, American — cannot be ruled out, although it is not assured. While the masses hope that the Third International will save them from the dangers of war, the CI is preparing to become the principal instrument of the coming imperialist war. It is thereby replacing the worn-out Second International in the service of bourgeois democracy and imperialism — though not without harbouring enormous contradictions of its own.
33. These recent successes trouble in particular the petty-bourgeois philistines gathered under the banner of the International Bureau for Revolutionary Socialist Unity, or London Bureau: the German SAP, the British ILP, the Swedish PS, Nin and Maurín's Spanish POUM, etc. In the aftermath of the catastrophic defeat of the German workers' movement in 1933, a number of these centrist parties had drawn closer to the Fourth International. But the Stalinist turn of autumn 1934 dragged these wavering figures — Walcher, Maurín, Nin, Maxton, Brockway — into the swamp of Popular Front politics. The absorption of the London Bureau by Stalinism is now only a matter of time.
34. A striking example of the contradictions bound up with the current rise of the communist parties is the prodigious movement of strikes and factory occupations in France, embracing close to two million workers and employees over recent weeks, which took the PCF entirely by surprise. But in embarking on the path of revolution, this new movement everywhere runs up against the obstacles placed in its way by the CI's ossified apparatus. Thus the PCF, instead of placing itself at the head of the strike and formulating revolutionary demands, collaborated from the very outset with the government and the employers with a view to strangling the strike. One can therefore predict with certainty: either the new movement of the proletarian masses in France will sweep away the ossified apparatus of the Stalinist traitors and create a new leadership, in which case the proletarian revolution will triumph, or else the traitorous bureaucrats will master the movement, in which case it is fascism that will triumph.
35. The contradiction between the combativity of the masses moving leftward and the new treacherous role of the communist parties places the organisations of the Fourth International before great responsibilities and great possibilities. Some of these organisations had recently entered the socialist parties and won over the best revolutionary elements to revolutionary Marxism. In countries where the internal political evolution is proceeding at an accelerated pace — France and Belgium — this was only a brief stage. In other countries, Poland and England, this experience is not yet complete. Finally, in the United States, it has only just begun. But whether acting independently or from within the socialist parties, the sections of the Fourth International must bear in mind that at present the Third International is drawing workers away from the Second International. The principal fight against social-imperialism — socialism or communism in words, imperialism in deeds — is therefore the fight against the CI, against the Stalinist bureaucracy. The primary task consists in making the workers understand the present character of the CI, now become an agency of imperialism, and in demonstrating to them that to pass from the Second to the Third International amounts to nothing more than exchanging a one-eyed horse for a blind one.
36. The paths and methods of this work will differ greatly according to the development and particularities of each country. The essential thing is to use every opportunity to bring out the contradiction between the reactionary Stalinist bureaucracy and its social base: the revolutionary workers. It is a matter of attentively observing developments everywhere, gathering information, and closely following contradictory tendencies, so as to be able to intervene vigorously at the right moment.
37. Of the theory and practice of the first four world congresses, not a trace remains in today's Communist International. But the strategic and tactical lessons of the CI of Lenin and Trotsky's time, and the Leninist renewal of theoretical Marxism, have not been forgotten. These lessons and experiences have been defended since 1923 by the Bolshevik-Leninist Opposition against bureaucratic degeneration. It is on this basis that the political and theoretical effort of the Opposition has developed — an Opposition which, from its very origin, fought the theory of socialism in one country as the source of social-patriotic degeneration. By applying Lenin's strategic lessons to new events and phenomena, and by implacably criticising the Stalinist errors and crimes of 1923–1936, the Left Opposition has educated new Bolshevik cadres throughout the world. Without a thorough study of the programmatic documents and writings of the Opposition of this period, no proletarian revolutionary worthy of the name can lay claim to a leading role within the ranks of the proletarian vanguard.
38. The Fourth International, by making its own the great strategic goal of the world proletarian revolution assigned to the Third International by Lenin and Trotsky, and betrayed by the Stalinist bureaucracy, strong in the lessons and experience of nearly a century of the proletariat's revolutionary struggles against the bourgeoisie, claims as its own the heritage of the ideas and work of the great pioneers of the proletariat: Marx, Engels, Liebknecht, Luxemburg and Lenin.
(Translated from the German edition)
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## Notes
1. The Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD) arose from a split in the Social Democratic Party in 1916. Its majority merged with the Communist Party in 1920, while the minority (Kautsky) returned to social democracy in 1922.
2. The Communist Workers' Party of Germany (KAPD) was the product of a left-wing split within the German Communist Party in 1919. It held the status of a "sympathising section" of the Comintern for a certain period.
3. The March Action of 1921: an abortive attempt at armed insurrection led by the German Communist Party, sharply criticised by the Third Congress of the CI.
4. The Estonian insurrection of 1924 was a putschist attempt to seize power by a few hundred armed communists, which was crushed within four hours. Cf. Armed Insurrection, A. Neuberg, Maspero.
5. Minority Movement: a left-wing tendency within the British trade unions during the 1920s, led by British communist militants.