Author: Leon Trotsky (written 3 July 1936) Adopted by: Conference for the Fourth International (Geneva, 29-31 July 1936); published in Quatrième Internationale, no. 1
Note: The French text used as the basis for this translation itself carries the notation "(Traduit de Writings of Léon Trotsky, 1935-1936, Pathfinder)" at the end of the companion thesis "La IVe Internationale et l'URSS" which immediately follows this one in Prager's volume. This strongly suggests that an authoritative English original of this text (and/or of the companion thesis) already exists in Pathfinder Press's Writings of Leon Trotsky, 1935-36, and possibly on marxists.org. This draft is a French-to-English machine-assisted retranslation made because no existing English translation was supplied for this task; it should ideally be checked against, or replaced by, the original English text if that can be located, since translating a French translation of an English original risks second-hand drift from Trotsky's own wording.
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The New Revolutionary Upsurge and the Tasks of the Fourth International
I. The June strike opens a new period in the internal development of France and Belgium. It will undoubtedly provoke not only the further sharpening of the class struggle in these countries, but also, with more or less delay, mass movements over a considerable part of Europe, including Great Britain, and perhaps even beyond the ocean. The Spanish revolution thus emerges from its isolation.
2. The June strike showed what exasperation and readiness to fight had accumulated, beneath the deceptive appearance of passivity, among the proletarian masses of town and country during the years of crisis and reaction. It revealed a sympathy for the workers' struggle on the part of broad masses of the urban petty bourgeoisie and the peasantry. It unveiled, finally, the extreme instability of the whole regime, the ruling classes' lack of confidence in themselves, the fact that they are floundering between Léon Blum and De La Rocque. These three conditions — readiness to fight on the part of the whole proletariat, acute discontent among the lower strata of the petty bourgeoisie, and disarray in the camp of finance capital — represent the fundamental premises of the proletarian revolution.
3. The masses' fighting offensive took, this time again, the form of the general strike. The partial, corporative demands, important in themselves, were for the workers the necessary means, after a long period of immobility, to raise up and rally against the bourgeoisie and its state the broadest possible masses. The general strike, opening a period of revolutionary combat, cannot but combine within itself the corporative and partial demands with the general tasks of the whole class, even though these are still formulated with little clarity. It is in this combination that its strength lies, and that lies the guarantee of the welding together of the vanguard and the deep reserves of the class.
4. Our French section, in recent years, has placed the general strike at the centre of its propaganda. Unlike all the other parties and groupings that speak in the name of the working class, the French Bolshevik-Leninists appreciated in time that the situation was pre-revolutionary, rightly grasped the symptomatic importance of the strike explosions at Brest and Toulon,[46] and, under the ceaseless blows of the opportunists and social-patriots (Socialist Party, Communist Party, CGT), in the face of the opposition of the centrists (Marceau Pivert, etc.), prepared the general strike through their agitation. On fertile soil, a handful of grain yields great shoots. Thus, amid the conditions of social crisis and the exasperation of the masses, a small organization, poor in material means but armed with correct slogans, exercised an undeniable influence on the course of revolutionary events. The furious campaign against the Bolshevik-Leninists by the whole of the capitalist, social-democratic, Stalinist and syndicalist press, together with the repressions carried out by the police and by the judges of Léon Blum, serve as external confirmation of this truth.[47]
5. None of the official workers' organizations of France, any more than of Belgium, wanted the struggle. The strikes arose against the will of the trade unions and of both parties. It was only once confronted with the accomplished fact that the official leaders "recognized" the strike, the better to strangle it all the more quickly. And yet this was still a relatively "peaceful" movement, under partial slogans. Can one doubt for a single instant that, at the moment of open struggle for power, the apparatuses of the Second and Third Internationals, like the parties of the Russian Social Revolutionaries and Mensheviks in 1917, will place themselves entirely at the disposal of the bourgeoisie against the proletariat? The necessity of the new International, as the world party of the proletarian revolution, is once again and indisputably demonstrated by the events in France and Belgium.
6. Nevertheless, a direct and immediate consequence of the great June wave is the exceptionally rapid growth of the old organizations. This fact is historically altogether normal. Thus the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries grew feverishly after the February 1917 revolution — a growth which, as social-patriots, they had not sought during the war; German social democracy swelled rapidly after the November 1918 revolution, which had come against its will. Before revealing their bankruptcy to the whole class, the opportunist parties become, for a brief moment, the refuge of the broadest masses. The rapid growth of the Socialist Party, and above all of the "Communist" Party, in France is a sure symptom of the country's revolutionary crisis, and at the same time it prepares the mortal crisis of the parties of the Second and Third Internationals.
Of no less importance is the extraordinarily rapid growth of the trade unions in France. While apparently increasing the weight and importance of the unified reformist-Stalinist trade-union high command (Jouhaux, Racamond, etc.), the influx of new millions of workers and employees in fact undermines the very foundation of the conservative trade-union apparatus.
7. Great mass movements are the best test of theories and programmes. The June strike shows how false are the sectarian ultra-left theories according to which the trade unions have in general "had their day" and should be replaced by other organizations, or according to which "true" new unions should be built alongside the old conservative ones. In fact, in a revolutionary epoch the struggle for economic demands and social legislation does not cease; on the contrary, it takes on an unprecedented scope. The hundreds of thousands and millions of new workers who have flowed into the unions destroy routine, shake the conservative apparatus, and enable the revolutionary party to build its factions within the unions, to win influence, and to fight successfully for the leading role in the trade-union movement. A revolutionary party incapable of carrying out systematic and successful work within the trade-union organizations will be still less capable of creating unions of its own. All attempts of this kind are doomed to collapse.
8. Contrary to the assertions of the leaders of the Second and Third Internationals, present-day capitalism is no longer capable either of providing work for all workers or of raising the standard of living of working people. Finance capital passes the cost of social reforms on to the workers themselves and to the petty bourgeoisie through rising prices, open or disguised inflation, taxes, etc. The essence of present-day statism, of state intervention — in the "democratic" countries just as in the fascist countries — consists in saving rotting capitalism at the price of lowering the material and cultural standard of living of the people. There is no other road within the framework of private property. The programmes of the Popular Fronts of France and Spain, like the programme of the Belgian coalition, represent a mirage and a manifest deception, the preparation of a fresh disillusionment for the working masses.
9. The absolutely hopeless situation of the petty bourgeoisie under the conditions of rotting capitalism means that — contrary to the theories of "social harmony" preached by Léon Blum, Vandervelde, Dimitrov, Cachin and their like — social reforms in favour of the proletariat, unstable and illusory in themselves, accelerate the ruin of the small property-owners of town and country, driving them into the arms of fascism. A serious, deep and lasting alliance of the proletariat with the petty-bourgeois masses, as opposed to parliamentary combinations with the radical exploiters of the petty bourgeoisie, is possible only on the basis of a revolutionary programme, that is, of the conquest of power by the proletariat and a revolution in property relations in the interests of all working people. The Popular Front, as a coalition with the bourgeoisie, is the brake on the revolution and the safety valve of imperialism.
10. The first step towards alliance with the petty bourgeoisie is the breaking of the bloc with the bourgeois radicals in France and Spain, with the Catholics and Liberals in Belgium, etc. It is necessary to explain this truth, on the basis of experience, to every socialist and communist worker. Such is the central task of the moment. The struggle against reformism and Stalinism is, at the present stage, above all the struggle against the bloc with the bourgeoisie. For honest unity of the workers, against dishonest unity with the exploiters! The bourgeois out of the Popular Front! Down with the capitalist ministers!
11. One can only make conjectures as to the further timetable of revolutionary development. Thanks to exceptional conditions (defeat in the war, the peasant question, the Bolshevik Party), the Russian revolution accomplished its ascent — from the overthrow of absolutism to the conquest of power by the proletariat — in eight months. But even within this short period it went through the armed demonstration of April, the July defeat in Petrograd, and Kornilov's attempted counter-revolutionary coup in August. The Spanish revolution has been running its course, with ebbs and flows, for five years already. During this period the workers and poor peasants of Spain have displayed so magnificent a political instinct, have deployed so much energy, devotion and heroism, that state power would long since have been in their hands had the leadership corresponded even in the slightest degree to the political situation and to the fighting qualities of the proletariat. The true saviours of Spanish capitalism have been and remain not Zamora, nor Azaña, nor Gil Robles, but the leaders of the socialist, communist and anarcho-syndicalist organizations.
12. It is the same today in France and Belgium. Had Léon Blum's party been genuinely socialist, it could have, leaning on the workers' strike, overthrown the bourgeoisie in June almost without civil war, with a minimum of upheaval and victims. But Blum's party is a bourgeois party, the younger brother of decaying radicalism. Had the Communist Party, for its part, had anything in common with communism, it would have, from the very first day of the strike, corrected its criminal error, broken its fatal bloc with the radicals, called on the workers to create factory committees and soviets, and thereby established in the country a regime of dual power, as the shortest and surest bridge to the dictatorship of the proletariat. But the apparatus of the Communist Party is in fact only one of the instruments of French imperialism. The key to the coming fate of Spain, France and Belgium is the problem of revolutionary leadership.
13. The same conclusion follows fully from the lessons of international policy, in particular from the so-called "struggle against war." Social-patriots and centrists, above all the French ones, in order to justify their servility towards the League of Nations, have invoked the passivity of the masses, in particular the fact that they were supposedly not ready to apply a boycott against Italy at the time of its brigand aggression against Abyssinia. This is the same argument used, to cover their own prostration, by pacifists of the Maxton type. In the light of the June events, it becomes especially clear that the masses did not respond to the international provocations of imperialism solely because they were deceived, lulled to sleep, held back, paralyzed and demoralized by their own leading organizations. Had the Soviet trade unions given, in time, the example of a boycott of Italy, the movement, like a steppe fire, would infallibly have won over the whole of Europe, the whole world, and would at once have become threatening for the imperialists of every country. But the Soviet bureaucracy prohibited and stifled every revolutionary initiative, replacing it with the crawling of the Communist International before Herriot, Léon Blum and the League of Nations. The problem of the proletariat's international policy, like that of its domestic policy, is the problem of revolutionary leadership.
14. Every genuinely mass movement clears the atmosphere, like a storm, and destroys in passing every kind of political fiction and equivocation. Pitiful and insignificant, in the light of the June events, appear the slogan of "unity" of the two Internationals — which, as they are, are already sufficiently united in the betrayal of the interests of the proletariat — or the old wives' remedies of the London Bureau (the Two-and-a-Half International), which hesitates among every possible direction and always chooses the worst.
The June events have, at the same stroke, exposed the complete bankruptcy of anarchism and of so-called "revolutionary syndicalism." Neither the one nor the other, to the extent that they exist at all on this earth, had foreseen the events or done anything to prepare for them. The propaganda of the general strike, of factory committees, of workers' control must be carried out by a political organization, that is, by a party. It cannot be otherwise. The mass organizations of the working class remain powerless, indecisive and disconcerted unless they are inspired and led forward by a tightly-knit vanguard. The necessity of the revolutionary party is demonstrated with renewed force.
15. Thus all the tasks of the revolutionary struggle come down, without fail, to a single one: the creation of a new leadership, genuinely revolutionary, equal to the tasks and to the possibilities of our epoch. To take direct part in the mass movement, to have bold class slogans carried through to the end, a clear perspective, an independent banner, to be intransigent towards the conciliators and merciless towards the traitors — such is the road of the Fourth International. It is ridiculous and absurd to debate whether it is opportune or not to "found" it. One does not "found" an international as one founds a co-operative society; one creates it in struggle. To the question of the pedants about "opportuneness," the June days have given their answer. There is no room left for further discussion.
16. The bourgeoisie is seeking its revenge. A new social conflict, consciously prepared in the headquarters of big capital, will undoubtedly assume, from its very first steps, the character of a vast provocation and a series of provocations directed at the workers. At the same time, the "dissolved" fascist organizations[48] will feverishly reorganize. The conflict between the two camps, in France, in Belgium, in Spain, is absolutely inevitable. The more the leaders of the Popular Front "reconcile" the contradictions between the classes and extinguish the revolutionary struggle, the more explosive and convulsive a character it will take on in the period ahead, the more great sacrifices it will entail, and the less prepared the proletariat will be to defend itself against fascism.
17. The sections of the Fourth International see this danger clearly and distinctly. They openly warn the proletariat of it. They teach the vanguard to organize and to prepare itself. At the same time they reject with contempt the policy of washing one's hands of the matter; they identify their own fate with the fate of the masses in struggle, whatever severe blows may fall upon them in the months and years to come. They take part in every act of the struggle in order to bring to it the greatest possible clarity and organization. They call tirelessly for the creation of factory committees and soviets. They link themselves to the best workers thrown forward by the movement, and hand in hand with them build the new revolutionary leadership.
By their example and their criticism, they will accelerate the formation of a revolutionary wing within the old parties, draw it into the process of the struggle, and push it onto the road of the Fourth International.
Participation in the living struggle, always in the front line of fire, work in the trade unions, and the building of the party go hand in hand, mutually reinforcing one another. All the fighting slogans — workers' control, workers' militia, arming of the workers, workers' and peasants' government, socialization of the means of production — are indissolubly bound up with the creation of workers', peasants' and soldiers' soviets.
18. The fact that, at the moment of the mass struggle, the French Bolshevik-Leninists suddenly found themselves at the centre of political attention and of the hatred of the class enemy is by no means fortuitous — quite the contrary. It shows the future in advance and infallibly. Bolshevism, which appears as sectarianism to philistines of every stripe, in fact combines ideological intransigence with the greatest attention to the mass movement. Ideological intransigence itself is nothing other than the purging of the consciousness of advanced workers from routine, inertia and indecision — that is, the education of the vanguard in the spirit of the boldest decisions, its preparation to take part in the struggle of the masses to the death.
19. No revolutionary grouping in world history has yet found itself under so terrible a pressure as the grouping of the Fourth International. The Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels spoke of the forces "of Pope and Tsar, [...] of French Radicals and German policemen" united against communism. Of this list, only the Tsar has disappeared. But the Stalinist bureaucracy today represents an obstacle on the road of the proletarian revolution incomparably more menacing and more perfidious than the autocratic Tsar once was. The Communist International cloaks the policy of social-patriotism and Menshevism with the authority of the October revolution and the banner of Lenin. The world agency of the GPU is already carrying on, hand in hand with the police of the "friendly" imperialist countries, a systematic campaign against the Fourth International. In the event of war, the united forces of imperialism and Stalinism will inflict upon the revolutionary internationalists persecutions incomparably more ferocious than those which the Hohenzollern generals, together with the social-democratic executioners, once inflicted upon Luxemburg, Liebknecht and their followers.
20. The sections of the Fourth International are frightened neither by the magnitude of the tasks, nor by the bitter hatred of their enemies, nor even by the fact that they are numerically weak today.
Even now the struggling masses, without yet being conscious of it, find themselves much closer to them than to their official leaders. Under the blows of coming events, an ever more rapid and profound regroupment will take place within the workers' movement. In France the Socialist Party will rapidly find itself eliminated from the ranks of the proletariat. Within the Communist Party a series of splits must be expected with certainty. Within the trade unions a powerful left current is forming, receptive to the slogans of Bolshevism. In other forms, but identical in substance, similar processes will occur in other countries drawn into the revolutionary crisis. The organizations of the revolutionary vanguard will emerge from their isolation. The slogans of Bolshevism will become the slogans of the masses. The epoch to come will be the epoch of the Fourth International.
Postscript
"The conflict between the two camps in France, Belgium and Spain is absolutely inevitable. The more the leaders of the Popular Front 'reconcile' the oppositions between the classes and extinguish the revolutionary struggle, the more explosive and convulsive a character it will take on in the period ahead, the more great sacrifices it will entail, and the less prepared the proletariat will be to defend itself against fascism." (Point 16 of the above thesis.)
Events have confirmed this prediction even before the present theses could be published.
The July days in Spain complete and deepen, with extraordinary force, the lessons of the June days in France. For the second time in five years, the coalition of the workers' parties with the radical bourgeoisie has driven the revolution to the edge of the abyss. Incapable of resolving any of the tasks that the revolution has posed — all of which come down to a single one, the overthrow of the bourgeoisie — the Popular Front makes the continued existence of the bourgeois regime impossible, and thereby provokes the fascist coup d'état. By lulling the workers and peasants with parliamentary illusions, and paralyzing their will to fight, the Popular Front creates the conditions favourable to the victory of fascism. The policy of coalition with the bourgeoisie will be paid for by the working class in years of suffering and sacrifice, if not in decades of fascist terror.
The Popular Front government reveals its complete incapacity precisely at the most critical moment; one ministerial crisis follows another, for the bourgeois radicals fear their worker allies more than they fear the fascists. The civil war is taking on a protracted character. Whatever the immediate outcome of the civil war in Spain, it deals a mortal blow to the Popular Front in France and in other countries. It must now be clear to every French worker that the bloc with the radicals means the legal preparation of a military coup d'état by the French general staff, under cover of the Minister of War, Daladier.
The administrative dissolution of the fascist associations, while the bourgeois state apparatus is maintained, is, as the Spanish example shows, falsehood and deception. Only armed workers can stand up to fascism. The conquest of power is possible only by means of armed insurrection against the state apparatus of the bourgeoisie. The destruction of this apparatus and its replacement by workers', peasants' and soldiers' soviets is the necessary condition for carrying out the socialist programme. Without the accomplishment of these tasks, there is for the proletariat and the petty bourgeoisie neither an escape from misery nor salvation in the face of the coming war. (1 August)
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[Editorial footnotes from the Prager edition]
46. The strike at the Brest and Toulon naval dockyards, which broke out on 5 August 1935, took on the character of riots in the days that followed, after the intervention of the army and the mobile guards. There were deaths and numerous injuries. The PS and PC disowned the movement and denounced the provocateurs.
47. Issues no. 1 and 2 of the new Trotskyist organ La Lutte Ouvrière were seized in June 1936, and the leaders of the POI were prosecuted.
48. The fascist leagues were dissolved on 19 June 1936 but soon reformed under another name.