X. Without international
theory, practice and organisation there will be no building of
the World Socialist Federation
The delay shown by the main
groups emerging today from the recomposition of the
international workers’ movement in taking up a consistent
internationalist commitment has a great many causes. Among the
subjective causes we can mention in particular the bad
experiences of the manipulative bureaucratic-administrative
“centres” which go right back to the Zinovievist deformation
of the Comintern. [24]
The culminating point was reached with the Stalinised Comintern,
then there was the Cominform, the attempts by the Kremlin to
maintain a control over the “international communist
movement,” the Chinese efforts to align Maoist groups on the
twists and turns of Chinese diplomacy, etc. Scepticism certainly
exists about the possibility of combining international policies
valid for all countries with the specificity of the state of the
class struggle in each country – a scepticism that has been
particularly fostered by the bankruptcy of the Second
International in 1914 in failing to hold a common world front
against the war, despite all the solemn commitment entered into
beforehand. But objective causes, which are at the end of the
day more important, must he added to these subjective reasons.
For parties already in power,
the unavoidable obligations of diplomatic manoeuvres involve the
impossibility of totally taking into account the interests of
the world proletariat, since at certain times and for certain
countries there is a contradiction between these interests and
the immediate consequences of the manoeuvre. This does not imply
that revolutionary Marxists have to condemn the necessity of
such manoeuvres. It does imply the need for a clear separation
between any state policies and the class policy of the world
proletariat. It is impossible to achieve this separation if it
is not organisationally institutionalised.
Lenin understood this. This was
one of the reasons why he pushed for the rapid creation (some
said at the time it was premature) of the Communist
International, not to give Soviet Russia a supplementary
instrument to manipulate, but on the contrary to counterbalance
the obligation of Russian communists to manoeuvre as a state on
the world political scene.
For Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev,
Bukharin, and all the Comintern leaders it was quite
straightforward that when Soviet Russia concluded the
Brest-Litovsk peace accords with Germany and Austro-Hungary, the
duty of revolutionary socialists in the three countries and
elsewhere was not to defend this treaty but to denounce it as a
diktat imposed on Russia by imperialism. When Soviet Russia
later concluded an agreement with capitalist Germany at Rapallo,
which even included the beginnings of military collaboration,
the German communists did not suspend for one day their struggle
to overthrow the German government and bourgeoisie.
But if one begins by refusing
to distinguish between the state apparatus and the party, if the
latter is generally identified with the former, if it follows
that the international policy of the state and the party is not
quite separated then the objective implications of what the
state requires and the objective results of the state manoeuvres
become an insurmountable obstacle to the creation of an
international revolutionary organisation.
Another objective reality
weighs down over parties and currents emerging from the process
of recomposition of the workers’ movement (elsewhere than in
Cuba and Nicaragua) and this is that the identity of interest
between the three sectors of the world revolution, which is an
historic reality, is not yet part of the day-to-day experience
of significant sectors of the vanguard, not to speak of the
broad masses. The desynchronisation and largely autonomous
development of mass struggles in these three sectors is an
important obstacle.
At a given moment in 1968, it
was possible to hope that the “Prague Spring” would have a
unifying role, multiplying the combined effects of May ’68 and
the Tet offensive in Vietnam. The suppression of the “Prague
Spring” is thus the political crime with the most unhealthy
long-term effects in the long list of crimes committed by the
Soviet bureaucracy since the Second World War.
Since then it is a fact that
– just to take a few examples – the experiences of the
masses and the revolutionaries in Central America is generally
cut off from that of the Polish workers in Solidarnosc and from
that of the British miners, the Fiat workers in Italy, the
French railworkers or the West German steelworkers. Attempts to
build bridges can be made by propaganda and solidarity
activities. But that does not really replace a common mass
experience or one simultaneously transmitted internationally.
The very fragmented and partial character of the mass struggles
and of the political progress of the vanguard in a number of
countries contributes to the same effect. Finally, as we have
already said above, the fact that some of the biggest national
working class battalions are still absent from the scene of the
battle has a big influence on the credibility of the project of
rebuilding a mass revolutionary International.
In these conditions, only the
Fourth International and a few small groups of equivalent size
to its strongest sections, are fully behind a really universal
class solidarity. Only the Fourth International has drawn the
corresponding organisational conclusion – to simultaneously
build national revolutionary parties and a world revolutionary
party. revolutionary party.
These obstacles will only be
overcome as a result of new explosive developments of the class
struggle in the key countries, of new differentiations inside
the developing revolutionary organisations and by new events,
splits, regroupments, and unifications affecting the traditional
mass organisations.
But the idea all these
processes can lead spontaneously and automatically to the
re-emergence of a real universal internationalism of the sort
seen in the first years of the Comintern (less the
hyper-centralisation and the tactical errors) has to be rejected
as woolly-minded and spontaneist. There will be no new mass
revolutionary international without a tireless battle for the
building of an International here and now. There will be no new
mass revolutionary International without the continued building
of the Fourth International, even if the former will not be a
simple growth out of the latter but will come out of
wide-ranging regroupments.
We can extend the argument even
further: there will be no World Socialist Federation in the
foreseeable future – and therefore no salvation for humanity
– without the prior experience of important sectors of the
working masses with a mass revolutionary International
functioning as such, that is as a real world organisation, bound
by statutes (rules of functioning) freely accepted by all and
involving at least partial limiting of sovereignty by its member
parties (sections).
But you would have to believe
in Father Christmas to think that after thousands of years of
exploitation, oppression and violence by the strongest states
against other ethnic groups, peoples, states, or weaker classes;
after a century of imperialist super-exploitation and oppression
against colonial and semi-colonial peoples; after centuries of
racial discrimination, violence and even extermination; after a
half-century of oppression and discrimination by the Soviet
bureaucracy against various foreign nations and nationalities
inside the USSR ... that all peoples, oppressed minority groups,
working classes and revolutionary parties will automatically and
freely accept without any afterthoughts such a limitation of
sovereignty as something quite logical.
It seems indispensable that
they first have to go through an experience teaching them that
world-wide collaboration is possible on a strict basis of
equality, where the “small” forces will not have less rights
and powers than the “big” ones, where limits on sovereignty
are applied first of all on the “powerful” before being
placed on the “weaker,” where all discrimination on the
grounds of gender, race, nationality, ethnic group is strictly
forbidden.
Everything points to
participation inside a mass revolutionary International as a
place where this experience could be first acquired. The
functioning of such an International – as is already the case
with the Fourth International today – must be founded on a
twofold principle: total autonomy for national parties in the
selection of their leaderships and national tactics but
international discipline based on the principle of majority rule
(democratic centralism in the original Leninist sense of the
term and not its Stalinist perversion into bureaucratic
centralism) when it comes to international political policies.
If the first principle is
abandoned it leads to Zinovievist manipulation or indeed
blatantly Stalinist-bureaucratic methods stifling internal
democracy and to a completely wrong process of selecting
national leaderships whereby only the most servile followers of
the “international centre” survive. But if the second
principle is rejected, there is a risk of ending up with the
terrible result admirably defined by Rosa Luxemburg: “Workers
of the world unite in times of peace but cut yourselves to
pieces in times of war!”
So the reasons behind the
foundation of the Fourth International in 1938 all remain valid
today. Let us summarise the results of our analysis. The
survival of capitalism implies more than ever the risk of a
succession of catastrophes threatening to destroy not just
civilisation but the physical existence of the human race.
Salvation can only come from the revolutionary overthrow of the
capitalist regime – its gradual disappearance by reforms is an
inconsistent utopia – and its replacement by the reign of
freely associated producers, federated on a world scale. Only
the international working class is able to overthrow capitalism.
But to do this it needs an adequate level of class consciousness
and revolutionary leadership.
The working class’s periodic
upsurges into direct action create at the same time the
conditions for resolving the crisis of the subjective factor, on
condition that revolutionaries have been active in the movement
for long enough, effectively enough and on a sufficiently wide
enough scale. They must simultaneously aim to build new national
revolutionary parties and a new International.
On a historic scale the dilemma
is therefore identical to what it was in 1938. Either the
international proletariat remains generally fragmented into
national sectors, fighting separate battles and essentially
limited, defensive ones, not breaking except in a few countries
the framework of the bourgeois state and bourgeois society.
In this case building a mass
revolutionary International will fail but building new mass
national revolutionary parties will also necessarily fail. In
this eventuality humanity will be condemned.
Or the proletariat of the main
countries will act as the French and Italian workers did in
1968-9, the Portuguese workers in 1973-4, the Czech and Polish
workers in 1968 and 1980-1 and the Brazilian and Black African
proletariat has done in the last few years. On condition that a
sufficient number of cadres, solidly rooted in the working
class, equipped with a correct programme and strategic vision,
able to take appropriate political actions and initiatives, are
grouped together in those situations, then the political,
organisational, and geographical limits of the ongoing process
of recomposition of the workers’ movement will be
progressively overcome. The building of new national
revolutionary leaderships and a new mass revolutionary
International will become possible.
Since we do not doubt for one
second that the second eventuality will become reality, we do
not doubt for an instant the future of humanity, the development
of a mass revolutionary International and the victory of the
Fourth International.
Footnote
24.
The Zinovievist regime which flourished in the Comintern after
1923, in particular involved changing national leaderships by
brutal interventions (sometimes purely administratively) of the
international leadership inside the Comintern sections.
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