October 2, 1937 SOCIALIST APPEAL ning the Roots and Traditions of lor the Fourth International By Leon Trotsky rard Stalinism, coarse, ignole, lies at the opposite pole.
more than ten years ago in death a whole set of new those only purpose is to jusalinists from the path of the Holution. Only a few days ston Oak, who has parRolution, wrote: The Stalinbemost revisionists of Marx Ist dare to go half as far as This is absolutely true. One actually felt certain theolicientiously to establish the Kormist practices of social The Stalinist bureaucracy, in common with Marxism iny doctrine or system whathoroughly permeated with ctice is the empiricism of ith its essential interests the o any theory: it can give an Ither to itself nor to anyone Lenin not with the theoreof the liamentary and other circles, conventional values prevail, or a conventional language to cover their lack of values.
This large and motley society for mutual protection live and let live cannot bear the touch of the Marxist lancet on its sensitive skin. The theoreticians, writers and moralists, hesitating between different camps, thought and continue to think that the Bolsheviks maliciously exaggerate differences, are incapable of loyal collaboration and by their intrigues disrupt the unity of the workers movement. Moreover, the sensitive and squeamish centrist has always thought that the Bolsheviks were calumniating him simply because they carried through to the end for him his half developed thoughts: he himself was never able to. But the fact remains that only that precious quality, an uncompromising attitude toward all quibbling and evasion, can educate a revolutionary party which will not be taken unawares by exceptional circumstances.
The moral qualities of every party flow, in the last analysis, from the historical interests that it represents.
The moral qualities of Bolshevism, self renunciation, disinterestedness, audacity and contempt for every kind of tinsel and falsehood the highest qualities of human nature. flow from revolutionary intransigeance in the service of the oppressed. The Stalinist bureaucracy imitates also in this domain the words and gestures of Bolshevism. But when intransigeance and inflexibility are applied by a police apparatus in the service of a privileged minority they become a source of demoralization and gangsterism. One can feel only contempt for these gentlemen who identify the revolutionary heroism of the Bolsheviks with the bureaucratic cynicism of the Thermidorians.
OF MORALS brality of Bolshevism come Hul nonentities whose cheap Bolshevism. In petty bours socialist. literary, parPAMPHLET cand Bolsherisin is being pement with the Pioneer in a few days as a 32 Matribution. Single copies With orders of five or more to the publishers at 100 of the post war days. But now, in the light of most recent experience, such infantile diseases have no longer even the interest of a curiosity. The Dutchmen Gorter and Pannekoik, the German Spartakists. the Italian Bordigists, showed their independence from Bolshevism only by artificially inflating one of its features and opposing it to the rest. But nothing has remained either in practice or in theory of these left tendencies: an indirect but important proof that Bolshevism is the only possible form of Marxism for this epoch.
The Bolshevik party has shown in action a combination of the highest revolutionary audacity and political realism. It has established for the first time the only relation between vanguard and class that can assure victory. It has proved by experience that the alliance between the proletariat and the oppressed masses of the rural and urban petty bourgeoisie is possible only through the political overthrow of the traditional petty bourgeois parties. The Bolshevik party has shown the entire world how to carry out armed insurrection and the seizure of power. Those who propose the abstraction of soviets to the party dictatorship should understand that only thanks to the Bolshevik leadership were the soviets able to lift themselves out of the mud of reformism and attain the state form of the proletariat. The Bolshevik party achieved in the civil war the correct combination of military art and Marxist politics. Even if the Stalinist bureacracy should succeed in destroying the economic foundations of the new society, the experience of planned economy under the leadership of the Bolshevik party will have entered history for all time as one of the greatest teachings of mankind. This can be ignored only by bruised and offended sectarians who have turned their backs on the process of history, But this is not all. The Bolshevik party was able to carry on its magnificent practical work only because it illuminated all its steps with theory. Bolshevism did not create this theory: it was furnished by Marxism.
But Marxism is the theory of movement, not of stagnation. Only events on a tremendous historical scale could enrich the theory itself. Bolshevism brought an invaluable contribution to Marxism in its analysis of the imperialist epoch as an epoch of wars and revolutions; of bourgeois democracy in the era of decaying capitalism; of the correlation between the general strike and the insurrection; of the role of party, soviets and trade unions in the period of proletarian revolution; in its theory of the soviet state, of the economy of transition, of fascism and Bonapartism in the epoch of capitalist decline; finally in its analysis of the degeneration of the Bolshevik party itself and of the soviet state. Let any other tendency be named that has added anything essential to the conclusions and generalizations of Bolshevism. Theoretically and politically Vandervelde, De Brouckère, Hilferding, Otto Bauer, Léon Blum, Zyromski, not to mention Major Attlee and Norman Thomas, live on the dilapidated left overs of the past. The degeneration of the Comintern is most crudely expressed by the fact that it has dropped to the theoretical level of the Second International. All the varieties of intermediary groups (Independent Labour Party of Great Britain, and their like) adapt every week new haphazard fragments of Marx and Lenin to their current needs. They can teach the workers nothing.
Only the founders of the Fourth International, who have made their own the whole tradition of Marx and Lenin, take a serious attitude toward theory. Philistines may jeer that twenty years after the October victory the revolutionaries are again thrown back to modest propagandist preparation. The big capitalists are, in this question as in many others, far more penetrating than the petty bourgeois who imagine themselves socialists or communists. It is no accident that the subject of the Fourth International does not leave the columns of the world press. The burning historical need for revolutionary leadership promises to the Fourth International an exceptionally rapid tempo of growth. The greatest guarantee of its further success lies in the fact that it has not arisen away from the large historic road, but is an organic outgrowth of Bolshevism.
August 29, 1937.
BLISHED YEARS AFTER ir Serge Even now, in spite of the dramatic events of the recent period, the average philistine prefers to believe that the struggle between Bolshevism. Trotskyism. and Stalinism concerns a clash of personal ambitions, or, at best, a conflict between two shades of Bolshevism. The crudest expression of this opinion is given by Norman Thomas, leader of the American Socialist Party. There is little reason to believe, he writes (Socialist Review, Sept. 1937, pag. 6) that if Trotsky had won. instead of Stalin, there would have been an end of intrigue, plots, and the reign of fear in Russia. And this man considers himself. a Marxist. One would have the same right to say: There is little reason to believe that if instead of Pius XI, the Holy See were occupied by Norman I, the Catholic Church would have been transformed into a bulwark of socialism. Thomas fails to understand that it is not a question of a match between Stalin and Trotsky, but of an antagonism between the bureaucracy and the proletariat. To be sure, the governing stratum of the is forced even now to adapt itself to the still not wholly liquidated heritage of revolution, while preparing at the same time through direct civil war (bloody purge mass annihilation of the discontented) a change of the social regime. But in Spain the Stalinist clique is already acting openly as a bulwark of the bourgeois order against socialism. The struggle against the Bonapartist bureaucracy is turning before our eyes into class struggle: two worlds, two programs, two moralities. If Thomas thinks that the victory of the socialist proletariat over the infamous caste of oppressors would not politically and morally regenerate the Soviet regime, he proves only that for all his reservations, shufflings and pious sighs he is far nearer to the Stalinist bureaucracy than to the workers.
Like other exposers of Bolshevik immorality. Thomas has simply not grown up to revolutionary morals.
freedom of the press and lications of the new Conomen incarcerated in the taries? What are their service? Is there an efpement and how does it behind the scenes of the tad more are answered mere who actually lived the revolution.
democratic character of the Trotsky and contrasts it with the rise of the vast conservatakes up such important tions of the workers and the the methods by which indusagriculture was carried out, movement, the all pervading and the new system of of Lenin.
5o 00 THE TRADITIONS OF BOLSHEVISM AND THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL SHERS York City The lefts who tried to skip Bolshevism in their return to Marxism generally confined themselves to isolated panaceas: boycott of the old trade unions, boycott of parliament, creation of genuine soviets. All this could still seem extremely profound in the first heat