90ETALST APPBAL ACTOBER 22, 1938 Toward a Workers and Farmers Government bere he above mentioned sense established in fact, te would cem. Militant Action By Workers In Advanced Countries the middle clasices. have had enough time in which is tuber Will Arouse Colonial Masses Backward Countries and the Program of Transitional Demands even if this highly improbably variant somewhere at some time becomes a reality and the Workers and Farmers Government, resent merely a short episode on the road to the actual dictatorship of the proletariat However, there is no need to indulge in guess work. The agitation around the slogan of a workeçs farmers government pre enters into an openly revolutionary stage. From the first moment serves under all conditions a tremendous educational value. And of their appearance, the soviets, acting as a pivot around which not accidentally. This generalized slogan proceeds entirely along millions of toilers are united in their struggle against the exthe line of the political development of our epoch (the bankruptcy ploiters become competitors and opponents of local authorities and decomposition of the old bourgeois parties, the downfall of and then of the central government. If the factory committee democracy, the growth of fascism, the accelerated drive of the creates a dual power in the factory, then the soviets initiate a workers toward more active and aggressive politics. Each of period of dual power in the country.
the transitional demands should, therefore, lead to one and the same political conclusion: the workers need to break with all Dual power in its turn is the culminating point of the traditional parties of the bourgeoisie in order, jointly with the transitional period. Two regimes, the bourgeois and the proletfarmers, to establish their own power.
arian are irreconcilably opposed to cach other. Conflict between them is inevitable. The fate of society depends on the outcome.
It is impossible in advance to foresee what will be the Should the revolution be defeated the fascist dictatorship of the concrete stages of the revolutionary mobilization of the masses. bourgeoisie will follow. In case of victory the power of the The sections of the Fourth International should critically orient soviets, that is the dictatorship of the proletariat and the socialist themselves at each new stage and advance such slogans as will aid reconstruction of society, will arise.
the striving of the workers for independent politics, deepen the class character of these politics, destroy reformist and pacifist illusions, strengthen the connection of the vanguard with the asses, and prepare the revolutionary conquest of power.
Soviets Colonial and semi colonial countries are backward countries Factory committees, as already stated, are elements of dual by their very essence. But backward countries are part of a world power inside the factory. Consequently, their existence is possible dominated by imperialism. Their development, therefore, has a only under condition of increasing pressure by the masses. This combined character: the most primitive economic forms are com is likewise true of special mass groupings for the struggle against bined with the last word in capitalist technique and culture.
war, of the committee on prices and all other new centers of the In like manner are defined the political strivings of the proletariat movement, the very appearance of which bears witness to the fact of backward countries: the struggle for the most elementary that the class struggle has overflowed the limits of the traditional achievements of national independence and bourgeois democracy organizations of the proletariat.
is combined with the socialist struggle against world imperialism.
These new organs and centers, however, will soon begin to Democratic slogans, transitional demands and the problems of feel their lack of cohesion and their insufficiency. Not one of the the socialist revolution are not divided into separate historical transitional demands can be fully met under the conditions of epochs in this struggle, but stem directly from one another. The preserving the bourgeois gime. At the same time, the deepening Chinese proletariat had barely begun to organize trade unions before it had to provide for soviets. In this sense, the present of the social crisis will increase not only the sufferings of the masses but also their impatience, persistence, and pressure. Ever program is completely applicable to colonial and semi colonial countries, at least to those where the proletariat has become now layers of the oppressed will raise up their heads and come forward with their demands. Millions of toil worn little men, capable of carrying on independent politics.
to whom the reformist leaders never gave a thought, will begin The central task of the colonial and semi colonial countries to pound insistently on the doors of workers organizations. The is the agrarian revolution, liquidation of feudal heritages, unemployed will join the movement. The agricultural workers, and national independence, e. the overthrow of the imperialist the ruined and semi ruined farmers, the oppressed of the cities, yoke. Both tasks are closely linked with one another.
the women workers, housewives, proletarianized layers of the intelligentsia all of these will scek unity and leadership.
It is impossible merely to reject the democratic program: How are the different demands and forms of struggle to be slogan for a National (or Constituent) Assembly preserves its it is imperative that in the struggle the masses outgrow it. The harmonized, even if only within the limits of one city? History has full force for such couatries as China or India. This slogan must already answered this question: through soviets. These will unite be indissolubly tied up with the problem of national liberation and the representatives of all the fighting groups. For this purpose, no agrarian reform. As a primary step, the workers must be armed one has yet proposed a different form of organization; indeed, it with this democratic program. Only they will be able to sumwould hardly be possible to think up a better one. Soviets are mon and unite the farmers. On the basis of the revolutionary not limited to an a priori party program. They throw open their democratic program, it is necessary to oppose the workers to the doors to all the exploited. Through these doors pass represent national bourgeoisie. Then at a certain stage in the mobilizaatives of all strata, drawn into the general current of the struggle. tion of the masses under the slogans of revolutionary democracy, The organization, broadening out together with the movement, soviets can and should arise. Their historical role in each given is renewed again and again in its wornb. All political currents period, particularly their relation to the National Assembly, will of the proletariat can struggle for leadership of the soviets on be determined by the political level of the proictariat, the bond the basis of the widest democracy. The slogan of soviets, there. between them and the peasantry and the character of the profore, crowns the program of transitional demands.
letarian party policies. Sooner or later, the soviets should overSoviets can arise only at the time when the mass movement throw bourgeois democracy. Only they are capable of bringing the democratic revolution to a conclusion and likewise opening an era of socialist revolution The relative weight of the individual democratic and transitional demands in the proletariat struggle, their mutual ties and their order of presentation, is determined by the peculiarities and specific conditions of each backward country and to a considerable extent by the degree of its backwardness. Nevertheless, the general trend of revolutionary development in all backward countries can be determined by the formula of the permanent revolution in the sense definitely imparted to it by the three revolutions in Russia (1905, February 1917, October 1917. The Comintern has provided backward countries with a classic example of how it is possible to ruin a powerful and prom.
ising revolution. During the stormy mass upsurge in China in 1925 27, the Comintern failed to advance the slogan for a National Assembly, and at the same time, forbade the creation of soviets. The bourgeois party, the Kuomintang, was to replace, according to Stalin plan, both the National Assembly and soviets. After the masses had been smashed by the Kuomintang, the Comintern organized a caricature of a soviet in Canton. Fol lowing the inevitable collapse of the Canton uprising, the Comintern took the road of guerrilla warfare and peasant soviets with complete passivity on the part of the industrial proletariat.
Landing thus in a blind alley, the Comintern took advantage of the Sino Japanese war to liquidate Soviet China with a stroke of the pen, subordinating not only the peasant Red Army but also the so called Communist Party to the identical Kuomintang, e. the bourgeoisie.
The betrayal of the international proletarian revolution by the Comintern for the sake of friendship with the democratic slave masters, could not but help it betray simultaneously also the struggle for the liberation of the colonial masses, and, indeed, with even greater cynicism than practiced by the Second International before it. One of the tasks of People Front and national defense politics is to turn hundreds of millions of the colonial population into cannon fodder for democratic imperialism. The banner on which is emblazoned the struggle for the liberation of the colonial and semi colonial peoples, e. a good half of mankind, has definitely passed into the hands of the Fourth International.
seriously gripped the workers. Those layers of the population which at one time were intoxicated with fascism, e. chiefly up. The fact that a somewhat perceptible opposition is limited to Protestant and Catholic church circles is not explained by the might of the semi delirious and semi charlatan theories of race and blood, but by the terrific collapse of the ideologies of democracy, social democracy and the Comintern.
The collapse of the Paris Commune paralyzed the French workers for nearly eight years. After the defeat of the 1905 Russian revolution, the toiling masses remained in a stupor for almost as long a period. But in both instances the phenomenon was only one of physical defeat, conditioned by the relationship of forces. In Russia, in addition, it concerned an almost virgin proletariat. The Bolshevik fraction had at that time not cele brated even its third birthday. It is completely otherwise in Germany where the leadership came from powerful parties, one of which had existed for seventy years, the other almost fifteen.
Both these parties, with millions of voters behind them, were morally paralyzed before the battle and capitulated without a battle. History has recorded no parallel catastrophe. The German proletariat was not smashed by the enemy in battle. It was crushed by the cowardice, baseness, perfidy of its own parties.
Small wonder then that it has lost faith in everything in which it had been accustomed to believe for almost three generations.
Hitler victory in turn strengthened Mussolini.
FRESH FORCES ARE NEEDED The protracted failure of revolutionary work in Spain or Germany is but the reward for the criminal politics of Social Democracy and the Comintern. Illegal work needs not only the sympathy of the masses but the conscious enthusiasm of its advanced strata. But can enthusiasm possibly be expected for historically bankrupt organizations? The majority of those who come forth as emigre leaders are either demoralized to the very marrow of their bones, agents of the Kremlin and the or social Democratic ex ministers, who dream that the workers by some sort of miracle will return them to their lost posts. Is it possible to imagine even for a minute these gentlemen in the role of future leaders of the anti fascist revolution?
And events on the world arena. the smashing of the Austrian workers, the defeat of the Spanish revolution, the degeneration of the Soviet State could not give aid to a revolutionary upsurge in Italy and Germany. Since for political information the German and Italian workers depend in great measure upon the radio, it is possible to say with assurance that the Moscow radio station, combining Thermidorian lies with stupidity and insolence, has become the most powerful factor in the demoralization of the workers in the totalitarian states. In this respect, as in others Stalin acts merely as Goebbels assistant.
At the same time, the class antagonisms which brought about the victory of fascism, continuing their work under fascism, too, are gradually undermining it. The masses are more dissatisfied than ever. Hundreds and thousands of self sacrificing workers, in spite of everything, continue to carry on revolutionary mole work. new generation, which has not directly experienced the shattering of old traditions and high hopes, has come to the fore.
Irresistibly, the molecular preparation of the proletarian revolution proceeds beneath the heavy totalitarian tombstone. But for concealed energy to fare into open revolt, it is necessary that the vanguard of the proletariat find new perspectives, a new program and a new unblemished banner.
Herein, lies the chief handicap. It is extremely difficult for workers in fascist countries to make a choice of a new program. program is verified by experience. And it is precisely experience in mass movements which is lacking countries of totalitarian The Program of Transitional Demands in Fascist Countries It is a far cry today from the time when the strategists of the Comintern announced the victory of Hitler as being merely a step toward the victory of Thaelmann. Thaelmann has been in Hitler prisons now for more than five years. Mussolini has held italy enchained by fascism for more than sixteen years.
Throughout this time, the parties of the Second and Third Internationals have been impotent not only to conduct a mass movement but even to create a serious illegal organization, even to some extent comparable to the Russian revolutionary parties during the epoch of Czarism.
Not the least reason exists for explaining these failures by reference to the power of fascist ideology. Essentially, Mussolini never advanced any sort of ideology. Hitler ideology never World Congress Manifesto Against Imperialist War Marxism, by breaking with class collaboration, social patriotism, and the priests of submission in the labor movement, and by tak.
ing the road of resolutely aggressive class struggle, by storming the fortress of the bourgeoisie, armed with the invincible weapons forged by our great masters, Marx and Engels, Lenin and Trotsky, that the exploited of the world will be able to escape stagnation and defeat and march forward like a solid phalanx toward the socialist future.
That is the road of the Fourth International! It rests upon the unshakeable foundations of the principles of revolutionary Marxism Leninism. It proudly proclaims itself the heic and perpetuator of the First International of Marx, of the Russian Revolution, and of the Communist International of Lenin. Continued from page 7)
of the masses and equally incapable of assuring peace. Less than a generation has passed since the last war to end war and we already find ourselves on the threshold of a new world war, infinitely more horrible than the last one.
Once more the exploited are called upon to destroy each other for their respective imperialist thasters. Once more the mothers of the people are called upon to become brood sows.
Once more fields will be transformed into blood soaked frenches and cities into devasted tombs so that the imperialists may preserve their profits and their colonies, or acquire new ones. Bandit War Al! the ruling classes of the capitalist countries are bandits.
Their war, whatever the pretentions and hypocritical slogans, will be a war between bandits. It will not be a workers war, but on the contrary, the workers, and the exploited in general, will be its victims. will not be a war for democracy, since true democracy for the masses can be won only in the struggle against capitalist domination. Even the democratic rights which the masses still enjoy cannot be preserved or extended, as the example of the Spanish civil war has shown, except by methods of militant, revolutionary class struggle for socialism.
It will not be a war in the interests of the workers, since the attacks on the social conquests of the French workers of June, 1936, especially the 40 hour week, show that the defense of the most elementary economic and social interests of the masses their daily bread and their freedom is incompatible with the defense of the fatherland of the bourgeoisie.
Hitler, who destroyed all social gains of the German and Austrian working class, is leading the struggle in the name of capitalism against the interests of the peoples of Europe. In midst of war threats we emphasize again that the main enemy is in one own country. The working class has no fatherland to defend except where it conquers and rules. No support to the war makers and to imperialist war we say but continuation of the class struggle in every situation and utilization of the war crisis for the overthrow of capitalist rule, e, the overthrow of the war and of capitalisin itself!
Betrayers of the Toilers Capitalism is bankrupIts social relations, its national boundaries, are strangling the economic and social development of man It is more than ripe for socialist reorganization. Its prolonged existence can only add to unending horror and misery.
Humanity can be saved from the new barbarism that menaces it only under the leadership of the revolutionary working class, historic champion and ally of the landless and debtridden farmres, and of the millions of black, brown and yellow colonial slaves.
But the great tragedy of the proletariat resides today in the fact that paralyzing fetters prevent it from realizing its mission of emancipation, fetters less powerful than those of capitalism itself, but more subtly and insidiously devised. With these fetters the traditional parties of labor, the Second and Third Internationals, have bound it hand and foot.
The leaders of the Second International act as direct agents of democratic imperialism, helping it to soften the shocks of the class struggle, and hoping thus to preserve their position in declining capitalist democracy. The leaders of the Third International, betraying all their traditional principles and ideals, have been converted into instruments of the Soviet bureaucracy.
The two old Internationals differ now primarily in the degree to which differences exist between the Anglo French bourgeoisie and the ruling Stalinist clique.
Instead of hastening the dispatch of the putrified corpse of capitalism into the limbo of history, social democracy and Stalinism unite to patch it up and preserve it. They have long since abandoned the class struggle. They concentrate all their efforts toward bringing the working class into the service of capitalism in the name of a falsified democracy or a People Front instead of destroying the monster. They support the domination of colonial peoples by their respective imperialists and offer their military aid to the same end.
Impotent Against Fascism Neitber of the old Internationals were capable of organizing proletarian resistance to lascism in Germany or in Austria. Even Spain, where the proletariat. by whose side we stand firmly and enthusistically has displayed its capacity to struggle ef fectively against the fascist beasts, the old parties sapped its resistance and brutally exterminated the revolutionary forces behind their own front, acting as agents of Anglo Irench imperialism and of the Moscow bureaucracy.
la reality, by abandoning the vigilance of the working class, abandoning the independence of the workers movement and subordinating it to the democratic bourgeoisie, the old parties facilitated the victory of fascism, whose aim to smash the proletariat as an independent movement and as a class is partially carried out in advance by the two old Internationals.
No less traitorous is the role played by the social democracy and Stalinism in the face of the imminent war danger. More cyn.
ically than the Second International before the last war when it at least formally took an anti war position the two Internationals now demand for themselves the responsibility of leading the masses to the butchery.
They have neither the desire nor the possibility of organizing the struggle against the coming imperialist war. On the contrary, completely corrupted by social patriotism and flying the pirate flag of democratic imperialism, the social patriots are already acting as recruiting sergeants of imperialism.
The role that they play in the defense of the Soviet Union is equally perfidious. They do not defend the great Russian Revolution, but the reactionary, usurping bureaucracy. They not lay the bases of socialist society but sap the foundations laid 20 years ago by the Russian masses under the leadership of the Bolsheviks.
We Are Loyal to We, the Fourth International, loyal defenders of the against all its enemies, within and without, accuse Stalinism of having subjected the economic life of the country to the interests of the bureaucratic clique at the top. Partisans of real proletarian democracy, we accuse Stalinism of having deprived the Soviet masses of all the great liberties they won arms in hand.
The reactionary bureaucracy has established an odious totalitarian regime by means of a regime of continuous bloody terror supplemented by gangster attacks against revolutionists abroad and the corruption of the workers and intellectuals movements.
This regime discredits the name of socialism. The so called Communist Parties are nothing but the hired agencies of this total.
itarian regime, whose only world aim is the maintainance of the imperialist status quo. The Second International differs from Stalinism only in its purely verbal and superficial criticism. Bona.
partism is undermining the Bolshevik revolution.
The Fourth International The Fourth International does not bide its aims. Its program is known to the working class. Il is the program of irreconcilable opposition and of class struggle against injustice, against exploitation, and against oppression.
Above all, in the present crucial period. a period of crisis vital Ito the working class and all humanity. the Fourth International issues an appeal to the workers and oppressed people of the entire world.
To the French and German workers especially, who are men aced with mutual destruction in the interest of imperialism, we say: like the proletariat everywhere you hate the hangman Hitler.
Like you, we are determined to destroy Fascism and all oppres.
sive rule.
But fascism cannot and will not be destroyed by the bayonets of French imperialism. Only the independent class action of the proletariat will put an end to the hideous rule of fascism.
Unite in the unremitting class struggle against fascism and imperialist war.
Unite for the freedom of colonial peoples and against the tyranny of imperialist rule.
Unite in the only just and sacred war the war against the oppressors, cxploiters, against their perfidious agents in the working class.
Long live the Fourth International!
Long live the International Socialist Revolution. The Executive Committee of the Fourth International (World Party of the Socialist Revolution. Sept. 15, 1938 Break the Chains!
The world proletariat cannot advance without breaking the chains that bind it to the old Internationals and their policies, Anarchism, which has shown itself, particularly in Spain, to be the prisoner of its own doctrines, and which capitulated to the bourgoisie in the name of the People Front, cannot make this break. Equally futile are the small centrist groups united in London Bureau which refuse to break clearly with the old Inter.
nationals and take the road of class struggle toward internationalist revolutionary socialism.
It is only by restoring the great traditions of revolutionary