JUNE 29, 1940 SOCIALIST APPEAL We Must Help Workers of to Overthrow Stalin FOR THE OVERTHROW OF THE STALIN CLIQUE!
alley. The only thing that can weld India together is the agrarian revolution under the banner of national inde pendence. revolution led by the proletariat will be directed not only against British rule but also against the Indian princes, foreign concessions, the top layer of the national bourgeoisie, and the leaders of the National Congress as well as against the leaders of the Moslem League. It is the pressing task of the Fourth International to create a stable and powerful section in India.
The treacherous policy of class collaboration through which the Kremlin for the last five years has been helping the capitalist governments prepare for war was abruptly liquidated by the bourgeoisie, just as soon as they ceased to need a pacifist disguise. But in the colonial and semicolonial countries not only in China and India, but in Latin America the fraud of the people fronts still continues to paralyze the working masses, converting them into cannon fodder for the progressive bourgeoisie and in this way creating an indigenous political basis for im perialism.
WHAT DOES THE FUTURE HOLD FOR LATIN AMERICA?
After five years fawning on the democracies. the Kremlin revealed cynical contempt for the world proletariat by concluding an alliance with Hitler and helping him to strangle the Polish people; it boasted with shameful chauvinism on the eve of the Finnish invasion and displayed no less shameful military incapacity in the subsequent struggle; it made noisy promises emancipate the Finnish peopic from the capitalists and then made a cowardly capitulation to Hitler this was the performance of the Stalinist regime in the critical hours of history.
The Moscow trials had already revealed that the totalitarian oligarchy had become an absolute obstacle in the path of the country development. The rising level of the increasingly complex needs of economic life can no longer tolerate bureaucratic strangulation. The gang of parasites is not, however, prepared to make any concessions. In struggling for its position it destroys everything that is best in the country. It should not be thought that the people who accomplished three revolutions in twelve years have suddenly become stupid. They are suppressed and disoriented but they are watching and thinking. The bureaucracy reminds them every day of its existence by its arbitrary rule, oppression, rapacity and bloody vengefulness.
Semi starved workers and collective farmers among themselves whisper with hatred about the spendthrift caprices of rabid commissars. For Stalin sixtieth birthday the workers in the Urals were forced to toil a year and a half on a gigantic portrait of the hated father of the peoples made out of precious stones an undertaking worthy of a Persian Xerxes or an Egyptian Cleopatra. regime capable of indulging in such abominations cannot fail to arouse the hatred of the masses.
Foreign policy corresponds to domestic policy. Had the Kremlin government expressed the real interests of the workers state; had the Comintern served the cause of world revolution, the popular masses of tiny Finland would inevitably have gravitated toward the USSR and the invasion of the Red Army either would not at all have been necessary or would have been accepted at once by the Finnish people as a revolutionary act of emancipation. In reality the entire previous policy of the Kremlin repelled the Finnish workers and peasants away from the USSR.
While Hitler has been able to count upon the assistance of the so called fifth column in the neutral countries he invades, Stalin did not find any support whatever in Finland despite the tradition of the 1918 insurrection and the long existence of the Finnish Communist party. Under these conditions the invasion of the Red Army assumed the char.
letariat of the colonies and the semi colonies capable of achieving invincible collaboration with the proletariat of the metropolitan centers, and with the world working class as a whole. Only this collaboration can lead the oppressed peoples to complete and final emancipation, through the overthrow of imperialism the world over. victory of the international proletariat will deliver the colonial countries from the long drawn out travail of capitalist development, by opening up the possibility of arriving at socialism hanch in hand with the proletariat of the advanced countries.
The perspective of the permanent revolution in no case signifies that the backward countries must await the signal from the advanced ones, or that the colonial peoples should patiently wait for the proletariat of the metropolitan centers to free them. Help comes to him who helps himself. Workers must develop the revolutionary struggle in every cound try, colonial or imperialist, where favorable conditions have been established, and through this set an example for the workers of other countries. Only initiative and activity, resoluteness and boldness can really materialize the slogan. Workers of the world, unite!
formation of the Soviet section of the Fourth Internationale. RESPONSIBILITY OF THE SECOND AND THIRD INTERNATIONALS THE COLONIAL STRUGGLE AND THE WAR By its very creation of enormous difficulties and dangers for the imperialist metropolitan centers, the war opens up wide possibilities for the oppressed peoples. The rumbling of cannon in Europe heralds the approaching hour of their liberation If a program of peaceful social transformation is Utopian for the advanced capitalist countries, then the program of peaceful liberation for the colonies is doubly Utopian. On the other hand, the last of the semi free backward countries have been enslaved before our eyes (Ethiopia, Albania, China. The entire present war is a war over colonies.
They are hunted by some; held by others who refuse to give them up. Neither side has the least intention of liberating them voluntarily. The declining metropolitan centers are impelled to drain away as much as possible from the colonies and to give them in return as little as possible. Only the direct and open revolutionary struggle of the enslaved peoples can clear the road for their emancipaof disobedience it will apply all necessary measures including, of course, the air force in which it is deficient at the Western Front. There is a clear cut division of labor acter of direct and open military violence. The responsibility between the colonial bourgeoisic and the British governfor this violence falls wholly and indivisibly upon the ment: Gandhi needs the threats of Chamberlain and Moscow oligarchy.
Churchill in order more successfully to paralyze the revo War is the acid test of a regime. As a consequence of lutionary movement.
the first period of the war, the international position of In the near future the antagonism between the Indian the USSR, despite the window trimming successes, has al masses and the bourgeoisie promises to become sharper as ready obviously worsened. The foreign policy of the Krem the imperialist war more and more becomes a gigantic comlin has repelled from the USSR broad circles of the world mercial enterprise for the Indian bourgeoisie. By opening working class and the oppressed peoples. The strategic bases up an exceptionally favorable market for raw materials it of support seized by Moscow will represent a third rate may rapidly promote Indian industry. If the complete defactor in the conflict of world forces. Meanwhile Germany struction of the British empire slashes the umbilical cord has obtained the most important and the most industrialized linking Indian capital with the City of London, the nasection of Poland and gained a common frontier with the tional bourgeoisie would quickly seek a new patron in New USSR, that is, a gateway to the cast. Through Scandinavia, York Wall Street. The material interests of the bourGermany dominates the Baltic sea, transforming the Gulf geoisie determine their polities with the force of the laws of Finland into a tightly corked bottle. Embittered Finland of gravitation comes under Hitler direct control. Instead of weak neu So long as the liberating movement is controlled by the tral states, the USSR now confronts a powerful Germany exploiting class it is incapable of getting out of a blind on the other side of its Leningrad border. The weakness of the Red Army decapitated by Stalin has been demonstrated to the whole world. The centrifugal nationalist tendencies within the USSR have intensified. The prestige of the Kremlin leadership has declined. Germany in the West, The monstrous growth of armaments in the United Japan in the East now feel infinitely more confident than States prepares for a violent solution of the complex conbefore the Kremlin Finnish adventure.
tradictions in the Western hemisphere and should soon pose point blank the question of the destiny of the Latin AmerIn his meager arsenal Stalin could find but one and only ican countries. The interlude of the good neighbor policy one answer to the ominous warning of events: he replaced is coming to an end. Roosevelt or his successor will quickly Voroshilov by an even emptier nonentity, Timoshenko. As take the iron fist out of the velvet glove. The theses of the always in these instances the goal of this maneuver is to Fourth International state: South and Central America divert the anger of the people and the army away from the cannot free themselves from backwardness and servitude main criminal responsible for the misfortunes and place except by uniting all their states in a powerful federation.
at the head of the army an individual whose reliability is This grandiose historic task is destined to be solved not by guaranteed by his insignificance. The Kremlin has once the belated South American bourgeoisie, the completely again revealed itself as the central nest of defeatism. Only prostituted agency of foreign imperialism, but by the young by destroying this nest can the security of the USSR be South American proletariat, the destined leader of the opsafeguarded.
pressed masses. Therefore, the slogan for the struggle The preparation of the revolutionary overthrow of the against the violence and the intrigues of world capitalism Moscow ruling caste is one of the main tasks of the and against the blood stained work of the indigenous comFourth International. This task is not simple or easy. It pradore cliques is: The Soviet United States of South and demands heroism and sacrifice. However, the epoch of Central America. Written six years ago, these lines have great convulsions upon which mankind has entered will now acquired a particularly burning actuality.
strike the Kremlin oligarchy with blow after blow, will Only under its own revolutionary direction is the probreak up its totalitarian apparatus, will raise the self conthereby Events will work in our favor if we are capable of assisting them!
The victory of the Spanish revolution could have opened up an era of revolutionary overturns throughout Europe and so forestalled the present war. But that heroic revolution, which contained within itself every possibility of victory, was smothered in the embrace of the Second and The Great Lesson of China Third Internationals, with the active cooperation of the anarchists. The world proletariat became poorer in its loss The tragic experience of China is a great lesson for the of another great hope and richer in the lessons of another oppressed peoples. The Chinese revolution of 1925 27 had monstrous betrayal.
every chance for victory. unified and transformed China The mighty movement of the French proletariat in June would constitute at this time a powerful fortress of freedom in the Far East. The entire fate of Asia and to a 1936 revealed exceptionally favorable conditions for the revolutionary conquest of power. French Soviet republic degree the whole world might have been different. But would immediately have gained revolutionary hegemony of the Kremlin, lacking confidence in the Chinese masses and seeking the friendship the generals, utilized its whole Europe, created revolutionary repercussions in every country, rocked the totalitarian regimes and in this way saved weight to subordinate the Chinese proletariat to the bourhumanity from the present imperialist slaughter with its geoisie and so helped Chiang Kai shek to crush the Chinese countless victims. But the thoroughly debased, cowardly, revolution. Disillusioned, disunited and weakened, China and treacherous policies of Leon Blum and Leon Jouhaux, was laid open to Japanese invasion.
Like every doomed regime the Stalinist oligarchy is alwith the active support of the French section of the Comintern, led to the collapse of one of the most promising ready incapable of learning from the lessons of history. At movements of the last decade.
the beginning of the Sino Japanese war the Kremlin again placed the Communist Party in bondage to Chiang KaiThe strangling of the Spanish revolution and the sabotaging of the proletarian offensive in France these two tragic shek, crushing in the bud the revolutionary initiative of facts stand at the threshold of the present war. The bourthe Chinese proletariat. This war, now nearing its third geoisie convinced itself that with such labor leaders at anniversary, might long since have been finished by a real catastrophe for Japan, if China had conducted it as a its disposal it could go ahead with anything, even a new slaughter of peoples. The leaders of the Second Internationgenuine people war based on an agrarian revolution and al prevented the proletariat from overthrowing the boursetting the Japanese soldiery aflame with its blaze. But the Chinese bourgeoisie fears its own armed masses more than geoisie at the close of the first imperialist war. The leaders of the Second and Third Internationals helped the bourit does the Japanese ravishers. If Chiang Kai shek, the sinister hangman of the Chinese revolution, is compelled geoisie unloose a second imperialist war. Let it become their political grave!
by circumstances to wage a war, his program is still based, as before, on the oppression of his own workers and com The Second International promise with the imperialists.
The war of 1914 1918 split the Second International at The war in Eastern Asia will become more and more interlocked with the imperialist world war. The Chinese once into two camps separated by trenches. Every social democratic party defended its fatherland. Not until several people will be able to reach independence only under the years after the war did the traitorous warring brethren beleadership of the youthful and self sacrificing proletariat, in whom the indispensable self confidence will be rekindled come reconciled and proclaim mutual amnesty.
Today the situation in the Second International has by the rebirth of the world revolution. They will indicate a. changed sharply on the surface. All its sections without firm line of march. The course of events places on the order of the day the development of our Chinese section into a exception are politically on one side of the military lines, powerful revolutionary party.
in the camp of the Allies: some because they are parties in the democratic countries, others because they are emigres Tasks of the Revolution in India from belligerent or neutral countries. The German Social Democracy which followed a despicable chauvinist policy In the very first weeks of war the Indian masses exerted during the first imperialist war under the Hohenzollern bautheir growing pressure, compelling the opportunist na ner, today is a party of defeatism in the service of France tional leaders to speak in an unaccustomed tongue. But and England. It would be inexcusable to believe that these woe to the Indian people if they place trust in high sounding case hardened lackeys have become revolutionists. There is words! Under the mask of the slogan of national inde a simpler explanation. The Germany of Wilhelm II offered pendence Gandhi has already hastened to proclaim his the reformists sufficient openings for personal sinecures refusal to create diffic for Great Britain during the in the parliamentary bodies, municipalities, trade unions present severe crisis. As if the oppressed anywhere or at and other places. The defense of Imperial Germany was the any time have ever been able to free themselves except defense of a well filled trough in which the conservative by exploiting the difficulties of their oppressors. labor bureaucracy buried its snout. Social democracy reGandhi moral revulsion from violence merely reflects mains patriotic only so long as the existing political regime the fear of the Indian bourgeoisie before their own massés. secures its profits and privileges, warned theses six They have very good grounds for their foreboding that years ago, Russian Mensheviks and Narodniks who were British imperialism will drag them down too in the col patriots even under the Czar, when they had their own lapse. London for its part warns that at the first display Duma fractions, their own newspapers, their own trade tion.
In the colonial and semi colonial countries the struggle for an independent national state, and consequently the defense of the fatherland, is different in principle from that of the imperialist countries. The revolutionary proletariat of the whole world gives unconditional support to the struggle of China or India for national independence, for this struggle, by tearing the backward people out of the Asiatic system, particularism and foreign bondage, strikes powerful blows at imperialism. War and the Fourth International. At the same time the Fourth International knows in advance and openly warns the backward nations that their belated national states can no longer count upon an independent democratic development. Surrounded by decaying capitalism and enmeshed in the imperialist contradictions, the independence of a backward state inevitably will be semi fictitious and its political regime, under the influence of internal class contradictions and external pressure, will unavoidably fall into dictatorship against the people such is the regime of the People party in Turkey, the Kuomintang in China; Gandhi regime will be similar tomorrow in India. The struggle for the national independence of the colonies is, from the standpoint of the revolutionary proletariat, only a transitional stage on the road toward drawing the backward countries into the international socialist revolution.
The Fourth International does not draw water tight distinctions between the backward and the advanced countries, the democratic and the socialist revolutions. It combines them and subordinates them to the world struggle of the oppressed against the oppressors. Just as the only genuinely revolutionary force of our era is the international proletariat so the only real program to liquidate all oppression, social and national, is the program of the permanent revolution.
union functionaries, and hoped for further advances along this road now that they have lost all this hold a defeatist: position in regard to the USSR.
Consequently the present unanimity of the Second Tits ternational is explainable by the fact that all of its sections hope that the Allies will save them their posts and revenues in the labor bureaucracy of the democratic countries and restore these posts and revenues in the totalitarian countries. The social democracy does not go beyond impotent day dreams about the patronage of the democratic bourgeoisie. These political invalids are completely incapable of struggle even where their own interests are involved.
This was revealed most clearly in Scandinavia, which appeared to be the most secure sanctuary of the Second International and where all three countries were governed for a period of years by the sober, realistic, reformist and pacifist social democracy. Socialism was what these gentlemen called the conservative royal democracy, plus the state church, plus the niggardly social reforms made possible for a time by limited military expenditures. Backed by the League of Nations and protected by the shield of rieutrality the Scandinavian governments calculated on generations of tranquil and peaceful development. But the imperialist masters paid no attention to their calculations.
They were compelled to dodge the blows of fate. Upon the USSR invading Finland, all three Scandinavian governments proclaimed themselves neutral so far as Finland was concerned. Upon Germany invasion of Denmark and Norway, Sweden declared herself neutral so far as both victims of aggression were concerned, Denmark contrived to declare herself neutral even in relation to herself. Norway, under the gun muzzles of her guardian England, alone made a few symbolic gestures of self defense. These heroes are fully prepared to live at the expense of the democratic fatherland but feel disinclined to die for it. The war which they did not foresee has in passing overthrown their hopes for a peaceful evolution under King and God. The Scandinavian paradise, final refuge of the Second International hopes, has been transformed into a tiny sector of the general imperialist hell.
The social democratic opportunists know but one policy. that of passive adaptation. Under the conditions of decaying capitalism nothing remains open to them but the surrender of one position after another. The whittling away of their already miserable program, the lowering of their demands, the renunciation of demands altogether, continuous retreat further and further back until there is 10 place left to retreat except a rat hole. But even there the pitiless hand of imperialism drags them out by the tail.
Such is a brief history of the Second International. It is being killed by the present war for the second time and, one must think, this time forever.
The Third International The policy of the degenerated Third Internationala mixture of crude opportunism and unbridled adventurism exercises an influence upon the working class which is if possible, even more demoralizing than the policy of its elder brother, the Second International. The revolutionary party builds its entire policy upon the class consciousnese of the workers; the Comintern is preoccupied with nothing