We Are the Party of the Russian Revolution

Part One

We print below, edited for publication, a presentation by comrade Victor Gibbons given in Los Angeles on 10 November 2007 in commemoration of the 90th anniversary of the Russian Revolution.

The vast political gulf that separates the International Communist League from the rest of the left can be summed up in one declaration: “We are the party of the Russian Revolution.” We salute the 90th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution in the same spirit as the red proletariat of Petrograd celebrated its first anniversary—as “the greatest event in the history of the world.” And it remains the most important event in the history of human civilization: the path that the workers and toiling masses must follow, if we are to escape the death agony of capitalism and embark on the transition to communist society.

The founder and historic leader of American Trotskyism, James P. Cannon, stated in his 1939 “Speech on the Russian Question”:

“The Russian Bolsheviks on November 7, 1917, once and for all, took the question of the workers’ revolution out of the realm of abstraction and gave it flesh and blood reality....

“The October revolution put socialism on the order of the day throughout the world. It revived and shaped and developed the revolutionary labor movement of the world out of the bloody chaos of the war. The Russian revolution showed in practice, by example, how the workers’ revolution is to be made. It revealed in life the role of the party. It showed in life what kind of a party the workers must have.”

For a more extended discussion of the 1917 Revolution, I recommend that you read a series of four educationals on Leon Trotsky’s The History of the Russian Revolution (1932) in WV Nos. 874, 875, 877 and 879 (4 August, 1 September, 29 September and 27 October 2006).

During the course of the Russian Revolution, the multinational proletariat, drawing behind it the peasantry and the oppressed nationalities, forged its own new organs of class power, the soviets. With the smashing of the old capitalist state, these organs, under Bolshevik leadership, formed the basis of the new workers state. The vanguard of the workers understood that they were not just taking power in Russia; they were opening the first chapter of the world socialist revolution. They inspired workers uprisings throughout Europe and inspired rebellions by imperialism’s colonial slaves.

The tremors of October 1917 extended all the way around the globe to right here in the richest bastion of imperialism. In 1919, the Bolsheviks launched the Communist International (CI). Under Bolshevik leaders V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky, the CI and the Soviet state became the most powerful revolutionary force ever yet assembled by the world proletariat.

The October Revolution forged a Red Army that emerged victorious from four years of civil war as well as invasion by the armies of 14 capitalist powers in league with their local capitalist henchmen. The Soviet government expropriated the capitalists and repudiated outright the tsar’s massive debt to foreign bankers. It proclaimed the right of working people to jobs, health care, housing and education, as the first steps to building a socialist society.

It gave land to the peasants and self-determination to the many oppressed nations of the tsar’s prison house of peoples. It tore down the whole edifice of Russian patriarchal medievalism. The early Soviet government not only separated church and state, it put all available resources toward universal secular education and science. It eliminated all laws discriminating against national and ethnic minorities, women and homosexuals. Soviet Russia not only gave the vote to women at a time when the Western imperialists were beating them bloody for demanding such a thing; the Bolsheviks put women in the front ranks of proletarian rule as factory managers, state commissars and army commanders.

The Soviet workers state proved the superiority of nationalized property and planned economy over capitalist private property and anarchy in production. Out of the historical poverty left by tsarist Russia, the wreckage left by imperialist invasions, the continuing economic and military encirclement by imperialism, and in spite of Stalinist mismanagement and parasitism, the Soviet Union achieved unrivaled modernization and growth. At the same time as the capitalist world had fallen into the abyss of the 1930s Great Depression, the Soviet planned economy brought tens of millions of Soviet workers and peasants out of Russia’s medieval villages and turned them into educated modern proletarians, scientists, directors of industry and commanders of the mechanized Red Army.

The Soviet Union was the industrial and military powerhouse that made possible, and protected, the overturns of capitalist rule from Cuba to East Europe to China to Vietnam and North Korea. Had it not been for the USSR, the imperialists would have attacked North Korea, China and Vietnam with nuclear weapons during the Korean and Vietnam wars.

The destruction of the Soviet Union and the restoration of capitalism there in 1991-92 and in East Europe transformed the political landscape of the planet and threw proletarian consciousness back to a point in which workers today by and large no longer associate their struggles with the goal of socialism. Capitalist counterrevolution triggered an unparalleled economic collapse throughout the former Soviet Union, with skyrocketing rates of poverty and disease combined with a catastrophic decline in the average lifespan. Internationally, with the absence of the Soviet Union as a counterweight to their ambitions, the imperialists feel they have a free hand to project their military might, from Serbia to Iraq and Afghanistan.

The bourgeoisie has always wanted to wipe the October Revolution from historical memory by burying it under a mountain of lies. They often call it a conspiracy or putsch, but the 1917 October Revolution was no putsch and no accident. It was needed because the socially organized productive forces of the planet were tearing at bourgeois private property forms, and at the bourgeois nation-states as well. These had become shackles on social progress. The first imperialist world war of 1914-18 marked the descent of the capitalist system into a barbaric destruction of society’s productive forces, culture and humanity itself. World War I signaled that, to free the planet’s productive forces from the death grip of capitalist imperialism, proletarian revolution, in the historical sense, had to be on the order of the day. The October Revolution happened because it was organized and led by a party that was able to instill in the proletariat this understanding of its historic mission.

Capitalist imperialism is still caught in its fatal contradictions; it still creates a proletariat with the social power to overthrow the bourgeoisie, and it still compels the workers to fight for their survival. Our duty is to make sure that there will be a party like Lenin’s in the right place at the right time. So this talk is not just about what happened in 1917 in Russia, it is also about the fight of the ICL to make new Octobers.

War and Revolution

The immediate backdrop to the outbreak of revolution in Russia in February 1917 was World War I. This war had a profound impact on Lenin’s thinking. It had triggered the collapse of the Second “Socialist” International. Beginning on 4 August 1914, the vast majority of its affiliated parties lined up behind their bourgeoisies’ war mobilizations. The Bolsheviks turned out to be among the few that sought to act on the International’s prior resolutions to use war to hasten workers revolution.

The collapse of the old International led Lenin to generalize his split with the Mensheviks in Russia. That split went back to the 1903 fight over the definition of party membership; the differences broadened shortly thereafter as the Bolsheviks rejected the Mensheviks’ promotion of the liberal bourgeoisie as the purported leadership of an overthrow of the tsar. The split had become definitive by 1912.

Lenin concluded from World War I that opportunism in the workers movement was not a vestigial or localized phenomenon that could be overcome within a common party. He concluded that the Second International had been destroyed and that a new revolutionary international must be built through a complete split with not only the outright jingoists, but also the centrists who covered for them by using fake-Marxist arguments. The archetype of such centrists at the time was the German Social Democrat Karl Kautsky.

Lenin held that the war had demonstrated that capitalism was in its final stage of decay and that proletarian socialist revolution offered the only way out of a continuing descent into barbarism. He maintained that the path to proletarian revolution was the transformation of the imperialist war into a revolutionary civil war and that the condition for this was that socialists must stand for the defeat, above all, of their own bourgeois state in the war. Lenin’s policies brilliantly anticipated the revolutionary sweep of events to come and pointed to the program needed to meet them.

It was in the Russian capital of Petrograd on International Women’s Day, 23 February 1917 (by the old Julian calendar) when the social tensions exacerbated by World War I burst. A strike of mostly women textile workers demanded bread and war rations. There were over 1,000 casualties as ever more workers joined the street fighting and launched a general strike on the 25th. This was the start of the February Revolution. Throughout Russia, police and state officials were sent packing, and on February 27 the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies was formed. The election of soviets in the factories and in the army reflected the workers’ experience in the 1905 Revolution. (You can read a presentation on the 1905 Russian Revolution in WV No. 872, 9 June 2006.)

Let’s take a moment to define “soviets.” These were working-class organs, councils of deputies elected from workplaces and army units. The workers elected their deputies, could actively control them and, whenever need be, recall them. The soviets were organs of struggle, insurgency and proletarian administration.

But the paradox of the February Revolution was that while the autocracy had been overthrown by the workers, many of them schooled over the years by the Bolsheviks, the official government that emerged was bourgeois. Even as street fighting was raging in Petrograd, a self-appointed Provisional Committee of bourgeois-monarchist politicians met in the Tauride Palace on the night of February 27, behind the back of the popular revolution. They declared a Provisional Government aimed at erecting a constitutional monarchy.

And while the Bolsheviks and the workers were still in the streets battling the tsar’s gendarmes, a cabal rushed to the other wing of the Tauride Palace and appointed themselves the heads of the Petrograd and All-Russian soviets. These were the leaders of the Mensheviks and the Socialist-Revolutionary Party (SRs). While the SRs were largely based on the peasantry, the Mensheviks represented urban petty-bourgeois layers and the more conservative and privileged workers. The program of the Mensheviks and SRs was that the bourgeoisie should lead and rule, and they desperately appealed to the bourgeois Provisional Government to take control.

The February Revolution thus resulted in a situation of dual power. That is, alongside the Provisional Government of the bourgeoisie, there stood the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, based on the working class and answering to it. This situation could not last. One class or the other would have to rule.

Lenin and the Bolsheviks

The Bolsheviks’ internal life was an arena of constant debates. And in the course of 1917, a struggle recurred between Lenin and a conservative wing centered around Bolshevik leaders Lev Kamenev, Gregory Zinoviev and Joseph Stalin. And as we will see, the latter three would come together again after the October Revolution.

Lenin waged a key fight with them when he returned to Petrograd on April 3. While still trapped in Swiss exile, he had been reading with increasing alarm in the party paper, Pravda, of Kamenev and Stalin’s “conditional” support to the Provisional Government. They dropped Lenin’s revolutionary defeatism on the war and embraced a variety of Menshevik defensism, under the cover of pressuring the Provisional Government to negotiate an end to the war. They moved to merge the Bolsheviks with the Mensheviks. They were steering the party towards the Menshevik mirage of a parliamentary pressure group on the government of Prince Lvov!

When he finally arrived at the Finland Station in Petrograd, Lenin climbed atop an armored car to address the cheering crowds that had brought down the tsar. Lenin hailed them and, to the shock of the official pro-war Soviet welcoming committee, gave an internationalist salute to the German revolutionary Marxist leader Karl Liebknecht who was in a prison cell for opposing German militarism and its fake-socialist supporters: “The hour is not far when, at the summons of our comrade Karl Liebknecht, the people will turn their weapons against their capitalist exploiters.... Long live the world-wide socialist revolution!”

This was the opening shot of Lenin’s fight to rearm the party. He was adamant on the principle of no support to the capitalist Provisional Government and its imperialist war. It was a split issue. He was a minority of one, but he knew his program corresponded to the needs of the proletariat and peasantry. Lenin’s program for proletarian seizure of power was already taking shape in the masses’ own struggles. “Turn the imperialist war into a civil war!” would be concretized on Bolshevik banners that read “All Power to the Soviets!” and “Down With the War!” What made it possible for Lenin to turn the party wheel toward the proletarian seizure of power was that by the end of April he rallied decisive support from the proletarian provinces and industrial districts of the capital.

Whenever you hear us Spartacists being called “splitters” or you hear sermons about “unity, unity,” just remember: Lenin could not have led a workers revolution alongside supporters of the bourgeois government and imperialist war.

State and Revolution

One of Lenin’s great achievements during 1917 was his revival and defense of the teachings of Karl Marx and his lifelong comrade, Friedrich Engels, on the state. In July, as he was hiding from a government death squad, Lenin devoted what he thought might be his last days to completing a pamphlet, The State and Revolution. He wrote that the bourgeoisie uses lies to hide its dictatorship, but that Marxists must state the truth: states are not neutral arbiters above classes.

Engels defined the core of the state as armed bodies of men, the prisons and police who hold a monopoly of violence over society. These instruments were forged in wars and revolutions for the social domination of particular classes. These social classes are defined by their property rights in relation to society’s means of production. Thus all states are instruments for the domination of a particular class’s property forms in the means of production. In modern society, there are only two fundamental classes: the bourgeoisie, which owns the means of production; and the proletariat, defined as those who own only their labor power. The capitalists require private property in the means of production, the workers need socialized ownership of them. The interests of the capitalists and workers are thus absolutely counterposed and cannot be served by one and the same state.

Lenin also explained that it is impossible to make the institutions of the bourgeoisie’s class dictatorship serve the proletariat: “Marx’s idea is that the working class must break up, smash the ‘ready-made state machinery,’ and not confine itself merely to laying hold of it.” The proletariat had to build up its own organs of state power out of such things as factory committees, unions, red guards, workers militias, soldiers committees and revolutionary soviets, independent of, and in active struggle against, the old bourgeois state. These were built in 1917 and, after the workers’ revolutionary seizure of power, became the basis of a new kind of state: the dictatorship of the proletariat. This was a fundamentally different power from all previous states in that its purpose was ultimately not perpetuation of class domination, but the transition to classless, therefore, stateless, socialist society.

The Bolsheviks’ Fight Against Class Collaboration

The first Provisional Government was brought down in a political firestorm over its pledge to continue the hated imperialist war. A new cabinet was formed on May 5, and this time the SR and Menshevik Soviet leaders took ministerial posts in the capitalist government. Trotsky later called this Russian coalition government “the greatest historical example of the Popular Front.” The popular front was the name that the Stalinists would use, starting in the 1930s, to designate their coalition government betrayals. It also goes by other names: Union of the Left, Unidad Popular, Tripartite Alliance.

Such class collaboration is not a tactic, but the greatest betrayal. Any political bloc that a workers party enters into with capitalist parties, whether in government or in opposition, is a pledge by the traitorous working-class leaders that they will not violate the bourgeois order. It means that the workers party will take political responsibility for policing the bourgeois social order.

Lenin and Trotsky devised a slogan in response to the coalition government: “Down With the Ten Capitalist Ministers!” This meant: break the coalition with the capitalists; the workers and soldiers Soviets should take all the power! The refusal of the Mensheviks and SRs to do this exposed them before the mass of workers, soldiers and peasants of Russia who still followed them.

In June, the coalition government launched a new war offensive. This impelled the Petrograd proletariat and sailors of the neighboring Kronstadt naval base to embark on a three-day armed demonstration in July to demand the Soviet leaders end the hated war and take power. The Bolsheviks strove to prevent a premature showdown but, unable to hold back the mobilization, took their place at its head to provide leadership.

Capitalist Petrograd’s reaction was to bring in reactionary troops from the front and launch a reign of terror. But when even this failed to stop the Bolsheviks, the bourgeoisie in August resolved on a military coup by the Commander-in-Chief of the army, General Lavr Kornilov, to crush the Soviets altogether. The conciliationist Soviet tops were paralyzed, but the masses rallied around the Bolshevik-organized united-front action that stopped Kornilov in his tracks.

Kornilov was gearing up to sweep away the Provisional Government along with the Soviets as a whole. In mobilizing to stop Kornilov, the Bolsheviks were defending the Provisional Government, but this was strictly military defense. The Bolsheviks gave absolutely no political support to the Provisional Government. On the contrary, while the workers and soldiers mobilized against the counterrevolutionary threat, the Bolsheviks exposed the traitors—the Mensheviks and SRs—in the Provisional Government, who were in constant communication with Kornilov.

A crucial corner had been turned by the beginning of September. The masses were convinced through their Bolshevik-led struggle against Kornilov that the old Soviet misleaders were kaput and that only the Bolsheviks would take decisive action to end the war and stop capitalist sabotage of the economy. The General Staff of the army was no longer capable of mobilizing military units against revolutionary Petrograd. The countryside was aflame as returning peasant soldiers seized the landlords’ fields and torched palatial estates. On September 4, Trotsky was released from prison, and by the 23rd he was elected Chairman of the Petrograd Soviet. The Bolsheviks finally had solid majorities in the Moscow and Petrograd Soviets. Trotsky declared, “Long live the direct and open struggle for a revolutionary power throughout the country!” Lenin hammered home: Get on with it, take power!

The Party, the Soviets and the Conquest of Power

The Bolshevik Central Committee met on October 10 and 16 to finalize the insurrection. At both meetings Zinoviev and Kamenev were opposed to insurrection, while the Lenin and Trotsky wing carried the majority in support of it. Everywhere, factory Red Guards were drilling, workers at the arms factories funneled weapons directly to the workers militias, and the Petrograd Soviet and Bolshevik headquarters in the Smolny Institute became a beehive of working-class organization.

On October 18, Kamenev and Zinoviev publicly blew the whistle on the insurrection in the press. Lenin called them strikebreakers and demanded their expulsion. As Trotsky explained in his 1924 work, Lessons of October, sharp turns such as the leap to insurrection footing provoke conservative tendencies latent in the party into opposition. Trotsky defined the essence of Bolshevism as “such a training, such a tempering and such an organization of the proletarian vanguard as enables the latter to seize power, arms in hand” and the social-democratic (Menshevik) tendency as “the acceptance of a reformist opposition activity within the framework of bourgeois society and an adaptation to its legality—i.e. the actual training of the masses to become imbued with the inviolability of the bourgeois state.”

As we’ve seen, the soviets by themselves do not settle the question of power. They can serve different programs and leaderships. As Trotsky wrote, “Without a party, apart from a party, over the head of a party, or with a substitute for a party, the proletarian revolution cannot conquer.”

The insurrection took place on the eve of the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets on October 25th. Lenin reappeared in public and read out declarations on peace, land and the rights of the toilers. The Bolsheviks’ proclamations were punctuated by the steady boom of red naval artillery directed against the government holdouts in the Winter Palace. Lenin declared: “The Russian started the revolution, and the German will carry it through to the end.” He also said: “A new phase has opened up not just in Russia, but throughout the entire world.”

Isolation of the Revolution and Stalinist Degeneration

The masses of workers in war-ravaged Europe looked to the example of Soviet Russia. However, the social-democratic leaders of the mass reformist workers parties sought to preserve the capitalist order and strangle the October Revolution. Hamstrung by this treachery, insurgent workers in Europe failed in their efforts to take and hold power in Finland (1918), Germany (1918-19), Hungary (1919) and Italy (1919-20), where revolutionary struggles went down to defeat. What was lacking were programmatically grounded and battle-tested revolutionary parties like the Bolshevik Party, capable of leading the workers in victory over the social-democratic and nationalist defenders of capitalist rule.

Within Soviet Russia, the Red Army eventually repulsed all the imperialist-sponsored troops and domestic White Guards, but the country emerged exhausted and drained from the Civil War. There was a vast gulf between the Bolsheviks’ communist goals and the prevailing material scarcity and want. Not only was industry in ruins, the vibrant proletariat that had accomplished October had practically ceased to exist. Vast parts of Moscow and Petrograd were like dark, frozen ghost towns. Instead of an influx of material resources from a Soviet Europe to help rebuild Russia’s devastated infrastructure, Soviet Russia was swept by famine that reached the point of cannibalism in the countryside.

Because of the material and cultural poverty inherited from tsarism, the Bolsheviks early on had to utilize those remaining former functionaries, technical specialists and military officers who, often for careerist reasons, offered their services to the new regime. Lenin warned at the March 1922 Eleventh Party Congress that “‘Four thousand seven hundred responsible communists’ in Moscow administer the state machine. ‘Who is leading whom? I doubt very much whether you can say that the communists are in the lead’” (quoted in Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed, 1936). A nascent conservative and bureaucratized layer had developed—using its position to secure privileges amidst general scarcity—that became a transmission belt for alien class interests and conservative political moods into the Bolshevik Party itself.

These were the conditions in which the revolutionary core of the Bolshevik Party was outflanked by the growing conservative wing, centered on the party apparatus headed by Stalin. After Lenin was struck down by a stroke in May 1922, Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev formed a secret “troika” (or triumvirate) to stop Trotsky from succeeding him as central leader of the party. Their bloc against Trotsky became a center around which opponents of the party’s Leninist wing would act to usurp political power. Stalin emerged as the protector and spokesman for the conservative, bureaucratic layer in the party and state apparatuses.

Doing away with Great Russian chauvinist despotism, the Bolsheviks in power offered full democratic rights to all ethnicities in what had been, in Lenin’s words, the tsarist “prison house of peoples.” In order to liberate the myriad peoples at different levels of national consolidation, a variety of soviet republics were established, from Union Republics for fully formed nations to Autonomous Oblasts (provinces) for various nationalities. In areas of heavy interpenetration of peoples, such as the Caucasus, the resulting complicated checkerboard of autonomous regions set an internationalist framework for intercourse among the peoples.

It was precisely over the national question in the Caucasus that the first decisive political fight against the developing Stalinist bureaucracy was waged by Lenin. After Stalin attempted to deny the Georgian, Azerbaijani and Armenian republics their sovereign status and force them into a Transcaucasian federation, Lenin broke with him in late 1922. Lenin resolved to consummate a bloc with Trotsky, preparing to, in the words of one of his secretaries, drop a “bomb” on Stalin at the upcoming Twelfth Party Congress, held in April 1923. However, Lenin was debilitated by another stroke shortly before the Congress opened, ending his active participation in the affairs of the Soviet party and state. With Lenin ill, Trotsky’s primary concern was to avoid a split within the leadership. Thus, he accepted a deal in which his resolutions on key issues, including the national question, were adopted by the Congress while Stalin kept his post as General Secretary (see “A Critical Balance Sheet: Trotsky and the Russian Left Opposition,” Spartacist No. 56, Spring 2001).

The final straw was the defeat of the October 1923 revolution in Germany. It stopped the postwar revolutionary wave, allowing the global bourgeois order to stabilize. This was hugely demoralizing for Soviet workers. They had strained every nerve preparing for common revolutionary struggle alongside a Bolshevik Germany. Instead, they now faced, for the first time, the prospect of national isolation for the foreseeable future.

The delay of international revolution is what enabled the ascendancy of a conservative bureaucracy in Soviet Russia, which step-by-step strangled the remnants of the Bolshevik Party’s revolutionary core. Trotskyism (i.e., genuine Marxism) is the continuation of Leninism. Stalinism did not flow from Leninism; it was a conservative reaction against it.

A qualitative turning point occurred at the Bolshevik Thirteenth Party Conference in January 1924. In the discussions leading up to that conference, Trotsky and the emerging opposition to bureaucratism and Stalin’s Great Russian national chauvinist policies received unexpectedly broad party support. The apparatus panicked and demonstratively slammed shut the doors to the last party forum where Lenin and Trotsky’s revolutionary core might have been able to overcome their opponents. The elections for delegates to this conference were systematically rigged by the Troika to allow only three supporters of Trotsky to attend. The nascent bureaucracy had shaken its fist in the face of the Opposition: you are out!

One of the three Oppositionist delegates seated at the Conference was Ivan Vrachev. As he denounced Stalin’s undermining of Lenin’s party from the floor of the Thirteenth Conference, he was repeatedly interrupted by hecklers. Vrachev fired back in protest: “Comrades, it may be that we have only a few hours left of full democracy, so let us use it!” He was right. From that point on, the people who ruled the USSR, the way the USSR was ruled and the purposes for which it was ruled all changed.

It took some time for the bureaucracy to consolidate its rule. The Stalin clique had to carry out bloody purges throughout the 1930s. (As an aside, one of the things that the ICL did in the USSR was to seek out surviving veterans of the Trotskyist Opposition. We found Ivan Vrachev and interviewed him.)

In defending its privileges, the Stalinist bureaucracy necessarily soon acquired political self-consciousness in opposition to the Bolshevik Party’s Marxist program. The change of purpose of the USSR’s leadership was encapsulated in December 1924 when Stalin trampled on October’s banner of world revolution by propagating the false dogma of economic autarky and isolationism known as “socialism in one country.” As a theory it was absurd. A workers state cannot ignore the capitalist-dominated international economy. In order to achieve a classless, socialist society, what is required are socialist revolutions to expropriate the bourgeoisies and establish planned, collectivized economies. But Stalin’s nationalist formula crystallized a mood of conservatism, a retreat into a false hope of stability for which Soviet society ached after years of war, revolution and privation.

As the Kremlin bureaucracy became more conscious of its position, this revisionism of internationalist principle became a rationale for political betrayal. Increasingly, Communist parties abroad were transformed into Soviet foreign-policy bargaining chips in a bid for illusory “peaceful coexistence” with imperialism. Over the coming decades, one opportunity after another for socialist revolution in the capitalist countries was strangled.

The Left Opposition that emerged from the crucible of the anti-bureaucratic struggle in the Soviet party was unquestionably the continuity of Leninism, the real heirs to the 1917 Russian Revolution. Trotsky’s Left Opposition fought, both in the Soviet Union and—insofar as they were able—in the Communist International, to preserve and extend the gains of the Russian Revolution. Trotsky’s 1928 “Critique of the Draft Program of the Communist International” proved that the fight in the Russian party was a fight not only for a revival of the Soviet proletariat and against the bureaucratic deformation of the Soviet Union, but also to preserve the theoretical and programmatic heritage of Bolshevism, the revolutionary Marxism of the imperialist epoch. Trotsky’s The Third International After Lenin, containing his 1928 “Critique,” stands as the founding statement of international Trotskyism.

In 1933, Hitler came to power in Germany without a single shot being fired. The Stalinists, who were then in an ultra-left phase that they termed the “Third Period,” referred to the Social Democrats as “social fascists” and refused to call for a united front with this mass reformist working-class party against Hitler’s drive to power. In the face of this historic defeat—and the fact that no opposition was voiced nor a balance sheet drawn within the Stalinized Comintern—Trotsky called for forging a new, Fourth International.

The Communist International under Stalin, after the catastrophic ultra-left line, zigzagged to the right and, at the Seventh (and last) Comintern Congress in 1935, consolidated around a policy of forming class-collaborationist coalitions that they termed “popular fronts.” At the time, the Stalinists sought to justify this treacherous policy by arguing that they were uniting with supposedly “democratic” bourgeois parties “against fascism.”

It was through tying the workers politically to their class enemy that the 1936 French general strike was betrayed by the French Socialist and Communist parties. From the Spanish Revolution of 1936-38 to Chile in 1970-73, the popular front has served to undermine any independent bid for proletarian power, paralyze its struggles and set it up for defeat, often bloody. Like Lenin and Trotsky, we are opposed in principle to any coalition with capitalist parties, whether in government or in opposition, and we are against voting for the workers parties that are part of a popular-front coalition.

In the aftermath of the Stalinist betrayal in Germany, followed by the Comintern’s codification of the reformist popular-front line, Trotsky and his comrades founded the Fourth International in 1938. The 1938 Transitional Program of the Fourth International characterized the Soviet Union under Stalin as follows:

“The USSR thus embodies terrific contradictions. But it still remains a degenerated workers’ state. Such is the social diagnosis. The political prognosis has an alternative character: either the bureaucracy, becoming ever more the organ of the world bourgeoisie in the workers’ state, will overthrow the new forms of property and plunge the country back into capitalism; or the working class will crush the bureaucracy and open the way to socialism.”

Trotsky’s program pointed to how these contradictions could be resolved: the Fourth International fought for unconditional military defense of the degenerated workers state from imperialism and counterrevolution. This was based on the understanding that the Stalinist bureaucracy’s usurpation of power was a political, rather than social, counterrevolution because it did not overthrow the proletarian property forms created by October. As Lenin had taught, the state—a repressive apparatus of armed bodies at its core—defends the property relations of the ruling class: a bourgeois state defends capitalist private property relations, a workers state defends collectivized property relations. The Soviet Union, with the political rule of the parasitic and repressive Stalinist bureaucracy, had become a bureaucratically degenerated workers state.

The Trotskyists called for proletarian political revolution. Such a revolution, based on defense of collectivized property forms, is not a social revolution or a counterrevolution, which overturns existing property relations and puts a different class in power. Rather it is a political revolution to oust the bureaucracy, restoring workers soviet democracy and a Trotskyist internationalist leadership such as the one that led the October Revolution.

[TO BE CONTINUED]