We Are the Party of the Russian Revolution

Part Three

We print below, edited for publication, the concluding part of a presentation by comrade Victor Gibbons, given in Los Angeles on 10 November 2007 in commemoration of the 90th anniversary of the Russian Revolution. Parts One and Two of this presentation were published in WV Nos. 924 and 925, 7 and 21 November.

In early 1989, as Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was capitulating to Washington by withdrawing Soviet troops from Afghanistan, we offered to organize an international brigade to defend the embattled Kabul regime against the CIA-backed mujahedin. After the Afghan government turned down our offer, we organized at the government’s suggestion a campaign of solidarity with the civilian victims in the front-line Afghan city of Jalalabad. Around the same time, the international Spartacist tendency changed its name to the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist). Our Jalalabad campaign and name change signaled that the banner of communism, long trampled in the mud by the Stalinists, had its true champion in Trotskyism.

In the subsequent period, the ICL sought to mobilize its limited forces in the struggle against capitalist restoration in the DDR (East Germany), and then in the Soviet Union itself. In this, we were applying in practice the Trotskyist position of unconditional military defense of the deformed and degenerated workers states against imperialism and capitalist counterrevolution. At the same time, we fought for proletarian political revolution against the Stalinist bureaucracy. The ICL acted on Trotsky’s October 1933 injunction (“The Class Nature of the Soviet State”):

“From our standpoint, of course, the tragic possibility is not excluded that the first workers’ state, weakened by its bureaucracy, will fall under the joint blows of its internal and external enemies. But in the event of this worst possible variant, a tremendous significance for the subsequent course of the revolutionary struggle will be borne by the question: where are those guilty for the catastrophe? Not the slightest taint of guilt must fall upon the revolutionary internationalists. In the hour of mortal danger, they must remain on the last barricade.”

The 1990 defeat of the incipient proletarian political revolution in Germany proved to be a prelude to capitalist counterrevolution in the Soviet Union. Events would show that decades of Stalinist misrule had fatally undermined workers’ consciousness to the point where they did not rally to defend the remaining gains of the 1917 Russian Revolution—centrally, the collectivized planned economy. But that conclusion was not determined in advance. As Stalinist rule broke down in the Soviet Union, the question was posed: would the nascent bourgeoisie go forward to consolidate a capitalist state or would the working class use the opportunity to fight for political power?

As the Stalinist bureaucracy strangled the proletarian internationalist traditions of October, it increasingly promoted Great Russian chauvinism. Over decades, Stalin and his heirs succeeded in imprinting their nationalist outlook on the Soviet peoples. Leninist proletarian internationalism came to be sneered at in official propaganda as an obscure “Trotskyite heresy,” “export of revolution” or, at best, it was emptied of any content.

As the bureaucracy became increasingly discredited, anti-communist Russian nationalist movements were deliberately promoted as a political outlet for opposition. At first they operated under cover of cultural nativist revivalism. Thus the name of one sect, Pamyat (Memory). But this was no culture club. It was an anti-Semitic, pro-monarchist, Black Hundreds fascist movement, the putrid end product of what Stalin and his heirs had cultivated.

In 1987 Pamyat crawled out into the open and brazenly rallied at the gates of the Kremlin, right on Karl Marx Prospekt, demanding to meet with the then Moscow Communist Party boss Boris Yeltsin. Even more alarming was the fact that Yeltsin warmly received them and legally sanctioned them. This was a green light for the attacks that followed. From the start we warned of the mortal danger these Black Hundreds represented and called on Soviet workers, minorities, women and youth to take independent action to send Pamyat scurrying back into their rat holes.

You can read about this in “Pamyat: Russian Fascists Raise Their Heads” (WV No. 434, 7 August 1987). We did not call on the bureaucracy to crush Pamyat. We pointed out that an important component of Stalinist political rule was the weapon of anti-Semitism, which was wielded against the Trotskyist Left Opposition and others. In World War II, which Stalin presented as the “Great Patriotic War” to defend Mother Russia, the Stalinists revived the pogromist Russian Orthodox church in order to foster Russian nationalism.

The Bolshevik Revolution transformed what Lenin called the tsarist “prison house of peoples” into a multinational workers state. It was only the Bolsheviks’ internationalist program—which asserted full and equal rights for all peoples, in order to secure the fullest unity of the workers of all nationalities—that made this possible. With the usurpation of power by the nationalist Stalinist bureaucracy, and over the course of several decades, these principles were perverted. To be sure, even under Stalin and his successors, the foundations of the planned economy laid the basis for massive advancement by the most oppressed and impoverished minority nationalities and peoples, such as those in the Soviet Central Asian republics. But the Stalinist bureaucracy simultaneously served to foster reactionary Russian nationalists like Pamyat as well as petty-bourgeois nationalist currents in many of the non-Russian republics, which sought to assert the supposed “right” of their nationality to lord it over the other peoples. Gorbachev’s perestroika, with its appeal to decentralization and market forces, fueled the aspirations of the more economically advanced republics for an even greater slice of the pie.

The ICL did not consider the boundaries of the Soviet Union to be sacrosanct. We upheld the right of self-determination of the various nations of the USSR—i.e., the right to secede and form an independent state—except where it served as a cover for counterrevolution. Our adherence to the class line meant that we opposed pro-imperialist movements such as the Sajudis in Lithuania, whose call for “independence” was a fig leaf for counterrevolution. The Sajudis also sought to marginalize the ethnic Russian population in the Baltics. For their part, the pseudo-Trotskyists indiscriminately supported petty-bourgeois nationalists, no matter how reactionary; a gross example was Ernest Mandel’s enthusing over the Forest Brothers in Estonia, who had fought alongside the Nazis in World War II. Without the social base of a genuine bourgeoisie, such as existed in West Germany for the takeover of the DDR, nationalism became both a key driving force for capitalist restoration in the Soviet Union and much of East Europe, and a product of the counterrevolution. Thus the disintegration of the Soviet Union unleashed a wave of fratricidal national conflicts and communalist bloodletting, with a resurgence of fascist and nationalist groupings.

ICL’s Initial Attempts to Intersect Soviet Workers

As early as 1984, as President Ronald Reagan ratcheted up the threats against the Soviet Union, we made attempts to get our propaganda into the hands of Soviet citizens by sending a team there with our key documents. In 1989, Soviet merchant marine sailors, touring ballerinas, circus performers and many other Soviet citizens who visited the West were greeted on the docks, by a stage door entrance, or wherever else possible by a team of Spartacists distributing our “plain manila envelope.”

These packets contained our cover letter and Russian-language versions of key Trotsky writings. In Spartacist (English-language edition No. 41-42, Winter 1987-88), we advertised in Russian Trotsky’s four-volume Bulletin of the Left Opposition and reprinted key excerpts from the 1938 Transitional Program of Trotsky’s Fourth International.

By the winter of 1989-90 the political arena in the Soviet Union had opened up to the point where it became feasible for us to make a trip there in the name of the ICL. During that visit, a meeting with the United Front of Toilers (O.F.T.), a group associated with working-class-based movements across the Soviet Union, was invaluable in revealing the vast gulf between outward appearances from afar and the reality on the ground. When we asked two O.F.T. leaders what their position was on the need to smash Pamyat, one of them explained that if the O.F.T. came out against Pamyat it would lose half its membership. This is what seventy years of Stalinist Great Russian chauvinism had produced! We immediately got out of the O.F.T. office.

By September 1990 the continued openings made it possible for the ICL to establish a permanent presence in the USSR, initially with comrade Martha Phillips and, later, myself. The ICL published the first issue of our Russian-language journal Byulleten’ Spartakovtsev (Spartacist Bulletin) in October 1990. The lead piece was “What Trotskyism Is.” This was a translation of a pamphlet (Trotskyism: What It Isn’t and What It Is!) produced for our intervention into the DDR, in which we presented our authentic Trotskyism as the revolutionary continuity of Bolshevism in sharp differentiation from the fake Trotskyists who supported “democratic” counterrevolution in East Europe and advocated the same in the USSR. Around the same time, the ICL published our first Russian-language leaflet for mass distribution: “Soviet Workers: Smash Yeltsin/Gorbachev 500-Day Plan!” You can read translations of these materials in the bound volumes of Workers Vanguard of that period and in Spartacist, especially English-language edition No. 45-46 (Winter 1990-91).

A good example of the situation in the country at the time was the October 1990 Soviet coal miners congress held in Donetsk, Ukraine. Donetsk had been a focal point of a nationwide coal strike in 1989 that Gorbachev managed to defuse. But as the planned economy was dismantled and ever greater market chaos hit the working class, the miners were again hit the hardest. It was their desperate conditions that propelled the Soviet coal miners to form a new union, the Independent Union of Miners (NPG). As soon as we learned of this congress to form the NPG, we took a train to Donetsk and gave the congress organizers a set of our international and Russian-language literature. They issued us guest credentials.

As the congress convened, we discovered that every agency of the bourgeoisie was there in the hopes of turning this new miners union into a Soviet version of counterrevolutionary Polish Solidarność. In the front rows were representatives of the U.S. and British embassies and the AFL-CIO’s Freedom House. This cabal also included a representative of the CIA’s longtime Russian “labor” decoy, the outright Hitlerite fascist National Alliance of Russian Solidarists (NTS). This despised remnant of the “Russian Liberation Army” that fought on the side of Hitler in World War II was then working within the Soviet Union with the additional public relations help of the anti-Communist, fake-Trotskyist British Workers Power (WP) group. WP had toured NTS “coal miner” Yuri Butchenko around Britain in July of that same year, knowing full well of his NTS ties. In London, Butchenko had shared a stage with the scab British “Union of Democratic Miners” (UDM).

The UDM was an anti-Communist outfit formed and financed in an attempt to break the great British coal strike of 1984-85. That strike was led by Arthur Scargill’s National Union of Mineworkers (NUM). During that British coal strike, the Soviet miners had raised a huge solidarity fund for the NUM, totaling 1.5 million pounds sterling. This Soviet aid was a powerful countermeasure to the redbaiting campaign against Scargill and the NUM conducted by the Tory government of Margaret Thatcher and abetted by both the “left” and right wings of Neil Kinnock’s Labour Party. Five years later, “Soviet coal miner” Yuri Butchenko toured Britain in support of the scab UDM slander campaign against Scargill, spreading the lie that he had stolen £10 million from Soviet miners’ donations to the NUM. In Donetsk in 1990, this “AFL-CIA” road show was pushing Soviet miners in the name of anti-Communism to repudiate their past support to Scargill. Though there were only two of us Spartacists at this conference, we played a crucial role in the decision of the congress not to pursue the UDM’s appeal to denounce Scargill. The presidium took a set of WV articles on the UDM strikebreakers. Night after night we had spirited discussions with miners from across the USSR. As a result, delegations took back whole stacks of our bulletin to their mining regions.

To be sure, the NPG tops were later drawn into Yeltsin’s machinations. But at the time of this founding congress, the base was still in flux and its leaders had to pay attention to what representatives of the labor movement from abroad had to say about scabs. The NPG was not a ready-made creature of the imperialists.

August 1991, Yeltsin-Bush Countercoup

In 1990, the newly elected head of the Russian Soviet Republic, Boris Yeltsin, emerged as the champion of the pro-Western “democrats.” Opposing them were the so-called “conservatives” or “patriots” of the Stalinist bureaucracy based in the military, industrial management and the apparatus of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Some of them such as Nina Andreyeva called themselves true Leninists and many of them denounced the ruinous results of market chaos. But these “conservatives” were not committed to preserving a collectivized economy or even the old Stalinist order. Their main difference with the “democrats” was that they opposed dismembering the centralized USSR-wide state structures. These “patriots” wanted to introduce capitalism more slowly and along channels more beneficial to themselves.

On 20 August 1991, a new trans-Soviet “treaty” was to be signed. The main change was to be a substantial transfer of political, military and financial powers from the central organs of the USSR, to the governments of the Soviet Union’s constituent republics. At that point the latter were bastions of the “democrats,” while the “patriots” resisted the weakening of the centralized Soviet state. At the very last minute, on the morning of 19 August 1991, a group of Gorbachev’s lieutenants declared they were taking power in the Kremlin in the name of the State Emergency Committee (EC). The new pact was put on hold.

Tanks and armored personnel carriers rolled into Moscow all day. I went among them and found that neither the troops nor their commanders had the slightest idea of what they had been summoned for. For reasons I will explain in a moment, the EC never dared to issue written orders to act against Yeltsin.

In contrast to the hapless EC, Yeltsin knew exactly what to do. He organized a countercoup. Yeltsin denounced the EC as an attempt to restore the “Communist” system and set up barricades around the “White House,” the seat of his Russian Presidential administration. The American Embassy was in close communication with Yeltsin.

In the evening of August 19, President George Bush Sr. issued a categoric statement rejecting the EC’s services as stand-ins for Gorbachev (who was conveniently absent during the critical days). On August 21, Bush put a call through to the EC and told them that Yeltsin was his man. That sealed the fate of the EC. They were not looking to preserve the USSR as a workers state; they were just as committed as Yeltsin to “partnership” with the West. Bush’s declaration dashed their hopes. That is why they never took any military action against Yeltsin—their “coup” was over before it started.

Counterrevolution in the Streets of Moscow

On August 19 the privileged center of Moscow was abuzz with the intelligentsia rallying to Yeltsin. Three days later, as thousands of Yeltsinite yuppies cheered, a massive crane provided by the American Embassy pulled down the statue of Feliks Dzerzhinsky, Bolshevik leader of Polish origins, and architect of the revolutionary All-Russian Extraordinary Commission to Combat Counterrevolution and Sabotage (Cheka), which was founded in 1917 after the Bolshevik Revolution.

The most obscene desecration was of the statue of Yakov Sverdlov, the central organizer of the Bolshevik Party, the first head of the Soviet state in 1917-18 and a Jew. The fascists not only dragged away his statue, they impaled its foundation with a wooden Christian cross, and burned the tree next to it down to the ground. The nearby statue of Karl Marx was also defaced with graffiti and filth.

Last but not least, the fake Trotskyists, anarchists and social democrats brought up the rear of Yeltsin-Bush counterrevolution. Most were on Yeltsin’s barricades only in spirit—they had no presence in the USSR—but they did what they could to cheer on this attack on the world proletariat. Rather than take the time now to detail this list of infamy, I refer you to our article “Traitors, Not Trotskyists—Cheerleaders for Yeltsin’s Counterrevolution,” WV No. 535 (27 September 1992).

But among the tendencies that literally were there on the Yeltsin-Bush barricades, I want to mention one in particular. At the time it was the British-based group known as the Militant Tendency, led by the late Ted Grant. Today it is represented by its two descendants: the Committee for a Workers’ International, led by Peter Taaffe, and the International Marxist Tendency, led by Alan Woods. Today both of these fakers swear they were nowhere near Yeltsin’s White House. But in the WV No. 828 article on the Taaffeites that I referenced earlier you can read the front-page headlines of their then common newspaper, Rabochaya Demokratiya (October 1991), that trumpeted: “Where We Were” and “On the Barricades in Moscow.”

In the course of August 19, the EC members began to drop out, check in to hospitals, etc. In the terminal collapse of Stalinist rule, not a single wing of the bureaucracy put up a fight against the Yeltsin-Bush onslaught. Just the opposite, many of the openly counterrevolutionary gangs who defended Yeltsin’s White House in August had just spilled out of the disintegrating CPSU, or were still even in it. General Alexander Rutskoi, vice president of Yeltsin’s openly pro-capitalist Russian government that was elected on the eve of the August countercoup, was the head of a faction within the CPSU, the “Democratic Party of the Communists of Russia.” Later Rutskoi and other prominent “patriots” such as KGB General Alexander Sterligov came out as opponents of Yeltsin’s government. But in August 1991, they were the key White House defenders. As Yeltsin’s vice president, Rutskoi broke the 1992 air traffic controllers strike. It was estimated that three-fourths of Yeltsin’s government apparatus was made up of former CPSU party bosses.

August 1991: Proletarian Political Revolution or Capitalist Counterrevolution

The ascendancy of Boris Yeltsin’s capitalist-restorationist forces in August 1991 was a pivotal event determining the fate of the Soviet Union. But it was not conclusive. There was no longer a central Soviet government presiding over USSR state organs or the governments of the constituent republics. The regimes in Russia, Ukraine and elsewhere did not rest on the solid foundation of coherent national capitalist classes. The new entrepreneurs were little more than party cronies, gangs of petty speculators and mafia hoods. Even though USSR state organs such as the Soviet Armed Forces, KGB and Militia were to varying degrees fractured, they were still in place. Yeltsin and Co. had not yet consolidated their own forces dedicated to capitalist rule.

In our August 1991 article, “Soviet Workers: Defeat Yeltsin-Bush Counterrevolution!” which was immediately translated into Russian and distributed in over 100,000 copies throughout the Soviet Union, we wrote that workers mobilizations should have cleaned out the counterrevolutionary rabble on Yeltsin’s barricades. This could have then opened the road to proletarian political revolution:

“While Yeltsin & Co. now see a clear field to push through a forced-draft reintroduction of capitalism, the outcome is not yet definitively decided.... Opposition from the factories against the ravages of capitalist assault could...prevent the rapid consolidation of counterrevolution.”

History records that the ICL’s call was the first published leftist protest against Yeltsin-Bush counterrevolution. It was a message of revolutionary intransigence and a clarion call to action. And it branded those responsible for the catastrophe: “Bankrupt Stalinism Opens Floodgates to Capitalist Restoration.”

We did not rush to conclude that the Soviet workers state had ceased to exist. This had to be confirmed one way or the other by events. To the extent that our meager forces allowed, we attempted to help spark working-class action against the counterrevolutionary forces and for proletarian political revolution in defense of collectivized property forms. Meanwhile, Yeltsin was moving to rapidly consolidate a capitalist state apparatus. The Soviet military command was purged, dismembered and recast into national armies, sworn to defend the anti-Soviet capitalist regimes.

The Reactionary Legacy of Stalinism

On 7 March 1992 those Stalinists who lost out in Yeltsin’s August 1991 coup entered into a formal bloc with Russian fascists and other right-wing nationalists in a “‘red’-brown coalition.” This was even codified in a formal “Declaration of the Founding of the United Opposition” in which they pledged to join a government of national unity for the purpose of combining “all the spiritual and cultural traditions developed at all stages of our history”! The signatories pledged to suppress any clash between “red” oppositionists and “white” monarchists and fascists.

Virtually every prominent Stalinist and social-democratic organization in Russia, from Viktor Anpilov’s newly-founded Russian Communist Workers Party to Gorbachev’s Socialist Party of Labor, joined with fascist, clerical and militarist “partners” in further injecting tsarist Great Russian chauvinism into the veins of the Soviet proletariat. By June 1992 the “red-brown” demonstrations reached a fever pitch. They surrounded Moscow’s TV tower, chanting the traditional slogan of Black Hundreds terror: “Beat the Yids, Save Russia!”

You can read more about this in a leaflet we distributed in the former Soviet Union titled “Stalinist Has-Beens: Left Wing of Nationalist Counterrevolution” (WV No. 561, 16 October 1992). You will also find there the disgraceful record of the splinters of the Militant Tendency in the USSR that quickly competed for a non-existent niche of a “Labourite” left bank on the “red-brown” swamp. Opposing any fight to save the workers state, they sought to pressure the “red-brown” nationalists to advocate populist-corporatist schemes, issuing appeals that avoided any mention of chauvinism or anti-Semitism.

We exposed the “red-browns” by devoting an entire issue of Byulleten’ Spartakovtsev No. 3 (Spring 1992) to the fight for a Leninist party as a tribune of the people. We politically fought against every form of national chauvinism, anti-Semitism, and anti-woman and anti-gay bigotry that was roiling the brown tide of capitalist counterrevolution.

It was right in this period that our leading spokesman in Moscow, comrade Martha Phillips, was murdered at her post. Her body was discovered by comrades on the morning of 9 February 1992, the day of a major anti-Yeltsin rally. We launched international protests demanding a serious investigation, but to no avail. She paid the ultimate price to plant the flag of the ICL on the last barricades in defense of the gains of October. You can read—you must read—the many moving tributes to her in Prometheus Research Series No. 6, a special volume dedicated to three women leaders of the ICL, and in the many moving tributes to Martha presented at memorial meetings around the world. These are published in WV Nos. 546-548 (6 March, 20 March and 3 April 1992).

There was working-class resistance—strikes and protests—to the Yeltsin regime. But these were sporadic and ineffective. By late 1992 there was nothing left of the Soviet Army, or any other All-Union structures. Instead of a proletarian political revolution breaking up the nascent regimes of social counterrevolution, the dismemberment of the USSR into new capitalist states and statelets tore apart the living fabric of the multinational Soviet proletariat.

After nearly 70 years of Stalinist usurpation of political life, and now further paralyzed by CIA-supported pro-Yeltsin “free trade unions” and the virulent chauvinist poison of numerous Stalinist remnants, the multinational Soviet working class became overwhelmed by the counterrevolutionary tide. The August 1991 events (coup and countercoup) ultimately proved to have been decisive in the direction of the development in the Soviet Union. In the absence of concerted proletarian action, the Yeltsin regime carried out a piecemeal consolidation of the counterrevolution.

Only when it was clear in the course of the next year that the working class was not going to move against Yeltsin did we conclude that the Soviet workers state had been definitively destroyed. In the fall of 1992, the Second International Conference of the ICL determined that “the degenerated workers state of Stalin and his heirs has been destroyed” and “a capitalist state, however fragile and reversible, has been created” (Spartacist English-language edition, No. 47-48, Winter 1992-93).

Our programmatic conclusion was that the Soviet workers state could not be revived by a workers political revolution. A new workers state—or states—would have to be forged through proletarian socialist revolution, led by an internationalist Leninist-Trotskyist party, that would sweep away Yeltsin and his ilk.

We continued our work in the former USSR after the Soviet degenerated workers state had been destroyed. In the wake of a historic defeat it was not possible for us to recruit masses, no matter how thoroughly our program had been vindicated in the negative. But it was possible, and vital, for us to seek out the exceptional, small numbers of activist-workers and students who had gone through this experience and shared our determination to preserve its dearly bought lessons for the future.

One example is our intervention into the Donetsk coal miners strike of 1993. It was the first major labor action against one of the new capitalist regimes. We got a firsthand feel of the miners’ social power. The strike committees virtually took over the city. We sent a team that was welcomed by the miners. From the countless political conversations I remember over the course of Moscow Station’s seven years, some of the most interesting and gratifying were those that our team had with the Donetsk coal miners. They had occupied the city square and maintained all-night vigils. We sat in circles, with only the miners’ helmet lamps to illuminate the ICL’s supplement: “How the Soviet Workers State Was Strangled.”

The miners had been through a lot and appreciated that our propaganda was not focused on economic issues. They knew that the Donetsk coal basin was near exhaustion and that their social crisis required a political program. But what program? They knew what they did not want. I remember one banner in particular at a miners’ rally: “Nationalism Shall Not Pass!” You can read the dramatic story of this strike in WV Nos. 578 and 579 (18 June and 2 July 1993).

The 1993 strike opened up further ICL work in Ukraine, especially in Kiev. By 1994 our success in polarizing local leftists led to an organized circle of readers and the beginnings of recruitment from among young worker activists. This was precisely the kind of growth that we were counting on. But our successes drew the attention of the authorities who unleashed a hysterical outburst of media vilification and legal repression against us. The ICL was officially banned from Ukraine. We vigorously protested both internationally and across the former USSR. At our press conference in Moscow we presented statements of international solidarity against the new bosses’ campaign aimed at silencing all working-class and leftist activists. We staged rallies internationally in defense of our legality, and the rights of workers to fight the ravages of capitalist counterrevolution. But this was a very uneven battle. Not only was the proletariat demoralized, so-called leftists like the longtime Russian supporters of Alan Woods, the Rabochaya Demokratiya group centered on Sergei Biets, once again did their best to help the bosses. They actually sent us a revolting letter that in effect endorsed the witchhunters’ charges against us.

We were unable to overturn our banishment from Ukraine. This not only deprived us of precious new recruits, it also tended to close an important window beyond the confines of Russia. At the same time, the costs of maintaining our presence in Russia became increasingly untenable. At our 21 January 1996 Plenum of the ICL’s International Executive Committee, we decided with great regret to suspend our direct presence in Russia.

The ascendancy of counterrevolution in the former USSR and East European deformed workers states was an unparalleled defeat for working people all over the world. It has created a “one superpower world” where the U.S. imperialists no longer feel constrained by Soviet military might. The victory of counterrevolution has devastated the ex-Soviet and East European proletariats ideologically and materially. Alongside mass pauperization in the former USSR, it resulted in waves of “ethnic cleansing” fratricidal wars in East European countries like the former Yugoslavia and within the former Soviet republics themselves.

China and the Deformed Workers States Today

I want to conclude by pointing out the relevance of our intervention in the DDR and Soviet Union to our tasks today. China, North Korea, Vietnam and Cuba are analogous societies to the former Soviet Union. U.S. politicians, particularly Democrats, tailed by the pro-capitalist trade-union bureaucracy, promote China-bashing and chauvinist protectionism. They aim to destroy the gains of the 1949 Chinese Revolution and to re-enslave China. That is why we hammer on the need for unconditional military defense of China and North Korea, including their vital nuclear armaments programs.

China is a volcano of social tensions and sooner or later it will erupt, shattering the political structure of the ruling bureaucratic caste. Then the choice will be starkly posed: proletarian political revolution or capitalist restoration. Already many tens of thousands of workers protests are breaking out every year. A proletarian political revolution in China, establishing a Chinese revolutionary internationalist workers government like Lenin and Trotsky’s, would truly shake the world. It would restore revolutionary Marxism to its rightful place in the eyes of the world proletariat and set off a revolutionary wave.

On the other hand, a counterrevolutionary destruction of the People’s Republic of China would unleash wars and devastation even worse than those inflicted on the former Soviet bloc. All of East Asia would become an arena of a renewed struggle between the imperialist powers.

These are the stakes! Today we are a small, international, revolutionary Marxist propaganda group. We do not know the political and organizational stages we will pass through. But what we do know is that the tide will again turn and that future workers revolutions will need a Bolshevik political arsenal. Their cadres must be educated in the experiences of the October Revolution, the early Communist International, Trotsky’s Fourth International, and the ICL––the party of the Russian Revolution! Join us in our fight for new Octobers!