Resolution of the Third World Conference of the ICFI

Resolution of the Third World Conference,

April 8, 1966 

Rebuilding the Fourth International

1. The class struggle is international. World capitalism has long since played out its historical role of laying down the objective bases for socialism; the struggles of the workers of all countries have meaning only in terms of the world socialist revolution which began in October 1917 in Russia, as part of the world proletarian revolution. The Third (Communist) International was set up to answer the needs of the working class in this epoch of wars and revolutions. Following the betrayals of Social Democracy after 1918, the degeneration of the CPSU and the Comintern led eventually to the defeats in Britain and China in 1926-27 and the victory of fascism in Italy, Germany and Spain. Between 1933 and 1938 Trotsky and the Bolshevik opposition prepared to establish a Fourth International in response to the needs of the working class in a period of defeats, when Stalinism passed definitively to the side of counter-revolution. 

The history of the class struggle since 1938 has proved correct the basic starting-point of Trotsky and the founders of the Fourth International: the working class remains oppressed by capitalism because of the betrayals of the working-class leadership, particularly by the Stalinist bureaucracy in the USSR; our epoch is the epoch of crisis of working-class leadership. All the economic and political developments since then have shown the correctness of insisting that the development of imperialism constantly deepens the contradiction between the productive forces and capitalist social relations. But at every critical stage in the development of this contradiction, the traitorous social-democratic and Stalinist leaderships and the Soviet bureaucracy have misled the workers; these petty-bourgeois formations have divided the workers along national and sectional lines and held back the development of a revolutionary consciousness. The post-war economic and political crisis in the advanced countries, the breakdown of capitalist rule in Eastern Europe, the victorious revolution in China, the mass struggles in the colonial countries  all of these international capitalism has survived because of the treachery of these misleaders who disarmed the working class. 

Only an international revolutionary Marxist leadership could have enabled these class struggles to be used for the overthrow of capitalism in the main centres, the advanced countries. Only the Fourth International and its parties, intervening in the class struggle in these countries, giving them international significance, could have given leadership to the independent organs of working-class power, and could have led the peasant masses beyond the leadership of the petty-bourgeois nationalists in the colonial countries. 

Imperialism was able to overcome its post-Second World War crisis through the collaboration of international Stalinism and of other petty-bourgeois tendencies. Such collaboration, fully developed in the bureaucracy's strategy of peaceful co-existence and peaceful competition between the two world systems since the death of Stalin and particularly since 1956, now takes on an added significance for the rebuilding of the Fourth International. This new and more advanced phase of the counter-revolutionary role of Stalinism is the response of the bureaucracy not only to the increased pressure of imperialism but also to the upsurge of the political revolution in Eastern Europe after 1953. At the same time, movements like the General Strike of August 1953 in France showed that the policies of the Stalinist and Social Democratic bureaucracies in the advanced capitalist countries were coming into contradiction with the mass movement. The containment of the working class in those capitalist countries where the Stalinists had mass influence became more difficult and fraught with danger. Every partial mobilization of the strength of the class threatened to rapidly develop into a general class confrontation, putting in question the whole capitalist system. The Stalinist bureaucratic leaderships of the working-class movement found themselves faced with the necessity of making themselves open agents of the maintenance of bourgeois order like the Social Democrats before them. In a different form, the historic defeat of French imperialism at Dien-Bien-Phu forced the international Stalinist apparatus into direct collaboration with imperialism for the purpose of preventing the extension of the revolution in the colonial countries. 

The Hungarian Revolution represents the principal manifestation up to the present of the insoluble contradiction between Stalinism and the extension of the socialist revolution. At the same time as it was the first political revolution against the Stalinist bureaucracy, and was for a time victorious, it was also an expression of the international class struggle, taking its specific form in the countries of Eastern Europe. It posed the problem of workers' power through workers' councils not only in Hungary but throughout the USSR and Eastern Europe. Its actual development raised the question of the social revolution in the countries of Western Europe. Thus the increasingly international character of the proletarian revolution threatens the existence of both the Kremlin bureaucracy and imperialism. The Sino-Soviet conflict is another major external manifestation of the insoluble contradiction between Stalinism and the international revolutionary struggle. This struggle must be led by a Marxist leadership if capitalist counterrevolution is to be prevented in China, the USSR and Eastern Europe, and if imperialism is to be defeated throughout the rest of the world. 

Another major principle of the founders of the Fourth International is thus more than confirmed. Stalinism is not a new social system but a regime of crisis in a degenerated workers' state, a regime which will fall to the political revolution of the working class; the political revolution can succeed only under the leadership of parties of the Fourth International. This is the lesson of the recurrent crises in the USSR since 1953, the East German and Polish uprisings, the Hungarian revolution and the Sino-Soviet split; the establishment of degenerated or deformed workers' states in Eastern Europe and China, far from ending the isolation of the USSR and softening its contradictions, has accelerated and deepened them. The more the planned economy develops under the control of the Soviet bureaucracy, the sharper become the social contradictions, thus giving more and more concreteness to the alternative posed in the founding programme of the Fourth International: 

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 to capitalism; or the working class will crush the bureaucracy and open the way to socialism.

  In neither event can there be any peaceful conclusion. The actual outcome will be the product of the world class struggle, primarily in the developed capitalist countries and in the USSR, Eastern Europe and China. The unity of the workers' struggle in Eastern Europe with the workers' movement in Western Europe now urgently requires conscious and concrete expression. This can only be done by the rebuilding of the Fourth International of Marxist parties in every one of these countries. The Socialist United States of Europe is a living slogan: in Eastern Europe the bureaucracy clumsily attempts economic co-operation between the different workers' states (Comecon); in Western Europe, the capitalists try to discipline the working class and resolve their contradictions in the framework of the European Common Market, itself a reflection of sharpening inter-imperialist contradictions; between the imperialists and the bureaucracy an uneasy series of compromises is negotiated, and the economy of Eastern Europe and Russia is penetrated more and more by the prevailing relationships and prices in the imperialist world market. Thus, along with its political rapprochement with imperialism since 1953, the bureaucracy is made more sensitive and responsive to the contradictory economic development of international capitalism. It is the task of the Fourth International to create working-class parties which consciously respond in struggle to these objective contradictions and potentialities. The historic division between the workers of Russia and Eastern Europe on the one hand, and those of Western Europe and America on the other, the result of Stalinism, can only be overcome through the conscious experience of the unity of their struggles; this conscious experience takes concrete form in the rebuilding of the Fourth International, rooted in the working class of the advanced countries as well as of the planned economies. There will be no spontaneous formation of such parties. In Hungary in 1956, despite a high level of political development and the formation of workers' councils, such a party was not built, and any conscious intervention by the Fourth International was sabotaged by the Pabloite revisionists. The workers' struggle continues in these countries since 1956, and it is the responsibility of the Fourth International to provide conscious leadership which can build on the lessons of 1956. 

In the same way, the International and its parties are the key to the problems of the class struggle in the colonial countries. The petty-bourgeois nationalist leaders and their Stalinist collaborators restrict the struggle to the level of national liberation, or, at best, to a version of 'socialism in one country', sustained by subordination to the coexistence policies of the Soviet bureaucracy. In this way, all the gains of the struggle of the workers and peasants, not only in the Arab world, India, South East Asia, etc. , but also in China and Cuba, are confined within the limits of imperialist domination, or exposed to counter-revolution and imperialist intervention (the line-up against China, the Cuban missiles crisis, the Vietnam war, etc. ). In each country, the organic link between the colonial workers and the struggle of the workers in the advanced countries and in the workers' states can be understood and given concrete expression only under the leadership of parties of the Fourth International. 

The period 1953-56 marks a turning point in the world situation. At the end of the Second World War, the changed relation of class forces on a world scale broke the old capitalist equilibrium. However, to the extent that the Stalinist and reformist bureaucracies were able to contain or manipulate the strength of the working class in the advanced countries, the most decisive consequences of this changed situation were not immediately apparent in all their significance. 

There was a growing together of the social and economic contradictions of the advanced capitalist countries and of the planned economies. In the long term, imperialism cannot survive except by bringing the workers' states back into the orbit of capitalist exploitation. At the same time, the harmonious development of the planned economies of Russia and Eastern Europe demands that the most advanced productive forces in the world be included in socialist planning. But the economy cannot be considered in and of itself. Its contradictions must be translated into class terms.

The Kremlin bureaucracy and all its satellite bureaucracies, precisely because they have the character of parasitic social groups, are no less attached to a purely national framework, to national states, than the bourgeoisie of the various capitalist nations. These national states constitute the basis of their exploitation of the working class in their own country. The idea that it is possible to achieve 'socialism in one country' is not only a false theory; it is at the same time the ideological expression of the conditions of growth and survival of the parasitic bureaucracy and its material interests. 

A mechanical idea of working-class internationalism leads to a misunderstanding of the national factor in the struggle for emancipation of the working classes subjected to imperialism and the Kremlin bureaucracy. But it is no less dangerous to ignore the internationalist content of the workers' struggles in these countries. The workers must liberate themselves from the oppression and exploitation both of imperialism and of the Kremlin bureaucracy, a task which goes beyond a struggle within national frameworks. Except in this context, national independence is meaningless. The struggle of the working class in Eastern Europe can only be understood as a struggle against regimes produced by a revolutionary movement which has been doubly distorted:

 1. It is part of a revolutionary upsurge which threatened the very existence of capitalism in the whole of Europe, a threat which was dispelled by the complementary actions of American imperialism, the Soviet bureaucracy and its agencies, and European Social-Democracy; 

2. The Kremlin bureaucracy used its power to decapitate the revolutionary action of the workers of these countries, using for this purpose the old apparatus of the capitalist state. 

The movements of August 1953 and of the summer of 1955 in France, together with the rising revolutionary wave in Eastern Europe, must be considered in their historical continuity, at the same time as marking a turning point in the world class struggle. From one point of view, they carried forward the revolutionary struggles in Europe of the years 1943-45; from another, they inaugurated a new period in the international struggle of the working class. 

Independently of their level of consciousness of the question, the working classes of Eastern Europe and of France in particular fought struggles which tended towards the dictatorship of the proletariat; only through this dictatorship is it possible to achieve the planned use of the productive forces of the world, based on common property in the means of production and the breaking down of national boundaries. In this sense the struggles of this period were the response of the working class to the contradictions both of the capitalist system and of the planned economies. In these struggles, they came into direct conflict with the Soviet bureaucracy, with its international Stalinist agents, and with the reformist bureaucracies, as well as with the bourgeois state machines. 

The linked crisis of imperialism and of the Soviet bureaucracy does not arise solely from the contradiction between capitalist economy as a whole and the planned economies. It consists also of contradictions between the imperialist powers themselves, which constantly nourish the class struggle and give it sharper forms in the advanced countries, and of the inability of imperialism to arrest the development of the revolution in the backward countries; the crisis is also fed by the fact that the Kremlin and satellite bureaucracies cannot resolve the problems posed by the development of the planned economy, whose harmonious development demands not only the extension of social ownership and planning to the means of production in the advanced countries, but also the participation of the working class in the management and control of industry; this is only possible if they exercise political power, which is impossible without the overthrow of the bureaucracy. This linked crisis creates the conditions for intensification of the world class struggle, and it is in that struggle that the crisis will find its solution. For this reason, the struggles engaged in by the workers of the advanced countries during the years between 1953 and 1956, and the changed relationship which these struggles expressed between the workers and the bureaucratic apparatus of the labour movement, were decisive factors. This fact was partially obscured by the defeat of the Hungarian Revolution, which was basically a victory for imperialism, encouraging pro-capitalist tendencies in the USSR and Eastern Europe and reformist trends in the Communist Parties. Nonetheless, this defeat was temporary and not fundamental, since in not a single advanced country has the working class been subjected to a defeat like those of the 1920s. 

It is the perspective of combined revolutionary struggles, threatening at the same time the existence of imperialism and of the Kremlin bureaucracy, bringing the proletariat into conflict with the bureaucratic apparatuses which control the workers' movement, which demands and makes possible the rebuilding of the Fourth International. 

2. No starting point for revolutionary practice in the present international political situation can be found simply from contemplation of the 'objective forces' at work. The lessons of the struggles within the revolutionary Marxist movement are decisive to the grasping of these opportunities in the objective situation. The Fourth International has successfully resisted and defeated the attempts of petty-bourgeois opportunism, in the shape of a hardened revisionist tendency which penetrated all sections of the Trotskyist movement, to destroy it politically and organizationally. The struggle against this tendency was and remains the necessary preparation for the rebuilding of the Fourth International as a centralized proletarian leadership. This revisionist tendency developed into a centre for liquidation of the revolutionary party and the International, now gathered together in the self-styled 'Unified Secretariat', which is the product of fusion between the International Secretariat of Pablo and the revisionist groups previously associated with the International Committee and the SWP of the USA. Revisionism became liquidationism when the French Section was expelled from the International because of its defence of Trotskyism, of the Transitional Programme, and of its own very existence. The onslaught of the revisionists reached its peak in the split of 1952-1953. The liquidationist centre has become a major obstacle to the rebuilding of the Fourth International. 

Revisionism and liquidationism in the Fourth International, with its primary political expression subordination to the bureaucratic instruments of imperialist penetration of the workers' and national liberation movements, must be seen not only as a result but also as an objective contributory factor to the success of these bureaucracies in containing the struggles of the international working class. The Fourth International cannot be rebuilt without a struggle against these 'Trotskyist' revisionists. In this period, when the counterrevolutionary actions of the Stalinist bureaucracy are an indispensable support to imperialism, revisionism and liquidationism take particular forms of capitulation to this bureaucracy. Centrist tendencies within the Stalinist movement, in Eastern Europe, USSR and China, as well as in the various Communist Parties, base themselves on the perspective of a reform of the Stalinist bureaucracy. Pabloite revisionism and liquidationism is the expression of this revisionism of our epoch within the revolutionary movement itself. The first steps of a fight against Stalinism in the countries ruled by the bureaucracy go through forms which tend to accept this revisionist framework. In this way, the dominance of Pabloite revisionism in the Fourth International objectively hindered the development of the political revolution in 1953-56. Thus Pabloite revisionism and liquidationism has not been a purely 'internal' or 'subjective' experience of the Fourth International. 

The split in the International of 1951-53 was linked with the development of revisionism into liquidationism. The abandonment of the programme of the Fourth International which had been contained in the earlier theses of Pablo developed into actual support for the Stalinist bureaucracy against the revolutionary workers of East Germany. This constituted proof that the revolutionary organization founded by Trotsky so longer existed. In 1953, the revisionism contained in Pablo's earlier theses was most sharply expressed in his retreat from the programme of political revolution in Eastern Europe at the time of the East German workers' uprising. The theories of 'centuries of degenerated workers' states', 'mass pressure on the bureaucracy', and the resultant tactic of 'entry sui generis', were the revisionist background of this betrayal and later of the Pabloites' similar attitude towards the Hungarian revolution of 1956, and to the whole phenomenon of 'de-Stalinisation'. The fundamental perspective of the founding programme of the Fourth International, the construction of revolutionary parties to fight for the political independence of the working class in the struggle for power, was abandoned. The Pabloite conception of an international centre whose role consists of influencing through abstract 'theoretical and political support' the leftward-moving sections of the bureaucracy, as the latter supposedly respond to the pressure of the masses and of 'irreversible' objective trends, is the negation of the basic task defined by the Transitional Programme: '... the crisis of the proletarian leadership, having become the crisis in mankind's culture, can be resolved only by the Fourth International'. The fundamental perspective of the founding programme of the Fourth International rests on the following appreciation: 'The orientation of the masses is determined first by the objective conditions of decaying capitalism, and second, by the treacherous politics of the old workers' organizations. Of these factors, the first, of course, is the decisive one: the laws of history are stronger than the bureaucratic apparatus. ' The question is to fight in the course of the class struggle itself for the destruction of the bureaucratic apparatus and the building of the International and its parties.

Instead of the struggle to build the International, to construct in the course of this struggle an international leadership selected in and through the struggle, the Pabloites substituted their false idea of an international centre, and this resulted in the negation of the construction of revolutionary parties to fight for the political independence of the proletariat in the struggle for power. The active construction of revolutionary parties in Eastern Europe and the USSR was abandoned and this assisted in the isolation of the workers in these countries from the working class of the capitalist world. (This liquidationism is the essence of Pabloism in all sectors of the international class struggle. ) In the capitalist countries themselves, the counter-revolutionary role of the Stalinist parties and of the policies of the Soviet bureaucracy is covered up by the Pabloite revisionists, who speculate on the 'irreversible' progressive tendencies within the bureaucracies. Pablo's theory that the Stalinist party would be forced to the left and even to take power disarmed the vanguard of the French working class at the time of the 1953 General Strike, just as surely as it disarmed the Fourth International in relation to the political revolution in Eastern Europe. Clearly then, every national section of the Fourth International must carry out a determined struggle against Pabloite revisionism if it is to build a revolutionary party with a real perspective of international working class unity. 

The bankruptcy of this revisionism became particularly clear in the Pabloite evaluations of the split between the Russian and Chinese Communist Parties. Instead of an objective analysis of the causes and consequences of this division as a way of strengthening the Fourth International in its struggle to defeat the bureaucracy, the Pabloites discussed at length the false problem of which line, the Chinese or the Russian, best expressed the needs of international socialism. The fact is that although the Chinese make formally correct criticisms of the revisionist formulations of the CPSU, these are only a theoretical dressing for an empirical rejection of the consequences of the Soviet bureaucracy's attempted agreement with the American imperialists at the expense of China. Correct formal criticisms of the role of the national bourgeoisie and of the Soviet attitude towards them in the colonial countries has not prevented the Chinese leaders from sabotaging the struggle of the workers, for example in Indonesia and in North Africa, in accordance with the needs of Chinese diplomacy. Chinese criticism of the theory of peaceful co-existence is again narrow and purely empirical because it does not go to the point of posing an alternative strategy of international mobilization of the working class against imperialism. This emerges clearly from the oft-repeated distinction between the colonial 'storm centre' and the advanced countries. The problem of unifying these struggles through the construction of revolutionary parties and above all of uniting these with the linked struggles in the workers' states against the bureaucracies, cannot be solved by the Chinese bureaucrats. Their attitude to Stalin and towards Trotskyism is entirely consistent with this limitation. It is objectively impossible for them to state clearly that proletarian revolution is the only escape from barbarism; they can present no overall strategy based on the nature of the epoch, because such a strategy puts in question their own existence. 

In the advanced countries, the revisionists who usurp the name of the Fourth International are prostrate before the Social Democracy as well as before Stalinism. Here, too, the building of independent working class parties is abandoned. Everything is concentrated on 'deep entry' and the encouragement of 'mass centrist' tendencies in the social democratic parties. In this way, the cadres of these sections are trained in opportunist adaptation to professional centrists and play their part in bolstering up the social democratic bureaucracy. In Belgium the General Strike of 1960-61 found the revisionists around Germain, because of their failure to prepare the way for the establishment of an alternative leadership, tailing behind centrist demagogues who opposed turning the movement into a struggle for power. They put forward the demand for 'structural reforms' derived from the minimum programme of the Belgium Socialist Party. Empirically they adapted themselves to the separatist moods produced by the lack of leadership during the strike and gave wholehearted support to the petty-bourgeois movement for Walloon federalism. From this time they were on the defensive, moving from one opportunist position to another until they found themselves helpless in the face of the bureaucracy's attacks on their freedom of expression in the Belgian Socialist Party in 1964. After years of 'deep entry' they now indulged in the sectarian adventure of proclaiming a new workers' party along with a handful of non-Marxists and demagogic elements. Their policy of 'structural reforms' is nc different from that of the left social democrats and Stalinists of Italy and other parts of Western Europe. Germain and his collaborator; provide the ideological cover for social democracy in those countries where social democracy is the main reflection of capitalism in the working class movement, just as they play the same role on behalf of the Stalinists in Eastern Europe or in those capitalist countries where the Stalinists are strong. In Britain a tiny group of supporters of the Pabloites has concentrated its efforts on attacking the more and more successful construction of a Marxist alternative to the Social Democrats and the Stalinists, particularly in the Labour youth movement. To this end, they have collaborated with renegades and anti-communists in service to the social-democratic bureaucracy. 

The general swing to the right of all the social-democratic and Stalinist parties since 1956 is their response to the renewed upsurge of the international workers' struggle. The increasing subordination of the revisionists to the bureaucracies even during this right turn indicates clearly the international class nature of this tendency in international Trotskyism. Their theory that mass pressure forces opportunist bureaucracies to the left is a treacherous and reactionary theory. These bureaucracies serve imperialism, and any adaptations they make to mass struggles are for the purpose of betraying these struggles to the imperialists. Only a struggle against the Pabloite 'objectivist' revisions of dialectical materialism can prepare for the building of real revolutionary parties based on Marxist theory. Without this fight, there can be no working out of the detailed strategy and tactics necessary in the international class struggle in response to every development in the linked crises of capitalism and the Stalinist bureaucracy. 

As we have seen, this dialectical connection between imperialism, bureaucracy, revisionism and the fight to reconstruct the International holds just as true for the colonial and semi-colonial countries. The Algerian national liberation struggle against French imperialism culminated in the establishment of the Ben Bella Government and the Evian Agreement with de Gaulle, leaving French imperialism's North African interests protected. Instead of working for an independent working class party in Algeria, and for a revolutionary working class party in France which would forge the real international link between the French and Algerian workers against their common enemy, the Pabloites subordinated their sections in Western Europe to the FLN apparatus and collaborated in the new regime's repressions against the working class, at the same time excusing Ben Bella's deal with the imperialists at Evian. Even the building of independent working-class parties against bourgeois regimes in countries like Egypt and Syria is condemned as sectarian, and some spokesmen of the Pabloites characterize not only Algeria but these countries too as workers' states. 

Castro's regime in Cuba has been uncritically praised as a 'healthy workers' state' and all independent working class struggle, including the building of a party, renounced. Even Castro's repressions of the Trotskyist party there (part of the Posadas group which split from the Pabloites in 1962) has been justified by the revisionists. The building of an independent workers' party and the establishment of workers' councils in Cuba as part of a proletarian internationalist orientation, with the extension of the revolution to Latin America and a revolutionary alliance with the workers of the USA and the rest of the world, is completely abandoned. The 'aid' of the Soviet bureaucracy is not seen in the context of the international class struggle, with the bureaucracy striving to trade the Cuban revolution for its own purposes, but as a 'progressive' assistance to Cuba. The theories about petty-bourgeois revolutionists being 'unconscious Marxists', about 'Jacobin leaderships sui generis', about 'revolutionary parties being built in the course of the revolution itself, about 'special conditions' in the backward countries which outdate the theory of crisis of leadership, all of these have served in practice to assist the petty-bourgeois and the bourgeois nationalist leaders who, assisted by Stalinism, have managed to contain the mass revolutionary struggles in the colonial countries within the framework of continued world domination of imperialism. 

The most striking confirmation of the definitively opportunist role of Pabloite revisionism has been provided by the political evolution of the LSSP in Ceylon. Adhering to the Pabloite centre, the leaders of the majority of this party responded to the call of Mrs. Banderanaike and her bourgeois SLFP party to enter a coalition government. Here we had expressed concretely the fact that the theory about middle class leaders being pushed to the left, a substitute for the building of independent working class parties, is the cover for capitalist politics. Imperialism's survival in Ceylon depended upon the workers' resistance being divided and broken above all upon their leadership being beheaded. The 'unification' of the revisionists in 1963, explicitly carried through without discussion of such questions as the opportunism of N. M. Perera and company, was an essential part of the preparation of the betrayal of the LSSP in Ceylon in 1964. In this way, the spurious internationalism of the Pabloite revisionists ends by actively assisting imperialism. Under the cover of international 'unification' the politics of the national sections are left to adapt themselves to serving the direct agents of imperialism in their own countries. 

3. The revisionism and liquidationism which has attacked the Fourth International is an international class phenomenon, responding to the needs of imperialism in its latest phase of extreme contradictions and dependence upon the Stalinist bureaucracy, social democracy, and the nationalist leaders. The abandonment of Marxist theory within the Fourth International, not only the abandonment of the programme but even of the fundamentals of dialectical materialism, was the mechanism by which the cadres were prepared for this capitulation. The objective situation  physical liquidation of many sections in the late 1930s and the Second World War, the apparent strength of Stalinism in the workers' movement from 1942 to 1953, the divisions and pressure of the cold war period, the McCarthy repressions in the USA  all provided the circumstances for the decline, particularly by physically separating the class struggle in Eastern Europe and Russia from that of the capitalist world. But the emphasis placed on revolutionary consciousness by the Transitional Programme must be our guide. The death of Trotsky weakened the Fourth International immeasurably. There had not yet been time to train a cadre which had absorbed the living theoretical heritage of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky, particularly the lesson learned by Trotsky in the October Revolution of the need for a centralized Bolshevik party, founded solidly on Marxist theory, responding to every need of leadership by the working class in accordance with an internationalist perspective. This theoretical and political weakness, reflected in a dogmatic attitude towards theory and programme, not developing Marxist theory against hostile ideologies but attempting to 'preserve' it, was the reason for the inability of the Fourth International to develop the programme and build parties in the post-war period. 

Instead the cadres of the International adapted easily to the petty-bourgeois trends dominant at that stage of political development, particularly to the Stalinists. A false and artificial 'international centre' was set up, relying on a propagandist contemplation and commentary upon 'objective' developments in the class struggle. Such a centre did not discuss the living experiences of the sections in the course of developing Marxist theory and programme but instead either left the sections without guidance or intervened bureaucratically (upon the basis of the most 'Bolshevik' of organizational statutes) to impose an abstract international line against the sections. Such an international centre, isolated from real struggle, adapting programmatic formulae to the surface atmosphere of politics and certain circles of the 'left' intelligentsia, dominated as it was by the pettybourgeois elements who inhabit the Labour bureaucracies, was inevitably exposed to the pressures of the cold war, of international Stalinism and imperialism. Its theory and programme developed not in active connection with the living struggle but in the rarefied atmosphere of 'international secretariats'. The theoretical backwardness of the SWP leaders, who paid no heed to Trotsky's warnings of the need to do battle against pragmatism, the dominant American philosophy, made it easy for them to adapt to the Pabloite revisions and to end in the position of pragmatists themselves. Such adaptation amounted in fact to a narrow nationalism in party matters, an abdication of internationalism and of responsibility to the International. This explains why the rejection of Pablo's revisionism by the SWP stopped short of a real theoretical analysis. Cannon and the SWP leaders reacted empirically to Pablo's gross capitulation to Stalinism and to his organizational abuses in organizing factions within the national sections, especially in the USA, but they did not probe to the theoretical roots of the revisions and therefore themselves fell victim to revisionism; their abandonment of the programme of political revolution and the building of revolutionary parties in Eastern Europe, their increasing support for petty-bourgeois leaders in Algeria and Cuba, as well as in the Negro struggles in the USA itself, have all prepared a situation where the SWP is now in immediate danger of liquidation. 

4. The assassination of President Kennedy provoked from the SWP leaders a reaction which revealed the depths of their capitulation. They addressed their 'condolences' to the widow, and published a statement denouncing the methods of terrorism. This action was only part of their liquidationism under the direct pressure, not of any Stalinist or Social-Democratic bureaucracy, but of US imperialism itself. Cannon's break with Pablo in 1953 only concealed this process of degeneration. It was perfectly possible, in the USA, to reject a tendency which took the form of a capitulation to the Stalinist bureaucracy, and at the same time to fall victim to the pressure of imperialism itself. That this was, in fact, the nature of the process was confirmed by the SWP's turn to the Pabloites after the crisis of Stalinism reached its peak in 1956. 

The 're-unification' of the Pabloite revisionists in 1963 was preceded by the defection of Posadas and a number of Latin American Pabloite sections. The unification was followed almost immediately by Pablo's own break with the Unified Secretariat and by the debacle in Ceylon. This decomposition is not accidental. The revisionist theories of the Pabloites adapted them to the Labour and Stalinist bureaucracies and to the petty-bourgeois nationalists who in turn are the agents of imperialism. Consistent with the politics of this adaptation they revised out of existence the role of revolutionary consciousness and Marxist parties. Blinded by the apparent strength of the bureaucracy and the nationalists at the end of a period of working class defeats and world war, they were taken unawares by the revival of revolutionary working class struggles in Eastern Europe and later in the imperialist world. They had capitulated to the dominant bureaucracies. The betrayals of the bureaucracy and the opportunists strengthen imperialism, but only temporarily. In the very act of perpetuating a system racked by contradictions and conflicts, the counter-revolutionary social democrats and Stalinists in fact lay the basis for more violent and all-embracing class struggles, which demand ever more insistently an international proletarian leadership. Just at the point where the linked crisis of imperialism and the bureaucracy provokes the sharpest struggles, so do the revisionists support more faithfully the petty-bourgeois nationalists and the bureaucracy. This is clearly seen in Ceylon, in Belgium, in Britain and in relation to the Sino-Soviet dispute. The Socialist Workers Party plays a similar role in relation to the Negro movement and its leadership in the USA. There is nothing spontaneous about the growth of a successful revolutionary movement to end the rule of the imperialists. The reconstruction of the Fourth International is a real task which must be consciously carried forward in every country. 

In every country the sections of the Fourth International will be built by insisting above all on training a political leadership which starts not from tendencies within the bureaucracies but from the movement of the working class which brings it into conflict with the bureaucracy, learning in struggle the treacherous nature of the official leadership and of their theoretical apologists, the revisionists. The policy of the working class United Front has nothing to do with the policy of capitulation before the apparatus. It is necessary because it opposes the working class as a whole to the capitalist class, to the capitalist state and to the capitalist government. Consequently it implies the exposure of the bureaucracies' politics of classcollaboration either with a section of the capitalist class or with the bourgeoisie as a whole. The United Front rests upon the correct aspiration of the working class, including those workers who are members of reformist and Stalinist organizations, for unity in action against the united forces of the capitalists, an aspiration which necessarily conflicts with the politics of the bureaucracy. It is not excluded that the bureaucrats in the traditional leaderships may be forced to take steps along the road of the United Front under pressure from the working class and their own members. In such cases, we support and participate in all actions which can be organized in that direction. 

In any event, the policy of United Front must be taken in the context of the construction of independent revolutionary parties. Not even the semblance of a United Front can arise from spontaneous developments. It demands political struggle by independent organizations carrying the Transitional Programme into practice. It must serve as the springboard for the development of these organizations. In sum, the policy of the United Front can only really exist through the building of the organizations of the Fourth International. At certain stages, entry into mass organizations will be the best way of effecting this tactic but in no case is such entry to be regarded as a permanent or semi-permanent feature. It is always a tactic, subordinated to the general strategy of the struggle for power, of which the construction of an independent revolutionary party is the general prerequisite. 

The decomposition of Pabloism, with its politics emerging clearly as a necessary part of opportunism, is thus a consequence of the crisis of capitalism and its agencies, to which the Pabloites subordinated themselves through their abandonment of the Transitional Programme and of dialectical materialism. 

5. It follows that the most serious theoretical preparation in struggle against revisionism is necessary for the rebuilding of the Fourth International. The deepening crisis of capitalist society and the connected crisis of the Stalinist bureaucracy are dissolving the old political relationships and creating favourable conditions for the construction of revolutionary parties. The changes in the internal relations of the international workers' movement at present taking place, and the need to exploit the linked crises of imperialism and the Stalinist bureaucracy, demand that our national tasks must be placed correctly in their international context as part of the construction of the Fourth International; only in this way will the international class struggle be resolved in favour of the working class. But these parties will nowhere develop spontaneously; they depend in every case on the intervention of Marxists who base their programme on the international perspective of Trotskyism. In particular, these national sections must grasp in theory and in practice the revolutionary role of working class youth in the USA, W. Europe, Russia and E. Europe, and in all the colonial and semi-colonial countries. It is these proletarian youth who are now drawn into struggle against the capitalists and the bureaucracy. In the building of parties of the Fourth International, youth play a special role as one of the most exploited sections of the proletariat. But the construction of sections of the International requires the mobilization behind the programme and organization of the Fourth International of all the principal fighting forces of the proletariat. It is in this perspective, and not in isolation from it, or as a substitute for it, that work among the youth takes on its real importance. The Negro struggle in the USA, intensified especially by the impact of automation under capitalism, the heroic struggle of workers and students in Spain, the political opposition to the bureaucracy in the workers' states, the fight against the Social Democrats and Stalinists in Britain, France and all Western Europe, as the youth strive to join battle with capitalism, the workers' battles in Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, Latin America and Africa, all of these bring a new generation of workers to the fore. As all the old working class political tendencies swing sharply to the right, a heavy responsibility falls upon the International Committee and the sections grouped around it. They have the responsibility, beginning from a scientific analysis, of providing the motive force for the rebuilding of the Fourth International on the foundations of this revolutionary potential. It is not a question of a 'youth movement' as such, but of a generation of the working class radicalized by new international revolutionary opportunities, resulting from the crisis of imperialism. The cadres of the Fourth International are on trial: in these struggles we must develop Marxism, defeat revisionism and demonstrate in practice in each national section the capacity for leadership of the Trotskyist parties as the only answer to the capitalist class and its bureaucratic servants. 

In each country, therefore, the starting point must be the construction of revolutionary Trotskyist parties based on a Marxist analysis of the present international class struggle. The national tasks of the sections can only be carried out as part of the construction of the Fourth International. In this way they will contribute to the enrichment of Marxist theory and the strength of the International. 

a) Imperialism is in a deepening crisis. The development of the productive forces during and since World War Two, particularly the production of nuclear weapons and the introduction of automation, strains to breaking point the conflict between the productive forces and capitalist property relations. The struggles produced by this contradiction radicalize the working class youth. The parties of the Fourth International will be built through these struggles. 

b) The realization by the imperialists of the threat to their world position, and their determination to uphold their domination no matter what the cost in human life, have been shown time and time again. The latest moves by the US government in Vietnam and Latin America, with the full support of the British Labour Government, underline still more the danger which imperialism represents for mankind: In Vietnam the US imperialists are developing a new strategy for dealing with the colonial revolution and with the USSR and China. It is no longer a question of 'peaceful co-existence', but of a Pax Americana maintained with destructive weapons which can blast out every living creature from large areas. These are not nuclear weapons which are now only in the background. They are weapons for use, they are bound up with the military requirements of imperialism at the present stage, in which it can only maintain itself by violence and terror. 'War is the continuation of politics by other means'  the politics of imperialism have no appeal to the masses but have to be imposed, not on states so much as on peoples. 

The US imperialists are not concerned about their unpopularity. They know that every bomb dropped in Vietnam makes it more difficult for the agents in the colonial countries to defend their policies, but they obviously do not care about this. They show contempt for the national bourgeoisie and intend to keep them in line by demonstrating that they possess overwhelming military force. 

It is not a case in Vietnam of defending US investments, or even only of defending imperialism in South East Asia. It is rather the need for a testing ground and demonstration of US striking power to impress Africa and Latin America and the bureaucracies of Russia, Eastern Europe and China as well. The US is concerned principally with the strategy of counter-revolution adapted to the needs of the present stage. The Russian adherence to 'peaceful co-existence' has contributed to its success. The overthrow of imperialism cannot be the result of a number of struggles in the less developed countries: it is necessary to carry out the struggle internationally, with the task of building parties in the advanced countries and in the countries of planned economy as a prime necessity. 

c) Imperialism is not only an epoch of wars and revolutions. More concretely, its life has been preserved through these wars and revolutions because the working class has not resolved its crisis of leadership. Since 1953, the Stalinist bureaucracy, severely shaken by the working class upsurge in its own camp, has entered into closer collaboration with imperialism. But this reflects above all the deepening of their own crisis. The construction of revolutionary parties of the Fourth International in Eastern Europe, Russia and China, with the programme of political revolution as the basic requirement of the workers in these countries, is a primary task of the Fourth International. Whereas in the late 1930s defence of the Soviet Union implied primary emphasis on support for its military defence, against imperialism, it is now necessary to stress the necessity of building revolutionary parties in these countries as the only answer to the capitulationist policies of the bureaucracy, which now directly endanger the basic conquests of October as well as holding back the struggle of the international working class, upon which the future of these conquests depends. 

d) Revisionism, which separates into distinct sectors the revolution in the advanced countries, the 'colonial revolution', and the political revolution in the workers' states, is a most important cover for capitalist domination of the workers' movement and for obstructing the construction of revolutionary parties. This revisionism is expressed particularly in the theory and practice of the self-styled Unified Secretariat of the Fourth International, which was formed without discussion of theoretical and political questions. The next phase in the building of the Fourth International must on the contrary be accompanied by a most serious theoretical discussion in all sections of the policies and theory of the movement, past and present. 

Many workers all over the world, particularly the youth, are in battle against the bureaucratic leaderships who want to confine them to narrow and sectional struggles. The Fourth International and its sections must be able to lead these struggles, explaining the class role of the bureaucratic leaderships and bringing forward the essence of these struggles - the perspective of world socialist revolution. 

The intervention in the class struggle is not separate from the theoretical discussion upon which we have insisted. There is no development of Marxist theory except insofar as revolutionary parties fight in practice to penetrate living reality with that theory, enriching it in the course of the struggle, to negate the revisionism which has destroyed the International originally founded by Trotsky. It is not enough to make formal theoretical corrections on the one hand and to carry out intensive activity in the class struggle on the other. Such a procedure might give the appearance of limited success, but only when Marxists see themselves and their consciousness as part of the living class struggle, developing with it and transforming its quantitative ebbs and flows into an enriched theory from which to develop the programme of the International, is the unity of theory and practice actually realized. Only in this way will the cadres of the sections of the International be trained. Their internationalism will be worthy of the struggles of the international working class, because it develops as a living part, the conscious and most vital component, of these struggles. The International Committee has been built in the course of the struggle against Pabloite revisionism, and as such has successfully fought for the continuity of the Fourth International. During the last 25 years its founding programme has expressed correctly the strategy of the international socialist revolution. It has no less importance for the struggle for the proletarian revolution than had the Communist Manifesto for the Marxist method and the fundamental aims of communists. In its appeal for the reconstruction of the Fourth International, the IC must show clearly the indissoluble link between this reconstruction and the building of revolutionary parties in every country, as the path to the victory of the socialist revolution.