In defense of Marxism
…But let us suppose that Hitler turns his weapons against the east and invades territories occupied by the Red Army (…)
As, with the weapons on their hands, Bolshevik-Leninist hit Hitler, they will, at the same time, hold a revolutionary propaganda against Stalin, preparing his overthrowing for the next and, maybe, close time.
This kind of “defense of the USSR” will naturally differ, as heaven does from earth, from the official defense which is now being conducted under the slogan: ”For the Fatherland! For Stalin!” Our defense of the USSR is carried on under the slogan: ”For Socialism! For the World Revolution! Against Stalin!” I
Leon Trotsky
Below we present the prologue Carlos Munzer`s foreword
to the edition of In Defense of the Marxism, published by the Socialist Publishing House Rudolph Klement
Prologue
The actuality of the combat against revisionism in Marxism
“The Fourth International does not want and does not invent panaceas. Its based completely on Marxism as the only revolutionary doctrine that enables one to understand reality, unearth the cause behind the defeats and prepares consciously for victory. The Fourth International continues the tradition of Bolshevism which showed the proletariat for the first time how to conquer power. The Fourth International sweeps away the quacks, charlatans and unsolicited teachers of morals. In a society based upon exploitation, the highest moral is that of the social revolution.”
Trotsky, León. The Transitional Program, 1938
The Socialist Publishing House Rudolph Klement presents here In Defense of Marxism. It is a collection of letters and writings of Leon Trotsky produced between 1939 and 1940. These texts account for a hard fractional struggle within the Fourth International, against a fraction whose main leaders were Burnham, Shachtman and Abern, members of the North American SWP (Socialist Workers Party). This was one of the most important sections of the Fourth International, the North American one, with insertion in the American working class.
This work that we present here to the reader consists of a decisive struggle against revisionism in Marxism, one of the many that Leon Trotsky gave throughout his life.
We edited this volume today, in 2017, when it is celebrated the 100th Anniversary of the Russian revolution. This work, which concentrates Trotskyists’ position before the degeneration of the first workers' state in history, is the best homage we can give to this revolution, which was expropriated and dishonoured by the Stalinist bureaucracy, that excretion of the workers' state.
Trotskyists fought against this bureaucracy by developing a struggle to defeat it with the political revolution, in order to restore the USSR as the bastion of the world revolution. Political revolution which, as such, was part of a single international socialist revolution.
We present this work then as a tribute to the Russian revolution and to the combat given by the Trotskyists in the 30s to defend their conquests, fighting against the Stalinist bureaucracy that constantly destroyed them.
By the end of the 20th century, in 1989, the Stalinist bureaucracy consummated capitalist restoration. It could do so after defeating and betraying different revolutionary waves that the world proletariat gave in the West. The bureaucracy also fled horrified from the great combats of the proletariat of the workers' states of Eastern Europe against the privileges it had, its parasitism and its regime of terror -as happened in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and in the USSR itself.
The bureaucracy, delivering the workers' states to imperialism, became a new possessing class within the USSR and the rest of the workers' states conquered in the WWII postwar period.
In this way the prognosis of the Fourth International came true: whether a political revolution succeeded defeating the bureaucracy, or the latter, as an agent of imperialism within the workers' state, would liquidate the conquests of the revolution and became a new bourgeoisie.
For the Bolsheviks of the Third International, the dictatorship of the proletariat meant a short period of time; it was a transition towards the conquest of socialism as a victory of the international socialist revolution.
For Marxism, the only possibility of conquering socialism, that is to say, a system where "everyone is granted each one according to what he/she produces", is taking power in the capitalist countries with the highest development of productive forces. Hence, the Bolsheviks proposed that they would have changed the Russian revolution for the victory of the German revolution and they devoted all their efforts to the foundation of the Third International.
They stated that Russia could seize power first, but it would be a million times harder to reach socialism -and its future was threatened- if the revolution did not win in Europe.
Revolutionary Marxism defined the dictatorship of the proletariat as the regime where the interests of the working class and its allies, the impoverished sectors of the middle classes, imposed over the interests of the capitalists.
But this short period of time which revolutionary Marxism had predicted for the dictatorship of the proletariat was not so in fact. The European revolution did not triumph, particularly in Germany. The workers' state was isolated. It did not achieve such a productivity of labor to throw a surplus of production capable of satisfying all the needs of the masses of the workers' state. Such goal would be impossible to achieve in a single country; let alone in a backward capitalist country as Russia was when workers' revolution triumphed. A powerful bureaucracy emerged, becoming increasingly an agent of the world bourgeoisie within that state.
The survival of the USSR was not due to the vigor of an isolated workers' state, with its productive forces encapsulated in a single country and they led to the worst crisis surrounded by a world economy controlled by imperialism. If the USSR and its conquests resisted, it was not due to the Stalinist bureaucracy that "defending the workers' state" in its own way, that is, defending its interests as a bureaucratic caste, plunged it day by day, betraying the world revolution. The USSR, guarded by the bureaucracy, the agent of imperialism within, was able to maintain the achievements of the October revolution thanks to the great combats of the Soviet and the world proletariat.
Stalinism could not surrender –although they tried a thousand times- before Hitler's fascism, or before the imperialist "democratic front" of Churchill and Roosevelt in the World War II (democratic front of which he was a vile servant). The Soviet proletariat did not let them. But Soviet proletariat did not do this because they defended Stalin's clique, which showed all its cowardice before and during the war in the military clashes with the German army. The Soviet proletariat was defending their conquers: nationalized property, the conditions of life they had conquered. That is why there were 20 million dead men in the battlefield.
This historic and heroic experience of the international and Soviet proletariat during the war gave proved that Trotsky was right in his struggle against the petty-bourgeois liquidationist current of the SWP, who no longer saw any conquest in the USSR in the 1930s.
The Soviet proletariat, on the contrary, did see conquests to defend, and in doing so during World War II it gave the European proletariat the possibility of seizing power throughout Europe, arriving at the very gates of Berlin. If it failed, it was because the treacherous betrayal of Stalinism, which disarmed the masses of Italy, Greece, and France, and gave power to the bourgeoisie. Stalinism -together with imperialism- erected a wall in Berlin to prevent the whole Germany from falling into the hands of the working class, and to agree with imperialism being the one who controlled the masses from there to the Russian steppes. Thanks to Stalinism, world capitalist system survived after the World War II.
Seen since the 21st century, what happened in 1989 becomes clearer. At that moment the Soviet proletariat did not fight against capitalist restoration, since it no longer had conquests to defend. The bureaucracy had sold these conquests up, along with the revolutions of the West. It had led the workers' states to the worst crises of indebtedness, sub-production and under-consumption. Meanwhile, other sectors of Stalinism, such as in China, anticipated the catastrophe and delivered full areas and large sections of their working class to be overexploited in the factories-jail of transnational corporations.
The dictatorship of the proletariat in the USSR, under the regime of the Stalinist bureaucracy, then, was extended in time. What allowed this "anomaly" was also the fact that at the end of World War II, the proletariat of the West had imperialism at gun point in the central countries. This prevented imperialism from launching a determined counter-offensive against the USSR and crushing the revolutionary triumphs developed in the second half of the twentieth century, as in China, Korea, and Vietnam.
If the Soviet bureaucracy could not sell the workers' states out in the immediate postwar period, it was because the working class of the Pacific in China and Korea beat Japanese imperialism and then the United States. And then they did the same in Cuba and Vietnam.
In the ‘68/’74 period a widespread rise in the world labor movement combined revolutionary struggles in the imperialist countries, in the semi-colonial world, and within the workers` states themselves, which threatened the power of bureaucracy and imperialism on the planet.
The betrayals to this revolutionary rise of the masses are the ones that later created the conditions for a true counteroffensive of imperialism, and for the bureaucracy to end up becoming a direct agent of imperialism and surrendering the workers' states.
The real anomaly was that Marxism did not foresee that the rise of the world labor movement was so persistent, effective, heroic and indomitable. It gave a thousand and one opportunities to revolutionary Marxism in the 20th century to prevent the catastrophe that meant the fall of the USSR in 1989, but the masses were removed from the scene internationally.
At the same time it confirmed that without revolutionary leadership victory cannot be achieved. And even if partial conquests were reached -including seizing power in isolated countries– they are lost without revolutionary leadership.
***
We present this work, which tells of the last great theoretical, strategic and programmatic struggle given by Trotsky in the Fourth International against a small fraction of American SWP that tried to destroy Marxism completely. The Russian question had been a key acid test. Around it the trenches of reform and revolution were defined throughout the twentieth century.
This discussion and the struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat is part of a fierce debate between Marxism and revisionism. This debate takes place in the 21st Century among those who renounced the dictatorship of the proletariat and struggle to leave no trace of these conquests in the consciousness of the proletariat; and us who say and state that we must try again. Without the victory of new socialist revolutions, the whole proletariat and human civilization is destined to barbarism; that is to say, fascism and new wars.
In this theoretical battle against a petty bourgeois current within the American SWP, which denied the struggle for the defense of the conquests of the October Revolution, Trotskyism develops its theory of permanent revolution completely. This theory was fully and programmatically expressed in the Transitional Program and its chapter about the struggle for political revolution in the workers' states; as well as in the "Manifesto of the Fourth International on Imperialist War and the Proletarian World Revolution". With this manifesto Trotskyism prepared the world party of the socialist revolution for the War, where the very subsistence of the USSR was being questioned. In that war it was defined not only which imperialist power remained as the dominant one of the planet, but also which of them would control the USSR.
What questioned the survival of the conquest, i.e. the USSR, was the need for imperialism to wrest it, and the betrayal of the bureaucracy of the world proletariat, as in the Spanish Civil War, in France, in the struggle against fascism in Germany, etc.
In the "Manifesto of the Fourth International on Imperialist War and the Proletarian World Revolution" Trotsky insists on the struggle for the defense of the conquests of the workers' state as a starting point for any step forward by the international proletariat. There he states:
“To be sure, the nationalization of the means of production in one country, and a backward one at that, still does not insure the building of socialism. But it is capable of furthering the primary prerequisite of socialism, namely, the planned development of the productive forces. To turn one’s back on the nationalization of the means of production on the ground that in and of itself it does not create the well being of the masses is tantamount to sentencing a granite foundation to destruction on the ground that it is impossible to live without walls and a roof. The class conscious worker knows that a successful struggle for complete emancipation is unthinkable without the defense of conquests already gained, however modest these may be. All the more obligatory therefore is the defense of so colossal a conquest as planned economy against the restoration of capitalist relations. Those who cannot defend old positions will never conquer new ones.” (Page 334 in this edition)
***
The work In Defense of Marxism and the polemic against a fraction of the American SWP that denied the conquests of the workers' state was, perhaps, the last great battle of Trotsky in life. Meanwhile the Fourth International was preparing to enter to fight for the socialist revolution in World War II, as it was proven by the "Manifesto of the Fourth International on the Imperialist War and the Proletarian World Revolution" presented in this edition.
This Manifesto and the fight against the petty-bourgeois fraction of the American SWP are two simultaneous elaborations, written before Ramon Mercader (Stalin's assassin) ended the life of the founder of the Fourth International.
These works are essential for the new generations of revolutionaries in the 21st Century. After selling out the conquest of the workers' states openly to the capitalist system in 1989, Stalinism survived as trade union bureaucracies, agents of the imperialist bourgeoisies. Or they became lackeys of the national bourgeoisie, those that they supported by left to strangle the revolutionary processes of the colonial and semicolonial world.
But we also consider these elaborations decisive since the renegades of Trotskyism today, as they did yesterday during Yalta period, destroyed completely this principled battle of the Fourth International. They did so in the post World War II period by submitting and openly capitulating to Stalinism, or denying any struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat and the struggle for socialist revolution, based on the failure and defeats provoked by the betrayal of the Stalinist treacherous leadership.
They have legitimized Stalinism once again and gave it new life. They are ultimately those who "resurrected Lazarus" after he delivered the workers' states in '89.
***
The importance of these two works we published is that they answer as if they were written today to a new school of counterfeiters of Marxism. In the 21st Century, they argue that the socialist revolution in the former USSR no longer exists as such from 1933 and that neither in China, nor in Cuba, nor in Vietnam existed any victory of the socialist revolution. They label these revolutions as "anticapitalist", a denomination with which it is not known to which class and sector of class they correspond.
Trotsky already destroys this position which does not define historical processes and the type of State by its class character. An answer to Burnham and Carter of the year 1937 entitled "A state neither worker nor bourgeois?" (P. 288), can be found on this book.
The today revisionists give life to a new Burnhamist and Shachtmanist current. They have tried to make the proletariat believe that it never took the sky by storm; that the expropriation of the capitalists, of imperialism, of their banks, of all their enterprises, lands, and even their kiosks, were not victories of socialist revolutions against the capitalists and their states. Capitalists’ states that they destroyed and demolished in a million pieces, despite and against the treacherous leaders that wanted to prevent it at all costs.
The capitalists who lived these revolutions in their own flesh are still crying in Miami or in Taiwan or South Korea for their properties that were expropriated... even if capitalism and international financial capital have recovered them with the selling out of the workers' states by the bureaucracy.
We are facing currents that, like Burnham and Shachtman in the ‘30s, are enemies of the defense of the conquests obtained with the seizure of power by the working class. Of course they think that the losses of the workers' states are not serious defeats, since there was nothing left to defend.
Other currents say that despite all the victories we have lost, we are witnessing wonderful victories -as the International Workers' League (LIT-CI) says– because the Stalinist bureaucracy fell. These currents are the other side of the same coin of revisionism. It is that the Stalinist bureaucracy did not fall... it became a new bourgeoisie and is celebrating in Monaco, in the great joint ventures it has with imperialism in China, Russia and La Habana.
For the new today Burnhmanists and Shachtmanists, it is the same liberated Cuba, its agrarian reform and its rupture with the imperialism, than the Cuba of Batista. They think China occupied and plundered by Japan and England, or as today sold out as a sweatshop to imperialism is the same than the China which came out of cannibalism and famine expropriating to capitalism at the end of World War II.
And this is said by the same ones who until '89 claimed that the Castros, the Titus, the Maos as "the greatest revolutionary leaders on the planet since Lenin's." This is what today's enemies of the struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat state.
Yesterday, when the Berlin Wall fell, they were all hanging on the skirts of Stalinism, and today they say "it wasn´t me".
Like Burhnam and Shachtman, they seek to cling to the norm of what the dictatorship of the proletariat is. To justify their opportunism, they end up leaving no trace of the Marxist dialectic. Suddenly they become "pure" and "orthodox" people...
In 1937, in the article "A state neither worker nor bourgeois?", included in this book, Trotsky defined this issue perfectly debating against Burnham and Carter, giving a blow in the nose to all who deny yesterday's dictatorship of proletariat so that they never stand again.
"Let's define a union," said Trotsky. The norm is that a union is a workers' organization, independent of the state and employers, destined to defend the value of the labor force as a commodity against the capitalists and their states, based on the will and control by the workers are part of this organization. If we compare this normative definition to actual reality, it would seem that we are obliged to affirm that there is no single union in the world.
Reformism denies that workers’ states existed in the postwar revolutions, stating that they did not happen according to the norm. All the workers’ conquests - such as unions, workers' states, etc. - are subjected to hostile forces. This is precisely the program of the revolutionaries in the trade unions, in the workers’ states and in every organization of struggle: conquering the norm, with the struggle against the treacherous directions that at every step seek to deform and destroy the workers' conquests.
They refuse to fight these hostile forces, that is, to defeat them with the political revolution ... either in the workers' states or in the trade unions. This is how they end up, while posing as purists, living together and holding all the trade union bureaucracies on the planet.
Today these Burnhamist-Shachtmanist currents have a double original sin. They appear after the conquest of the workers' state was delivered in '89. They are late Shachtmanist currents, that is, vulgar Democrat, not even Socialist.
Ultimately, they say that we must never conquer the dictatorship of the proletariat. They say that there was never any ... except one that could have lasted a few years. They say that the future of the struggle of the proletariat was a great misunderstanding. They blame the working class for all catastrophes, not their own betrayals.
What they want is that no traces remain in the consciousness of the workers that, in order to solve even the smallest of their demands, they have opened - and still do - hundreds of revolutionary processes that attacked the world capitalist system and, in a few of them - and as an exception - forced their leaderships to have to go where they never wanted to go.
What would we say about a socialist who, faced with the bosses' attack on a union, does not defend it because he does not recognize him as such because he is run by a rotten trade union bureaucracy? We would not say that he is an "anti-bureaucratic" fighter, but a vulgar charlatan on account of the bosses. Because if the bosses attack a union, including the bureaucracy, it is to destroy the workers' conquest, their organization. We would defend the union unconditionally, fighting to defeat at every step the bureaucracy, which is the one that really betrays it.
We call that "socialist" a traitor. The same as yesterday’s Shachtmanists and those who today deny that the conquest of that union existed and that we have to re-found it and put it on its feet to stop the bosses, but without bureaucrats or labour aristocrats who betray the struggle of the workers.
In his posthumous work In Defense of Marxism, Trotsky unmasks so much verbosity and purist talk of true anti-socialist charlatans.
They, who today continue the work of Stalinism of the twentieth century, as the "New Left" does, the "anti-capitalist" of word and servants of the bourgeois regimes in fact, today argue that we must fight for a "real democracy" and "generous." They follow the rule of their ex-Stalinist chiefs, who like Castroism betray the Cuban workers’ state to the shout of "Socialism no longer works, not even in Cuba." They are those who decorate on the left the delivery of socialism and the proletarian revolution.
They today argue that there were no socialist revolutions in the postwar period. They insist on it. They deny the power of the international proletariat, of the Chinese, Cuban, Vietnamese, and Korean working class ... which is very powerful because it fought along with the American and European working class, which refused and prevented any army from being formed to crush the workers' states.
What we truly experienced in the post-war era were enormous revolutionary processes that expropriated the capitalists, sustained in the struggle of the international working class, and managed to deal with hard defeats and to open fissures in the regime of imperialist rule at the end of World War II. This regime of domination was supported by Stalinism, which guaranteed to imperialism that there was no new victorious socialist revolution on the planet. This counterrevolutionary work effectively carried it out in hundreds of revolutions in the imperialist countries and in the entire planet. But it could not do it in Eastern Europe, in China, or in Cuba or in Vietnam, even though it tried desperately.
The revolutionaries of the twenty-first century who do not defend these conquests will not settle up with the leaderships that betrayed those revolutions. On the contrary, they are willing to associate with them, as they are today.
What we saw then in the post-war era were huge tactical but partial revolutionary triumphs. They were on the periphery of world economy and politics. They were directed and capitalized by counterrevolutionary directions such as Stalinism. And it used all the prestige and authority conquered by the working class for those victories to abort, strangle and defeat hundreds of revolutions in the central capitalist countries and also in the semi-colonial world.
The norm that states that the proletarian revolution could not succeed without revolutionary direction occurred in all the world and in almost all the countries, where the masses entered revolutionary offensives from the post-war period to our days.
There were exceptions, which had already been contemplated in the revolutionary program under conditions of crisis, crack and wars. That is, conditions in which the masses forced the counterrevolutionary leadership to have to reach where they had never wanted to.
But these exceptions, as we have seen, only confirmed the norm. These revolutions, due to crisis of direction, did not spread the world revolution and ended up being betrayed by the Stalinist bureaucracy that turned into a new ruling class. And that is the rule that was inexorably fulfilled.
The Fourth International had already prepared their cadres and their ranks to enter combat in the process opened by the World War II in the twentieth century.
In the article "The USSR in War", included in this book, Trotsky states: "But just imagine Hitler points his guns against the East and invades the territories occupied by the Red Army. (...) While the Bolsheviks-Leninists strike Hitler, they must at the same time make revolutionary propaganda against Stalin, preparing his overthrow for the next and, perhaps, very near stage.
This type of 'defence of the USSR' will naturally differ enormously from the official defence that is now carried out under the motto: “For the Homeland! By Stalin!”. Our defence of the USSR is raised under the motto: 'For Socialism! For the World Revolution! Against Stalin! '". (Page 66)
The theory and program of the Fourth International passed the test of history, while those who spoke on their behalf did not and betrayed their program.
The duty of revolutionaries, today more than ever, is to explain the new generation of workers that the working class, even in the worst conditions, with agents of the enemy, was able to stop the offensives of imperialism a thousand times and even expropriate one third of the planet.
There were conditions to spare to recover those conquests for the world revolution. If this could not be done, it is because the party of the world socialist revolution, the Fourth International, far from preparing these tasks and leading that struggle, passed with its forces and its clean flags to defend Stalinism throughout the period of the second Even post-war, to re-legitimize it after it became a new exploiting class, slave, in the former workers states.
As we have seen, when the workers' states fell in '89, in the West the liquidators of the Fourth International were embracing Stalinism by holding it. They cannot hide it. They were Castroites, Maoists, Titoists ... They refused - as did Pabloism and Mandelism - to defend the heroic political revolutions of East Germany in '53, Polish in '82, Czechoslovakia in '68, Hungarian '56 ... when they left the Soviet section of the Fourth International isolated ... when they said that "they did not want to play the game against imperialism" and all they did was to support their agent: Stalinism, the one in charge of crushing and Control the masses where they took power.
These are the so-called "anti-capitalists" today, mortal enemies of any struggle for proletarian revolution. Even publicly, they removed from their programs the struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat. Others, such as the English SWP or the Socialist Workers' Party (PTS) of Argentina, try out a supposed school of forgery, supposedly converging between the struggle of Trotskyism in the 1930s and Gramsci, the greatest defender - along with Bukharin and Stalin - of the pseudo-theory of "socialism in one country" and declared enemy of the permanent revolution and the struggle for the international socialist revolution. A real fake.
In Yalta, they became Castroites, Maoists, etc. All these Stalinists were already openly transferred to the side of the bourgeoisie. Now, these "Trotskyists" are looking, among the dead Stalinists, for some "progressive" Stalinist who will liquidate the program of Trotskyism so that the new generations of revolutionaries will move as far as possible from the program of the Fourth International.
***
We present the Trotsky’s work in Defense of Marxism and this great battle that he gave against a liquidationist current of Marxism, but within the Fourth International. We also present the "Manifesto of the Fourth International on Imperialist War and the World Proletarian Revolution," which together with the Transitional Program are the most finished programs left by the Fourth International prior to the assassination of Trotsky. These concentrate the entire struggle of Trotskyism, that is, the continuity of Bolshevism since Lenin's death.
We affirm that the theory of the Permanent Revolution and the program of revolutionary Marxism of the twentieth century passed the test of history and the Trotskyists did not. Although they want to silence, keep quiet and keep under seven keys this work, In Defense of Marxism, which is a true declaration of war against the liquidators of Marxism of yesterday and today.
***
In the imperialist epoch, of crisis and final bankruptcy of the world capitalist system, it survives with wars, parasitism and buying and corrupting the upper layers and workers' bureaucracies of the entire planet. We present this work in moments in which Trump assumes the presidency in the USA. As he has said, there is no imperialist power that dominates the planet without winning wars. He threw his bombs back into Afghanistan and Syria and shows his gunships in the Pacific, forcing China to restrain its Korean ally. As Lenin said, war is the most important economic factor of our time.
The Fourth International was prepared as a compact body to pass the test of war and postwar. As the "Fourth International Manifesto on the Imperialist War and the World Proletarian Revolution", the revolutionary movement was preparing not for a single revolution, but for a whole period of crisis, wars and revolutions. The tragedy was that upon Trotsky's death, the national parties and the international leaders of the Fourth International deserted the task of maintaining an international staff. Decades of adaptations to Stalinism and other treacherous directions ended in a degeneration of our movement, which was accompanying the surrender of the workers' states.
With the sharpening of the world capitalist crisis opened in 2008 that today has exploded openly in the BRICS; With the imperialist powers disputing a world market in crisis and the new business that opens the semicolonization of China and Russia; With partial counterrevolutionary victories of imperialism against the masses as in Ukraine, Syria, and the entire Middle East; With the masses contained by the treacherous leaderships in Europe; With the revolutions already diverted in Latin America; And while a reactionary moment is opening up in the world situation, the alternative of this work, In Defense of Marxism: socialism or barbarism, is updated more than ever.
Trump has already announced that the expansion of the US domestic market is no more than doubling the war budget and maintaining its armed forces on the planet.
The working class has not given its last battles yet, not even the decisive battles, before an inter-imperialist third world war is put on the agenda. But cruel and hard defeats, such as that of the Syrian revolution, Egypt and the entire Maghreb and Middle East, paves the way for a new war, if the proletarian revolution does not stop it.
However we insist, the last battles of the world working class have not been given yet. The American working class does not leave the streets. The colossi of Latin America: the Brazilian and Mexican proletariat are in an offensive position, as in South Africa. The workers and the exploited Russian people slowly start to stand and look for a way to fight. In spite of enormous betrayals and cruel partial defeats, the European working class still conserves energies to give great battles. Revisionism in Marxism prepares cadres to promote a reformist policy of subjugating the proletariat to the bourgeoisie.
Revolutionary Marxism, fighting revisionism, is preparing to deepen the struggle and fight for the victory of the dictatorship of the proletariat internationally and centrally in the imperialist countries, where they will ultimately define the decisive battles of the world revolution .
The present of the program of Trotskyism really calls attention under the present conditions. It is only with its method, that of historical and dialectical materialism, that new phenomena can be answered, such as the degeneration of the USSR or the emergence of new workers states under conditions of "abnormality".
Revisionism destroys this possibility by destroying the foundations of Marxism. It destroys the possibility of responding from revolutionary Marxism to new processes that arise from the class struggle. It is that they destroy the premise of Marxism in this imperialist age, where the proletarian revolution is an immediate task, and the crisis of direction is the determining factor that defines the historical processes in the class struggle.
The decay and corruption of the leadership of the proletariat were defined by Trotsky and the Fourth International in the Transitional Program as follows: "The objective conditions for the proletarian revolution are not only ripe but have begun to decompose. Without the socialist revolution in a coming historical period, human civilization is under threat of being swept away by a catastrophe. Everything depends on the proletariat, that is, on the first place of its revolutionary vanguard. The historical crisis of humanity is reduced to the historical crisis of revolutionary leadership. "
Revisionism in Marxism is an attempt to misrepresent the theoretical foundations of scientific socialism in order to underpin, under an alleged "socialist" envelope, the decomposition and counterrevolutionary cooptation of the aristocracy and labor bureaucracy, for great capital.
Hence, for today's revolutionary socialism, there is no possibility of combating reformism without an open theoretical and strategic struggle against revisionism. Therefore, without doubt, In defense of Marxism is a fundamental and unavoidable book for every young worker and revolutionary, a real school of struggle against revisionism, a school of dialectics and scientific socialism, a great lesson of fractional struggle.
"In 1940: a discussion ..." the reader will find a brief description and guide of the content of this fundamental work of the last great battle of Comrade Trotsky and the left wing of the Fourth International against a liquidationist fraction of Marxism in its ranks.
On the other hand, we present a paper on the character and definition of World War II preceding the "Manifesto of the Fourth International on imperialist war and world proletarian revolution" by way of introduction. The same is part of a work that will be published soon by Editorial Rudolph Klement on the Fourth International and War.
The differences in the theoretical and programmatic struggle, then expressed in the trenches between exploited and exploiters, in the social forces in conflict in the class struggle. In them live on the one hand the strength of reformism and on the other the forces of revolution.
This contribution then comes with the introductions mentioned to the works presented here.
Carlos Munzer
