Speech from Madrid by Paula Medrano, leader of the Spanish State Workers' Democracy and the FLTI
"Why were the Trotskyists so persecuted?
Because they were the ones who fiercely fought to defeat the Stalinist bureaucracy that expropriated the struggle of the USSR proletariat. They knew that defeating this scum that usurped the workers' state was part of the fight for world revolution.
Because they were the ones who were fighting to set up a new International so that the world working class could recover the proletarian internationalism that Stalin liquidated.
Because they argued that if power was not taken, the conquests of the working class could not last."
Good afternoon. I have a difficult task. It is not easy to talk about how the Fourth was founded; about the enormous struggle that the Trotskyists waged in the 1930s and about what happened after the assassination of Leon Trotsky.
The Fourth International was founded in 1938 and was a synthesis of the historical experience and the continuity of scientific socialism of two generations: one that in 1902 in Russian Marxism, and since 1905 in German Marxism, stood up to face the betrayal of reformism in the World War I, which led to the slaughter of the world proletariat; and the other, the generation that survived that combat and confronted Stalinism.
Today we can see, in the tributes being paid to Trotsky all over the world, that everyone speaks of "Leon Trotsky and the Fourth International" as something romantic. They even present him as one more fighter for socialism. The discourses of the different currents of the renegades of Trotskyism that one could see in these days are full of clichés. But the reality was different. The fight to found the Fourth International was not a bed of roses. It was riddled with stabs from the back of Stalinism, from the Moscow Trials, where they murdered the best of the Bolshevik fighters, where they sent thousands of them to concentration camps.
As comrade Martín said, when the Fourth International was founded in September 1938, just a few months before, in February, Leon Trotsky's son, Leon Sedov -who was the one who organized the Left Opposition from exile-, was assassinated on Stalin's orders.
Now... when you start to see, youwonder, why so much fury? Why so much persecution of the Trotskyist movement? Why were we persecuted all over the world? Because, for those who do not know, Trotsky, for a long time, did not have a visa. He was exiled around the world, until he was able to get one in Mexico.
Why did they persecute us so much? Because the Trotskyists fought to overthrow the Stalinist bureaucracy. Because they were the ones who denounced that Stalinism was expropriating the struggle of the proletariat of the USSR. Because the Trotskyists knew that removing the Stalinist bureaucracy from the Workers State was part of the struggle for world revolution.
We were persecuted because we were the ones fighting to set up a new International, and to recover that proletarian internationalism which existed before Stalinism liquidated the Third International. Anyone will remember that in order to conquer the 8 hours, world strikes were carried out. That proletarian internationalism was the one that liquidated Stalinism, and for which Trotskyism left blood, sweat and tears to put it back on its feet.
But something important, why were we so persecuted, and why did imperialism have the Trotskyists, and Leon Trotsky in particular, in its sights? Because we were the only ones who argued that no conquest could be maintained if the working class did not take power. And at that moment, the key of the Stalinists and reformists was to take away from the working class its struggle towards the seizure of power.
We're going to go a little further back. From the mid/late 20's. Stalinism emerged from the decomposition due to the isolation of the Workers' State, and what it did was to carry to the end what social democracy had not been able to achieve at the beginning of the 20th century, which was to liquidate the revolutionary internationalist fraction of the world proletariat. That is what Stalinism did with the assassination of Trotsky and the persecution of all Trotskyists.
Trotsky and all the Bolshevik old guard suffered the same as the masses and the German and European proletariat who could not seize power. They suffered the same conditions of resistance and suffering as the masses of the USSR, who had already exhausted their energies after having been fighting for 4 years in a huge battle against 14 imperialist armies. Those conditions were the ones that led to the emergence of a cynical counter-revolutionary bureaucracy, which led the Workers' State, OUR Workers' State, to its complete degeneration.
From there on, Trotsky and the Trotskyists, from within the USSR, fought tooth and nail to recover the Third International. They made the Left Opposition, and were, as always, persecuted by Stalinism.
Leon Trotsky and the Trotskyists aimed to put back on their feet a new Kienthal and Zimmerwald, the same one who in 1914 stood up and faced the betrayal of the Social Democracy that voted for war credits in World War I, but now they wanted to do so to prepare the struggle for the Seizure of Power in World War II, after it and in the whole subsequent historical period. That is why they wanted to stand up and fight to found the Fourth International.
80 years after Trotsky was executed, what we want to denounce today is the falsehood and the imposture of the renegades of Trotskyism about the revolutionary positions and the combat that Trotsky and the Trotskyists gave. Because this is not about clichés. This is not about romance. It is about the Program and how we do so that the working class seizes power.
So, to pay homage to Trotsky and the Trotskyists is to take into our hands the lessons that Trotskyism left in its struggle against Stalinism and fight for the proletariat to also take them..
We have seen thousands of examples from the whole left and the renegades of Trotskyism in particular of calling to vote for Evo Morales in Bolivia, of asking for the millions of votes that Chávez needed, of handing over the Transitional Program to Chávez... The problem these people have is that, the slogan, the fundamental principle of Trotsky and the Trotskyists who fought to found the Fourth was to fight against all class collaboration. One of the greatest lessons of the Fourth, and which can be seen in the Transition Program, is the struggle against the Popular Front, whether in France or Spain.
Comrades, in Spain Stalinism said -and later we will see that today the renegades of Trotskyism propose the same thing- that to win the war against Franco it was necessary to ask for arms from the "democratic imperialisms". Doesn't that sound familiar? Because if we look at the LIT-CI statement when the Syrian revolution began, they say the same thing.
On the other hand, the Trotskyists in the 30's proposed that, to win the war against Franco, it was necessary to expropriate the bourgeoisie and take power. We proposed the same thing for Syria, and said that the most powerful missile that the Syrian working class had was that of expropriation.
Notice that now everyone is talking about "fascism" with a lightness that makes your hair stand on end. But in the 1930s, Trotskyism knew that the fate of the world working class was at stake in the struggle of the Spanish working class. It put all its forces and organized militias from all over the world to fight against fascism; TO COMBAT, comrades, not "to discuss", as the left is proposing today.
What the Trotskyists proposed in the 30's is nothing different from what we have proposed in relation to Syria, for example, when we said that all the international workers' organizations had to organize brigades to fight against the fascist Al Assad and his allies.
But look: Stalinism, which was the one that threw him over the edge and subjected the working class of the Spanish state to the Popular Front, the one that murdered not only the Trotskyists but also the anarchists, is the same one that the renegades of Trotskyism are paying homage today. 80 years later! Makes you think, right?
The Trotskyists did not only fight against this policy of the Popular Front. They also fought against Stalin's policy that led the Communist Party to enter as the "left wing" of the Koumintang in China. The Koumintang was the bourgeois nationalist movement. Its leader, Chiang Kai Shek, was invited as "honorary president" to the congresses of the Stalinist Third International.
Let us imagine if we make an international congress and we invite Evo Morales, Maduro... Reformism did not invite them to its congresses, but it called to vote them always. Now, that same Chaing Kai Shek returned to China, after having been in the congress of the Third International, and massacred a million communists and crushed the insurrection of Canton in 1927. This is how the bourgeoisie acts with the working class. This is what happens when the working class is subjected to a bourgeois nationalist movement.
Another important struggle and lesson left by the program of Trotskyism and the Fourth International was the fight against centrism, which, at every step, tried to abort the left turn of broad layers of the working class. It was the fight against the POUM, for example, here in the Spanish State; the French turn in France; and a fight against the Single Fronts from above of Stalinism and Social Democracy that were strangling the road to the General Strike in England at the end of the 1920's; and of course, as I said before, against Stalinism in Germany, which, with its "Third period" policy, sold the proletariat out, divided and defeated before fascism. It was Stalinism that allowed the emergence of fascism in Germany for having sold out, divided and defeated the proletariat. That Stalinism is what the renegades of Trotskyism pay homage to today.
The Fourth International was founded as a continuity of Bolshevism facing the black night of Stalinism, fascism, the servility of the treacherous leaderships to the "democratic" imperialisms, which led to the tragedies of the defeats of the Spanish and French revolutions, and which subordinated the American and English working class to the imperialist butchers Roosevelt and Churchill.
We pay tribute, also today, not only to Leon Trotsky, but also to the Russian section of the Fourth International founded by Leon Trotsky, which faced the ignominies of Stalinism and Soviet bureaucracy from the prisons. The Russian section was centralized from the West by the International Secretariat of the Fourth International, headed by Trotsky together with Cannon of the American SWP, Van Heijenoort, RudolphKlement -the comrade who appeared floating on the Seine the day before the Congress of the foundation of the Fourth International. All of them, and many more, constituted an internationalist General Staff that gave continuity to the legacy of the Third International.
What we want to denounce from the FLTI, and we reaffirm today, 80 years later, is that the assassination of Trotsky was a decisive milestone in finishing off the liquidation of a whole generation of socialist and internationalist revolutionaries who did not kneel before the bourgeoisie; who said "water and fire do not get together", as our comrade Liebknecht said; and who relentlessly confronted the traitors of the trade unions and workers' organizations.
The assassination of Trotsky was a decisive blow, but it was not only the hand of Stalinism. This was monitored by world imperialism, which more than anyone else was interested in the fact that at the end of the war there was not a revolutionary International to tell the working class that the only way out was to take power.
That blow that the assassination of Leon Trotsky meant could be decisive because the Secretariat of the Fourth International capitulated to the terror of Stalinism and dissolved the international center. Trotsky's greatest work, the Fourth International, was not destroyed only by the blow of Stalinism, but because the leaders of that international center, on Trotsky's death, deserted their duties. That fascist blow dug deep and each one of those leaders returned to their own country and, unfortunately, when the war ended, the Fourth International was not, as before, a compact force, but each one was subjected to its own bourgeoisie in each country.
Many say that this is due to the weakness of the leadership of Cannon, of Heijenoort... But this is to justify the betrayal. They gave in to the terror of fascism and deserted from the Fourth. Not only did they leave the various sections of the Fourth International alone and subject to thousands of pressures, but -and what was more criminal- they left the Soviet section of the USSR, the most important section of the Fourth International at that time, alone.
Recently, documents from that Soviet section of the Fourth International were found; documents from those comrades who were part of Lenin and Trotsky's Party, but were resisting from the prisons. More than 130 Bolsheviks who were in the Ural prison, who were there from 1930 to 1933. Those comrades fought from prison for proletarian internationalism. They saw and posed the obligations of the Soviet workers to the German working class, because they saw that they would be crushed by Hitler. They asserted that in order for the USSR not to be crushed, the German working class had to take power; one of the fundamental lessons with which the Fourth International was founded. They called on the workers and soldiers of the Red Army to rise up against Stalin, to regroup their forces and to reach the gates of Germany so that the German working class would know that they were counting on the forces of the Soviet workers to crush Hitler.
How different would history have been if the Fourth International had existed and had proposed that policy in relation to Syria! Today the comrades in Lebanon would not be fighting alone, nor separated from the Iranian working class, and the Palestinian flag would surely be flying over the entire Palestinian territory.
That is why today we want to pay tribute to these comrades together with Trotsky. Unfortunately, if I remember correctly, a year ago, when these writings appeared - that showed the sacrifice of these comrades who wrote on small pieces of paper and small notebooks and hid them inside the prison - at the same moment the renegades of Trotskyism were gathered in Havana, on their knees and paying homage to the "nouveau riche" of the Cuban Communist Party. Today, a year later, they are all in Brazil with Stalinism.
But let us be clear, comrades. They are where they have to be and where they belong. What they do not have to do is speak in the name of Trotskyism anymore. And our task is that they do not continue to be a stone in the road or a dagger in the back for the world working class.
That is why we want to pay tribute to those comrades in the Ural prison, who alone and in the worst conditions, like Trotsky, remained honest and internationalist revolutionaries.
That is all, comrades.
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Program and resolutions in the founding Congress of the IV International in 1938, published by the American SWP
The left opposition in the USSR in Siberian exile in 1928. Their posters were against bureaucracy, against rich peasants and for revolutionary worker democracy
Leon Trotsky with Leon Sedov
James Cannon and Felix Morrow
Meeting of the Left Opposition in Moscow, 1927
The renegade of Trotskyism saluting Chávez
Conference of Teheran in 1943 with Stalin and “democratic imperialists” represented by Churchill and Roosevelt
International Brigades in Spain in the ‘30s
US president Obama and Raúl Castro
Chiang Kai Shek with Mao Tse Tung and the US Ambassador
Political isolator of Verkhneuralsk, USSR
Rudolph Klement
Scripts written by the left oppositon,
found in USSR polical isolators
Trotsky in the Red Army
Lenin and Trotsky
Second Congress of the 3rd International
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