The Fourth International -when Leon Trotsky headed it- prepared the vanguard of the international proletariat for intervening with a revolutionary program in the 2WW proper and in the immediate post-war revolutionary period
With the defeats of the Spanish and French revolutions, with the German proletariat smashed under Hitler’s jackboot, the way to war was cleared. In 1938, with the excuse of “preventing Hitler from invading the USSR”, rogue Stalin signed a non-aggression pact to German fascism.
As it was correctly denounced by the Fourth International, Hitler needed the wheat from Ukraine to supply his armies and be able to march over Western Europe in order to grab the whole of Europe, and of course within it, France, as he actually did. And the Wehrmacht had just touched Paris gates when Nazi Germany launched a terrible attack over the USSR leaving a toll of 500,000 workers and peasants dead in the first week alone, while cowardly Stalin kept crying and trembling under his bed in a dacha and the entire Soviet bureaucracy was trying to find him out to ask him desperately to “please” come again and safeguard their interests as he had used to up to then.
As Trotsky said, the non-aggression agreement between Stalin and Hitler amounted to ask politely the fox not to send the hen down its gullet. The 2WW demonstrated to have a dual character, as the fourth International had correctly foreseen. On one hand, it was inter-imperialist to the extent that Germany was obliged to break the siege of the Versailles Treaty, which had been imposed on her by the 1WW victors, and also to the extent that USA was on the verge of inundating the world with her gigantean finance capital to dominate it. But on the other hand, the objective of both imperialist powers (the fascist as the “democratic” one) was simply to take hold of the USSR, by restoring capitalism all over her.
Through its analysis, prognosis and program the Trotskyists were preparing to centralize the forces of the internationalists in front of the second worldwide slaughterhouse into which the entire human civilization was being thrown.
While Hitler was invading the URRS, Stalin sat at the same table with Churchill and Roosevelt to conform the new “democratic” Command of world counterrevolution. Those were the international conditions within which the GPU/KGB interwove and prepared the counterrevolutionary blows on the Trotskyist militants and particularly on comrade Trotsky. The Fourth International had to confront the cowardly policies of Stalinism, now in the war proper.
Trotsky’s murder had that objective: to disperse the ranks of the Fourth International, and to set up that “democratic front” between the Soviet bureaucracy and the “democratic” imperialists, Churchill and Roosevelt, a front that as the war ended with the German defeat granted imperialism and world capitalism as a whole their property. And above all, the objective was that this bloc, predecessor and founder of the present UNO, could grant the restoration of capitalism in the USSR in the aftermath of the 2WW that they had motorized.
But not everything went as they had planned. The war was again the midwife of new revolutions and in spite of all their efforts they couldn’t prevent the expropriation of the bourgeoisie in a third of the planet.
If the Stalinist bureaucracy was not able to give Moscow’s keys to “democratic” imperialism –as Yeltsin and Gorbachov were to do in the ‘80s- and if Churchill and Roosevelt could not reach the URRS at the head of the same German general that had given in to them when Hitler was downthrown in Germany, that is, if the “democratic” imperialist command with McArthur as its chief could not take hold of the USSR, it was due to the heroic resistance of the masses. The USSR and East European proletariats plus that of the West put more than 25 million dead in order to smash fascism, and some millions more to defeat the murderous Japanese and Chiang Kai-shek’s troops in China, and afterwards to make McArthur and his troops flee after the war in Korea in 1952, though the masses were finally contained by the rogue Stalinist-Maoist bureaucrats in the 38 parallel. In the same way, the Stalinist clique contained the march of the USSR and East European masses in the Berliner gates, just for the German imperialists not to be expropriated and so the revolution did not win in that country. The Yalta-Potsdam pact left the Stalinist bureaucracy –from Berlin to Moscow- in the role of controlling the proletarian revolution in the East, while the Stalinist parties were in charge of disarming the Italian, French, Greek, etc., proletariats, preventing the socialist revolution from attaining victory in imperialist Western Europe.
So, paying homage to Trotsky 70 years after his murder, and to the founders of the Fourth International, amounts to settling accounts with decades of revisionism and liquidationism in the interior of our world party in the 2nd Post-war, with all those that blamed Trotsky and the Fourth International for their own flaws and failures, degradation and capitulations, and who transformed our world party in an appendix to Stalinism and social Democracy during the Yalta period.
Nothing was more exact and accurate than the prognosis and the program by the Fourth International with which the world proletariat was prepared in front of war in mid twentieth century. Trotsky himself in a conference of the Fourth International intervened in a decisive way, fixing in its final shape the declaration of that conference, namely, the Manifesto of the War of the Fourth International.
Those are the lessons and the program that today are reneged by all the Trotskyite renegades, who refuse thus to prepare the new proletarian generations for the oncoming wars, revolutions and counterrevolutions that the twenty first century has boiling in its cauldrons in still more acute conditions.
The program of the Fourth International affirmed in the ‘40s something that even today retains its validity, something that confronts openly all the servile leaderships who bend their knees in front of the “democratic complexions” of the murderous imperialists: “No support to the “democratic” imperialists; neither Roosevelt nor Churchill, much less the imperialist French cliques, some of them allied to Hitler and others to Churchill! If the latter win the war with their Anglo-American allies they will massacre the masses of the war in the same way or worse than fascism!”
How correct and just were the program and the legacy of the Fourth International! We have seen in the post-war period the assassins of the French “democratic” imperialist gangs massacring a million workers and peasants in Algeria during the revolution that shook that country in the ‘50s, and giving courses to all the counterrevolutionary armies in the world, with lessons on how to torture worker and peoples’ fighters.
And that not to mention the massacres and genocides made by the Anglo-American imperialists in the last 70 years, the “democratic” victors of the 2WW.
The Fourth International fought for the defence of the USSR invaded by Hitler; but it affirmed that that defence consisted in organizing revolutionary cells in the rank and file of the German army so that the workers could make an about face with their guns in occupied France and in the forefront in Stalingrad, and so point them against Hitler and his imperialist clique.
The Fourth International affirmed that while fascism was being confronted as it was by millions red workers and peasants the best conditions were being conquered, namely that while fascism was being smashed the way was opened to defeat Stalin, who was the great obstacle for the proletariat to win the war instead of the imperialist cliques, and that that was the best way to defend the USSR. Their war cry was: “To defend the USSR it is necessary to defeat the counterrevolutionary gang of Stalin’s that is ready to hand the worker state to the “democratic” imperialism of Churchill and Roosevelt!”
Every class conscious worker will be able to see that beyond the timing, this process of handing out the USSR to Roosevelt or Reagan – Churchill or Thatcher was completed only 30 years later. The delay was due to the heroic struggles of the world proletariat and its revolutionary processes in the West that prevented that sell-out and not because of the alleged “defence of the USSR” as claimed by the Stalinist gangs who annihilated and or aborted the world socialist revolution.
For Trotskyism and the Fourth International the victory of the political revolution against the Stalinist bureaucracy was the only guarantee for setting the USSR as a bulwark of the European revolution during the war and in its aftermath.
“But that was not what happened!” the revisionists cry. Yes, that didn ’t happen, however it was not due to any inexistent Stalinist bravery but in spite of the heroic struggle of the masses those people misled and because the political revolution did not attain victory during and after the war. Let ’s not forget that all the Trotyskyite renegades under Pablo ’s orders had entered “for an indefinite time ” the Communist (Stalinist) Parties, so putting the Fourth International under the spell of Stalinism. When the processes of political revolution finally came, how could the fake Trotskyites put themselves at their head, identified as they were as servants to Stalinism? Due to the political revolutions that shook the workers states along the entire post-war having not succeeded for the open betrayal of the liquidators of the Fourth International, the tactic victories of the world proletariat became strategic defeats in 1989 .
Pabloites, Mandelites, Morenoites, Healyites, Lambertites et all have revised the program, the theory and the strategies with which the Fourth International had prepared the world proletariat for playing a central and decisive role in the historical period opened during the war and for the entire post-war period.
In the same way that had the national sections left to their fate during the war in Europe, Morenoites and Pabloites affirmed that, the 2WW had been a “war between regimes”, namely, between “democracy and fascism”.
“Trotskyite” opportunists in Yalta period believed in the fable of Roosevelt’s “democratic” imperialism and his successors. They believed in the trueness of the D-day in Normandy, with the “democratic” imperialist troops dying to “liberate Europe from fascism”. “Liberation” that those troops were faced to as late as 1945, because the “democratic” imperialists were waiting for the German troops to first demoralize, ravage and massacre the USSR. As all the declassified US Pentagon Papers expose today, the US policy was to wait by the sides that Germany smashed the worker state, however without leaving the Nazis to win the war. That was cynically expressed by US President Harry Truman as follows: “The German army must destroy sufficiently Russia in such a way that allows us take hold of her without encountering any resistance, but we should not let the Germans defeat her beyond that point: they must not win the war”. The reason is that if the Germans took hold of URRS, winning the war, they could get a whole new market and that would have obliged the US to enter into a new open dispute for the world. So, “democratic” imperialism was preparing to take hold of the worker state and in its strategy, Hitler and fascism were a decisive, key part, together with the submission of Stalinism to the “Allied” front of Churchill and Roosevelt.
How right were as a synthesis of Bolshevism the strategy and the fight of the Fourth International facing the 2WW!
And this is not music of the years past: now again we see the world left kneel in front of Obama, supporting the “democratic” “Bolivarian” governments, as the popular fronts in Bolivia. How valid are even today the revolutionary lessons by the Fourth International! There you have the story of the “democratic” popular front of French imperialism, which after strangling the ’36 revolution in France, went with Leon Blum at its head in ’38 –and the rattling of Nazi sabres nearing Paris in its ears- to rescue General Petain from oblivion, made him be named by the French parliament as “Saviour of France” and put the 1WW “hero” to defend her from Hitler. That same “saviour” Petain, a general blessed by the popular front was who handed the Paris keys to Hitler, making a partnership with the occupiers to make juicy business, showing that capitalists recognize no borders (save for jailing undesired foreign workers) but common business… or wars to decide who gets the booty when it is necessary.
Any similitude with “socialist” Allende naming “democratic soldier” Pinochet as commander in chief to the Chilean Armed Forces in Chile in 1973… so that the same Pinochet could smash the “cordones industriales” (Chilean workers’ soviets) with a counterrevolutionary coup… is not a mere coincidence. Any alikeness with the pact between Evo Morales and the fascist Media Luna in Bolivia in order to keep alive the power of the Rosca and contain and strangle the revolution of 2003/2005 in that country neither is a pure accident.
The Clintons and Obama, supporting with one hand the “coupers” in Honduras and with the other making Zelaya go round Central America backed by the entire left of the Americas…and eventually legitimizing the regime of the coup in Honduras through elections… that was not an innovative bourgeois strategy invented by the Pentagon’s strategists in 2010. Neither is sending Iraq back to the Middle Ages in the name of “democracy” and “freedom” and sending fresh “democratic” troops to massacre Afghan people a novelty or “democratic” Obama backed by all the social imperialist worker organizations.
Revisionism in the Fourth International, continuation of Menshevism and Stalinism, has not left any legacy to the world proletariat, save for the trap submitting the working class to the bourgeoisie.
Paying homage to Trotsky today is drawing the revolutionary lessons from revolution and wars in the twentieth century.
Without those lessons it would be impossible to conquer the conditions for the proletarian victory in the twenty first century, much less prepare the revolutionary parties for new wars that the rotten world imperialist system has in the works and no doubt will begin in the same level of destruction that the 2WW ended, if the proletarian revolution does not succeed. That is, the new wars will start –as continuity to the A bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Woe unto the world proletariat, said the Manifesto of the War of the Fourth International in 1940, if they believe that the preceding war was the “last” one!
The present debacle and bankruptcy of the finance capital will deepen the disputes among the major imperialist powers for the market. Those among them that emerge as losers in the present world crisis will become aggressive to recover their spheres of influence. Like vultures, the winners will try to share a world market that is becoming ever smaller and sooner than later, if the proletariat cannot prevent them from, the vultures will also squabble among each other.
SECRETARIAT OF INTERNATIONAL COORDINATION OF THE FLTI
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Tatu Tao
Paper of the British Section
Leon Sedov
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