Since the First World War, the necessary material conditions have existed for the building of a socialist society. Big factories have become the basis of production. The world division of labour has reached a high level. The interdependence of all people – the ‘objective socialisation of production’ – has been largely achieved. Hence it becomes objectively possible to replace the system of private property, of competition and market economy, by a system based on the association of all producers and the planning of production in order consciously to satisfy determined needs.
1 The conditions for the victory of the socialist revolution
But the existence of the material conditions necessary to bring about that revolution is in and by itself not sufficient for its victory. Contrary to all the social revolutions in the past, the socialist revolution demands a conscious and deliberate effort on the part of the revolutionary class: the proletariat. While the revolutions of the past substituted one system of economic exploitation of the producers for another, and had to be content with trying to smooth the functioning of a particular economic mechanism, the socialist revolution seeks to organise the economy and society according to a preconceived plan: the conscious organisation of the economy in order to satisfy all the rational needs of humanity and to assure the full development of the personality of all human beings.
Such a plan will not fulfil itself automatically. It requires a clear consciousness of its aims and the means of achieving them on the part of the revolutionary class. This is especially true as, in its struggle for the socialist revolution, the working class will have to confront a class enemy which is much better organised, with a world network of military, financial, political, commercial and ideological forces at its disposal to maintain its domination.
The victory of the world socialist revolution therefore requires two sorts of conditions if it is to be successful:
– Objective conditions: that is, independent of the level of consciousness of the proletariat and the revolutionaries. Among these we class the maturity of the social and material conditions (economic basis and numerical strength of the proletariat), permanently achieved on a world scale before 1914. Political conditions also come into this classification: the inability of the bourgeois class to rule, and its growing internal divisions; the refusal of the productive classes to accept bourgeois rule and their growing rebellion against it. These objective political conditions which are necessary for the victory of a socialist revolution are met periodically in various countries when profound pre-revolutionary and revolutionary crises break out.
– Subjective conditions: that is, the level of class consciousness of the proletariat, and the degree of maturity, influence and strength of its revolutionary leadership, its revolutionary party.
One can conclude that victorious socialist revolutions have been objectively possible on numerous occasions in many countries since the First World War. Just to deal with the industrially advanced ones: in Germany in 1918-20 and 1923, and probably in 1930-32 as well; in Italy in 1919-20, in 1946-48, in 1969-70; in France in 1936, in 1944-47, in May 1968; in Great Britain in 1919-20, in 1926, in 1945; in Spain in 1936-37, etc.
On the other hand, the subjective conditions were not ripe for the victory of the revolution. The absence of revolutionary victories in the West has therefore been, until now, essentially a function of the ‘crisis of the subjective factor in history’, of the crisis of the class consciousness and the revolutionary leadership of the proletariat.
2 The construction of the Fourth International
It was because they started from such an analysis, based on the historic failure of reformism and Stalinism to lead the proletariat to victory, that in 1933 Trotsky and a handful of opposition communists set themselves the task of creating a new revolutionary leadership for the world proletariat. In 1938 they established the Fourth International for this purpose.
The Fourth International is not yet in itself the revolutionary mass International which alone will be capable of functioning as a real general staff of the world revolution. But it transmits, sharpens up and improves the programme of such a mass revolutionary International, thanks to its constant activities within the class struggle in sixty countries. It forms cadres on the basis of this programme, through its many activities. It thus encourages in a deliberate manner the unification of the experiences and consciousness of revolutionaries on a world scale, teaching them to act within a single world organisation instead of vainly expecting such unification to come about spontaneously through the upsurge of revolutionary forces in various countries and regions of the world, each developing in isolation from the others.
The Fourth International does not just wait passively ‘for the time to come’, niggling over its programme while it waits. It does not restrict itself to abstract propaganda for its programme. Neither does it waste its strength in sterile activism and agitation which is limited to support for the immediate struggles of the exploited masses.
The construction of new revolutionary parties and a new revolutionary International combines: the intransigent defence of the revolutionary Marxist programme, which brings together the lessons of all the past experiences of the class struggle; propaganda and agitation for an action programme, part of the general revolutionary Marxist programme that Trotsky called a programme of transitional demands, drawing on the terms used by the leaders of the Communist International during the first years of its existence; and a constant intervention in the struggles of the masses in order to bring them, through their experience, to acceptance of this action programme, and to give forms of organisation to these struggles which will teach them to create workers’ councils during revolutionary crises.
The need for a revolutionary International which is more than the sum total of national revolutionary parties is based on solid material foundations. The imperialist epoch is the epoch of world economy, world politics, and world wars. Imperialism is a cohesive international system. The productive forces have already been internationalised for a long time. Capital is increasingly organised internationally in multinational corporations. The nation state has long been a hindrance to the furtherance of production and civilisation. The great problems of humanity (the prevention of nuclear world war; the elimination of hunger; the planning of economic growth; the equitable division of resources and income amongst all peoples; the protection of the environment; the utilisation of science for the people) can only be resolved on a world scale.
In these conditions, it is clearly utopian to progress towards socialism with dispersed forces, utopian to fight an enemy organised on a world scale while scorning any international co-ordination of our revolutionary project, utopian even to hope to defeat the multinational corporations through workers’ struggles limited to one country.
Moreover, revolutionary struggles have an objective and spontaneous tendency to spread internationally, not only in response to the counter-revolutionary interventions of the class enemy but above all because they are a stimulant for the workers of many countries. To put off continually the creation of a real international organisation of revolutionaries is not just to lag behind the objective necessities of our epoch, but is also to lag behind the spontaneous tendencies of the most advanced sections of the masses themselves.
3 Immediate demands, transitional demands
In our epoch, capitalist exploitation and imperialist oppression again and again arouse the masses to major struggles. But by themselves the masses generally do not go beyond the formulation of the most immediate aims of these struggles: the defence or increase of real wages; the defence or conquest of certain fundamental democratic freedoms; the fall of particularly oppressive governments, etc.
The bourgeoisie can grant concessions to the masses in struggle to prevent these struggles from developing to the point where they threaten capitalist exploitation in its entirety. It is even more willing to do this because it possesses innumerable means of neutralising these concessions, of taking back with one hand what it has given with the other. If it accepts a rise in wages, an increase in prices can maintain profits. If working hours are reduced, the rhythm of work can be stepped up. If the workers win measures of social security, taxes can be increased so that they themselves end up paying for what the state seems to be handing out, etc.
To break this vicious circle, the masses must be won to the adoption of transitional demands as the objectives of their present struggles – demands whose realisation becomes more and more incompatible with the normal functioning of the capitalist economy and the bourgeois state. These demands need to be formulated in such a way that they can be understood by the masses – otherwise they will just remain demands on paper. At the same time, their nature should provoke, by their very content and the depth of the struggles unleashed, a challenge to the entire ·capitalist system and the birth of organs of self-organisation of the masses, organs of dual power. Far from being valuable only in times of acute revolutionary crisis, transitional demands – such as the demand for workers control – tend precisely to give birth to such a revolutionary crisis by encouraging the workers to challenge the capitalist system in action as well as in their consciousness.
4 The three sectors of world revolution today
Because of the delay of the socialist revolution in the industrially advanced countries, the world proletariat finds itself confronted with different tasks in different parts of the world.
In the colonial and semi-colonial countries, the workers and poor peasants cannot wait until the workers of the industrialised countries come to their aid. Given the enormous burden of oppression and misery that imperialism has imposed on the masses in those countries, the eruption of vast mass struggles and vast revolutionary movements there is inevitable. The workers must support every anti-imperialist mass movement, whether it is directed against foreign political domination or against exploitation by foreign trusts; whether it is for the peasant revolution or the elimination of bloody native dictatorships. Having won the political leadership of these mass movements through its resolve and energy in making the progressive demands of all the exploited classes and layers of the nation its own, the proletariat fights for the conquest of power, and at the same time overthrows the property and power of the native bourgeoisie. This is the strategy of permanent revolution.
In the bureaucratised workers states, the masses rise up to obtain democratic freedoms against the bureaucracy’s monopoly over the exercise of power, against the reappearance of national oppression, against corruption, waste, and the material privileges which characterise the bureaucratic management of the economy. They demand the running of the workers’ state by the workers themselves, organised in their councils (soviets) with a plurality of parties and full democratic rights for all, the management of the planned economy by a system of democratically centralised workers’ councils. This is the strategy of the political anti-bureaucratic revolution.
In the imperialist countries, the mass movements against capitalist exploitation, against the restriction or the suppression of democratic freedoms, are transformed through the transitional programme and the construction of a new revolutionary leadership into struggles for the overthrow of the bourgeois state and the exploitation of capital, for the collective ownership of the means of production and socialist planning, into a victorious socialist revolution. This is the strategy of the social revolution of the proletariat.
The different tasks faced by the proletariat and the revolutionaries in different parts of the world – tasks of the permanent revolution in under-developed countries, tasks of the anti-bureaucratic political revolution in the bureaucratised workers states,- tasks of the proletarian revolution in the imperialist countries – reflect the unequal and combined development of the world revolution. This revolution does not break out simultaneously in all countries. All countries are not in an identical social, economic and political condition.
The supreme task of revolutionary Marxists is the progressive unification of these three revolutionary processes into one and the same process of world socialist revolution. This unification is possible because only one social class, the proletariat, can successfully advance the distinct historic tasks of the revolution in each of the three sectors we have mentioned. This unification will take place thanks to the internationalist politics and education of the revolutionary vanguard, which will bring to the present struggles more and more experiences of the international solidarity of the workers and oppressed people of all countries, and which will fight in a systematic manner against chauvinism, racism, arid nationalist prejudices of any kind in order to infuse this internationalist consciousness into broader and broader masses.
5 Workers democracy, the self-organisation of the masses and socialist revolution
One of the main aspects of the direct action of the masses, of their strikes or mass mobilisations, is the raising of their level of consciousness through the growth of their confidence in themselves.
In daily life the workers, poor peasants, small artisans, women, youth, national and racial minorities are all used to being crushed, exploited, and oppressed by a multitude of possessors and powers. They tend to feel that revolt is impossible and useless, that their enemies are too strong, that it will all end up in a ‘return to order’. But in the heat of mobilisations and great mass struggles, this fear, this feeling of inferiority and powerlessness, suddenly begins to disappear. The masses become conscious of their immense potential power as soon as they act together, collectively and in solidarity, as soon as they organise themselves and organise their struggles effectively.
That is why revolutionary Marxists attach extreme importance to everything which increases the self-confidence of the masses, everything which helps to break them from the obedient and servile behaviour which has been impressed on them through thousands of years of domination by the possessing classes. ‘Servile masses, arise, arise’: these words from the first verse of the ‘Internationale’ perfectly express the psychological revolution which is needed for the victory of the socialist revolution.
Democratic assemblies of strikers electing strike committees, and every similar mechanism in other forms of mass action, play a vital role in developing the self-organisation of the masses. In these assemblies the masses learn about self-government. In learning to conduct their own struggles, they learn to run the state and economy of tomorrow. The forms of organisation to which they become accustomed are thus the embryonic forms of the future workers’ councils, the future soviets, the basic forms of organisation of the workers state to be.
The unity of action which is needed to bring together the scattered forces of the workers; the powerful tide of unity which, in large mobilisations and mass actions, unites millions of individuals who have not been used to· acting together – this unity cannot be achieved without practising the widest possible workers democracy. A democratically elected strike committee must by definition be the expression of all the strikers in the factory, the industry, the town, region or country on strike. To exclude the representatives of any particular group of workers, on the pretext that their political or philosophical opinions don’t meet with the approval of those who are temporarily leading the strike, is to break the unity of the strike and therefore to break the strike itself.
The same principle applies to all forms of mass action and to the forms of representative organisation which are thrown up in their course. The unity which is needed for victory presupposes workers democracy – that is, the principle of not excluding any current among those in struggle. Everyone should have the right to defend their particular proposals in order to make the struggle successful.
If this democracy is respected, the minorities in their turn will respect the majority decisions, because they will still have an opportunity to modify these in the light of experience. Through this affirmation of workers democracy, the democratic forms of organisation of workers’ struggles also proclaim a characteristic of tomorrow’s workers state: the extension and not the restriction of democratic freedoms.