Revolutionary Workers, What Is Your Program ? (Part Two)

Revolutionary Workers, What Is Your Program ? (Part Two)

Read here the first part of “Revolutionary Workers, What is Your Program ?”

In English

PART TWO

IN THE IMPERIALIST ERA, A REVOLUTIONARY PROGRAM MUST NECESSARILY BE INTERNATIONAL AND NOT NATIONAL

People who do not reason dialectically confuse nationalist waves with a retreat from the perspective of uniting the world’s proletarians and world socialism, just as they confuse periods when reformist political and trade union struggles fail with the impossibility of revolutionary struggles triumphing. Similarly, they believe that counterrevolutionary periods are not also periods when revolutions are born.

Nationalism is more exacerbated than ever in phases where capitalism no longer has any perspective, both because it is then an incomparable way of diverting the anger and fears of the exploited and a means of strengthening the national state of the exploiters, a justification for fascism and war. But this does not mean that capitalism is then truly "national," even when its propaganda is. Despite the divisions among the bourgeoisies, despite their competition, despite their wars, despite the very real opposition of capitalist states and imperialisms, capitalism can only be a global system and the fight against it can only be global or not exist at all. The parties of the left, from social democracy to Stalinism, of the left of the left and of the opportunist pseudo-extreme left, have one thing in common : they only really develop national programs. The unions do the same. Workers are never informed of the fact that they are the bearers of an international program of social transformation. They do not know that this simple fact denotes the link between these organizations and the possessing class, that it demonstrates their pure and simple betrayal of all the historical interests of the proletarians. For the latter, national borders, far from being a protection and a safeguard, are prison walls. And this is even more true in the imperialist countries ! Since the First World War, the call to defend the national interest in the richest countries has been nothing other than the people’s tocsin sounding their mass execution...

The international socialist program of the proletariat has no national character. It is not even the sum of the national programs of the workers’ parties... One cannot, in fact, conceive of a revolutionary party that is not part of an international organization, even if one has yet to be built. No more than the power of the workers over the world can be the sum of several "socialisms in one country" (according to the criminal and counter-revolutionary expression of Stalin-Bukharin).

Internationalism is not a small salute to the proletarians of other countries, but the awareness that our destiny is one and the same. Nationalism is not only a dangerous tendency, a reprehensible sentiment that hinders the development of class consciousness ; it is the main trap of the class enemy. Nationalism simply means betrayal of the proletariat.

It is completely inconceivable to "make socialism" in a single country because one cannot go beyond the capitalist mode of production which has reached the global level without the cooperation of the proletarians of the largest countries.

There is no socialist perspective that is not the outcome of the fall of the global capitalist mode of production.

There is no socialist and communist program that is not stated as a world perspective.

Trotsky wrote in "The Permanent Revolution" :

“The theory of socialism in one country, which sprouted from the dunghill of the reaction against October, is the only theory that opposes in a profound and consistent manner the theory of permanent revolution.”
“In our epoch, which is the epoch of imperialism, that is, of the world economy and world politics directed by capitalism, not a single Communist Party can develop its program by essentially taking into account, to a greater or lesser degree, the conditions and tendencies of its national development. This observation is also fully valid for the party exercising power within the limits of the USSR. August 4, 1914, sounded and forever sounded the death knell of all national programs. The revolutionary party of the proletariat can base itself only on an international program corresponding to the character of the present epoch, the epoch of the apogee and collapse of capitalism. An international communist program is in no way an addition of national programs or even an amalgamation of their common characteristics.
The international program must proceed directly from an analysis of the conditions and tendencies of the world economy and the world political system as a whole in all its relationships and contradictions, that is, with the antagonistic interdependence of its various parts. In the present epoch, much more than in the past, the national orientation of the proletariat must and can only flow/come from the world orientation and not the other way around. Herein lies the fundamental and primary difference between communist internationalism and all varieties of national socialism…
He continues : “By linking together countries and continents at different stages of development by a system of dependence and oppositions, by bringing these various levels of development together, by pitilessly setting countries against each other, the economy has become a powerful reality dominating the diverse realities of countries and continents. This fundamental fact alone gives a very realistic character to the very idea of ​​a world Communist Party.”

Leon Trotsky wrote in June 1929 in his critique of the draft program of the Stalinist International :

"The time for the disappearance of national programs definitively came on August 4, 1914. For the communists, the date of August 4, 1914, marked the end of the Second International (its "failure"). The SPD faction in the Reichstag had in fact voted for war credits and accepted the Burgfriede (civil peace), while the French socialist deputies did the same and committed themselves to the sacred union. The International Socialist Bureau adjourned sine die : Lenin ironized, not gently but not without pain, that "those people" no longer needed an International in times of war. The revolutionary party of the proletariat can only base itself on an international program corresponding to the character of the current era, that of the crowning and collapse of capitalism. An international communist program is in no way a sum of national programs or an amalgam of their common features. It must take as its starting point the analysis of the conditions and tendencies of the world economy and political state, taken as a whole, with their interconnections and contradictions, that is, with the mutual dependence between its components. In the present epoch, infinitely more than in the preceding one, the direction in which the proletariat is moving from the national point of view must and can only be deduced from the direction taken in the international sphere, and not vice versa. This is the fundamental difference which separates the Communist International from the various varieties of national socialism.
What then is the "analysis of the conditions and trends of the world economy and political state" at the present time ?

The first building block of the world proletarian revolutionary party is the analysis of the situation of current world capitalism (and not that of a single country).

The capitalist system, once globalized, reached and then exceeded its own limits, not by becoming sustainable but by becoming its own destroyer. The mass of its accumulated capital exceeded the absorption capacity of the financial markets. The share of capital incapable of finding profitable investments continued to grow. In 2007-2008, following the greatest financial, banking, stock market, and industrial collapse in history, it admitted that it would never recover, deciding to take only measures intended to gain time but never again to revive the real economy, that of productive investments by private capital. Since then, it has shown that massive expenditures of public capital made it possible to sustain, but also that they only aggravated the fall in private productive investments. The ratio between the phenomenal mass of private capital and insufficient productive investments continues to grow, at the same time widening the abyss into which the global system of exploitation is plunging. Indeed, the relative fall in productive investments leads to a fall in the surplus value extracted from human labor, and the loss of real profits, replaced by fictitious profits from speculation and aid from states and central banks (themselves increasingly ruined). Under these conditions, all national recovery plans and all so-called national policies to "help the country," to "support the economy" are nothing more than smoke and mirrors.

It goes without saying that one cannot establish a revolutionary program without taking into account the fact that capitalism is in its death throes. Yet it is precisely this operation of self-deception that all political and trade union reformists and all opportunist fake extreme lefts are engaged in.

And that’s not all. The course of struggles, revolts, and revolutions is indeed marked first and foremost by the collapse of the system. Proof of this is the wave of revolts and revolutions that swept across the world following the fall of the capitalist system in 2007-2008. And it wasn’t just the COVID pandemic that weakened it !

It is a sign that the old capitalist civilization is dying out, returning to barbarism, while a new civilization is being born in pain.

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article8166

This new civilization, carried by the revolutionary proletariat, will only truly be able to mark history by developing the specific perspectives of the working people, namely the revolutionary councils otherwise called soviets (even if this term was subsequently distorted by Stalinism). Here again, the perspective of the soviets and their seizure of power has nothing national, nothing Russian, nor anything old-fashioned. It is indeed the only modern political and social perspective, the very meaning of the history of proletarian struggles, which alone can allow us to escape from the rut into which the finite world of capitalism throws us. And this historical perspective needs to be that of all struggles, large and small, including simple strikes with economic or social aims.

We cannot claim to want to build the revolutionary workers’ party without meeting the following conditions :

1) Have deep confidence in the self-organized revolutionary capacities of the mass of the proletariat and not believe in its vanguard alone.

2) To have a firm socialist conscience and to develop the critique of the capitalist world only from the point of view of the future, that is to say of socialism and never of petty-bourgeois democratism.

3) Do not defend organizational interests, under the pretext of moving faster to the party, but only defend the interests of the proletariat. Do not be content with defending immediate economic interests but always favor, whenever possible, the political intervention of the proletariat.

4) In every local question, see the general interest of the workers and in every question on a national scale always see the international interest of the proletariat. In all questions of demands, do not be satisfied with reformist demands and always pose the question in such a way as to show how the struggle leads to the struggle to overthrow the capitalist system (transitional demands).

5) In union or electoral interventions, never consider group interests first but the general interests of the workers. Always be concerned first with defending the socialist consciousness of the workers. Do not be afraid to publicly and virulently criticize the reformist political and union leaderships and unmask all their deceptions and betrayals, criticisms that will be valuable when these organizations, during the revolutionary upsurge, want to pass themselves off as radical in order to ride the rise of struggles and divert the social revolution. Do not be afraid to denounce the false opportunist extreme lefts that can, in revolutionary circumstances, play an extremely negative role.

6) Never limit your struggle to the defense of a people, a nation, a religion, or a culture. Revolutionary workers have no homeland, no nation, no religion, no community other than the human community. But they fight against all forms of oppression. Never fear coming up against the nationalist, racist, corporatist, and other prejudices that linger among the working class.

7) Never socially and politically isolate the proletariat from all social strata (artisans, small traders, peasants, small fishermen, small liberal professions, youth, unemployed, women, oppressed nationalities and religions) that are beginning to revolt and that it is called upon to lead in order to win the revolution. On the contrary, build the program of the proletariat so that it takes the lead of all these strata and separates them from big capital.

8) Aim first for the best ideas for the greatest advances of the proletariat and not only the best advances of its organization.

9) Do not address primarily trade union or left-wing political activists or the working-class aristocracy who frequent them and who believe themselves to be adapted to capitalism.

10°) Develop an analysis of the situation of the exploiting classes and not primarily of the suffering of the exploited ! It is this situation that determines the policy of the capitalist ruling classes and, therefore, the policy that is necessary for the proletariat. The basis of such an analysis is the study of the historical collapse of the world system initiated in 2007-2008 and whose consequences are still in full development (wave of revolutions, pandemic, fascism, wars and the rise of world war). Without such an analysis, there is no question of a revolutionary party and the working class fights blindfolded !

THE ANTI-IMPERIALIST AND ANTI-COLONIAL STRUGGLE AGAINST IMPERIALISM AND COLONIALISM : THE QUESTION OF THE RIGHT TO SELF-DETERMINATION AND THE NATIONAL QUESTION

The "national question" is also a dialectical question. Thus, it is the proletariat which, although not a national class, is the only one capable of posing a national question to the end.

Aspiring to have one’s own country, that is, a state that would protect us, is like aspiring to be a property owner, aspiring to have a small amount of capital, aspiring to a permanent and well-paid job ; these are petty-bourgeois aspirations, illusory in a cataclysmic phase of decaying capitalism. This does not mean that one disapproves of these aspirations, but rather that one affirms that society in the hands of big capital will never be able to assure you of such goals. The only real perspective for all aspirations that are not those of the tiny minority of capitalists is the socialist revolution, and it can only succeed if it is led by the revolutionary proletariat. Reformist parties and unions only develop workers’ demands in the form of petty-bourgeois aspirations, which in no way lead to the overthrow of the dictatorship of the owners of capital. What is needed is the opposite : that all popular aspirations, including petty bourgeois ones, should lead to passing under the leadership of the revolutionary proletariat. This is one of the aims of the revolutionary program : not to despise non-revolutionary aspirations but to want to direct them in the direction of revolution and socialism, that is, the control of the working people over the whole of capital and its states.

Radically rejecting nationalism in no way means denying all national rights to oppressed peoples and providing no support for the struggles of oppressed peoples. On the contrary, it means putting the international proletariat at the head of the struggles of all the oppressed. It also means refusing any agreement with imperialism, even if it is supposedly to allow an oppressed people to obtain satisfaction. The struggle of the proletariat must never come second, but first ! It is up to the proletariat to lead all struggles against big capital, and it must direct these struggles toward the worldwide abolition of capitalism. Any alliance with an oppressed social stratum can only be on these conditions. On these conditions, the national struggle of the peoples can participate extensively in the fight against imperialism and for its total and definitive abolition throughout the planet. The example of the Russian Revolution, which triumphed only by being a workers’ revolution as much as a peasant and national revolution, fully proves this.

What is imperialism ?

When we think of imperialism, we often wrongly think only of the USA and especially of warlike aggressions, and the economic foundation is forgotten. But above all, what is omitted is the foundation in terms of class struggles of today’s society that gives rise to this imperialism. For the latter is the form taken by the domination of an exploiting class over an exploited class, and its future does not depend on aspirations for peace and democracy but on the revolutionary capacity of the exploited class to organize itself for the global and definitive destruction of capitalism.
By developing metropolises where the masses of capital drawn from all over the world are stored, imperialism has been able to maintain the illusion that the working peoples of the rich countries had an interest in protecting the system. This is one of the most dangerous reformist illusions that must be demolished. The proletariat of the rich countries has no less interest in the destruction of imperialism than that of the poor countries. The fate of the German proletariat under Hitler provides a stark demonstration of this.
Some currents propose weakening, even putting in its pocket, the class struggle, in order to better—they say—unite all those who are revolted by imperialism. This is to remove from the struggle its communist perspective of destroying the capitalist system. It is to make people believe that there is an anti-imperialist voice that would be other than the communist action of the proletariat. This denunciation of the crimes of imperialism without the perspective of its destruction, even when it is honest, only leads struggles into a wall. It allows leaders, like bourgeois and petty bourgeois nationalists, who only want to adjust imperialism to their own advantage, to take the lead in proletarian struggles with revolutionary vocations and lead them to a dead end.
Revolutionary communist proletarians do not have to deny or reject the national democratic and anti-imperialist aspirations of the popular masses, for that would amount to throwing these masses into the hands of their bourgeois and petty-bourgeois enemies. They must take the lead in these struggles and give a communist perspective to the fight against imperialism : the destruction of the capitalist order.
Let us not forget that the people of Paris in 1871 were led by democratic and national aspirations, and that it was because they organized themselves autonomously on class bases that they gave the Commune of 1871 the character of the first proletarian power in the world...
The most commonly given, and completely false, definition is the following :
"Imperialism is a political strategy of conquest aimed at the formation of empires. This term is sometimes used to refer more specifically to neocolonialism. By extension, imperialism designates any relationship of domination established by a nation or a confederation over another country."
A strategy of conquest leading to empires would certainly not describe the imperialism we know, which is the imperialism of capitalism, very different from that of the Egyptian Empire, the Roman Empire, or the Arab Empire. Capitalist imperialism is not (or not only) the formation of an empire through military conquest.
The goal is not territories but capital investments.
It is not a strategy but a historical phase of the system. To say that it is a strategy implies that one could change strategy and have a less warlike or less conquering capitalism.
Imperialism is not "a policy of expansion" :
"Imperialism is an immense accumulation of money capital in a small number of countries." Lenin in "Imperialism, the Last Stage of Capitalism" (1916)

In his work "Imperialism : The Highest Stage of Capitalism," Lenin describes imperialism in five points :
1) concentration of production and capital, which has reached such a high degree of development that it has created monopolies, whose role is decisive in economic life ;
2) fusion of banking capital and industrial capital, and creation, on the basis of this "finance capital," of a financial oligarchy ;
3) the export of capital, as distinct from the export of commodities, assumes a very special importance ;
4) formation of international monopolistic unions of capitalists dividing up the world ; and
5) end of the territorial division of the globe among the largest capitalist powers.

He calls it the "supreme stage" and today imperialism has reached its rotten stage !

Murderous for the people, destructive of public health, pandemic, and on the way to global, economic, real estate, industrial, financial, banking, inflationary and warlike collapse, it is the stage of fascist barbarism of mass destruction, massacre and widespread terror.
The media and governments themselves are forced to recognize that the world is turning to horror and that those who are not immersed in it themselves are horrified... These are not games, these are not films to scare oneself, these are the news of repressions, dictatorships, wars and civil wars across the entire planet.
Entire regions of the planet are bathed in blood, entire peoples are displaced, frightened, decimated, herded into camps, raped, massacred...
The rest of the world witnesses these scenes of horror, generally justifies one of the warring camps, supports it, arms it, even pushes it to war, while it practices just as well as its adversary the massacre of civilians, thousands of unarmed, innocent people, caught in the crossfire. Everything is done to make people believe that the only choice is to support one of the camps, or to simply call for peace (or even just a humanitarian ceasefire), in a plaintive manner, without questioning the power of those who use it to plunge the planet into blood and death.
When those in power are reduced to direct violence alone, it is because the capitalist dynamic is dead.

The revolutionary politics of the proletariat in the national question, a product of the analysis of imperialism

Imperialism claims to justify its bloody interventions throughout the world by the need to fight to protect peoples against terrorism, dictatorship, warlike, murderous, and oppressive powers, etc. It also claims to act to defend the peace and security of all peoples, starting with that of its own country. These are gross lies, and it would be easy to unmask them, but the left and the unions are careful not to do so. It is remarkable that the reformists and opportunists who have influence within the working class contribute to making people believe these mendacious justifications.

One might imagine that the opportunist far left would have no trouble distinguishing themselves on the question of imperialism, but that would be a big mistake. Certainly, they do not spare moral reproaches towards certain imperialist countries, but not all of them, and not primarily their own when they are active in an imperialist country. And they are careful not to publicly attack their own imperialism. They are too attached to the trade union apparatus and the labor aristocracy, which is full of petty-bourgeois illusions, to be capable of carrying out a revolutionary policy against imperialism. And precisely this pseudo-far left is careful not to use its two main public interventions (bourgeois elections and the trade unions) to combat imperialist positions within the proletariat and the general public.

As for the leftists (communist left), they reject any notion of imperialism, considering that all nations, all states are bourgeois, that any aspiration against national oppression is bourgeois and that the petty bourgeoisie is identical to the big, capitalist bourgeoisie, and affirming that poor countries are as rotten as rich countries, thus confusing moral reprobation with revolutionary politics. Of course, we do not attribute any socialist or revolutionary qualities or anything to the national bourgeoisie of the poor countries oppressed by imperialism. But, following the policy expressed in Lenin’s theory of imperialism and in Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution, we believe that it would be disarming the world revolutionary proletariat to take away from it an explosive bomb to destroy imperialism definitively and worldwide. Both Lenin and Trotsky were always keen for the revolutionary proletariat to take the lead of the oppressed, including those who were victims of national, racial or religious oppression, believing that the petty-bourgeois layers alone were incapable of fundamentally harming capitalism and imperialism, but that the revolutionary proletariat, taking the lead in these struggles, was perfectly capable of making a revolutionary weapon for world socialism. This is one of the essential points that flow from the analysis of imperialism and a point that the communist (leftist) lefts reject and that the opportunist extreme lefts are careful not to remember, not wanting to break with their friends the trade union bureaucrats and members of the labor aristocracy.

Should the proletariat fight alongside the rebellious petty bourgeoisie, youth, women and other social classes who are victims of capitalism ?

Throughout the far left, there is a reluctance in various forms to consider that popular struggles involving the petty bourgeoisie do not concern the proletariat and have nothing to do with the revolutionary struggle for workers’ power and socialism, and there are also positions that, on the contrary, attribute revolutionary capabilities to petty bourgeois leaderships. Both positions, seemingly opposite, are equally distant from true proletarian revolutionary politics. Both leave the rebellious petty bourgeoisie under a leadership that can only lead them into a dead end.

Thus, in France, the far left (for example, LO and NPA) has largely stayed away from the Yellow Vests struggle and has avoided combating the violent hostility of the union apparatuses towards this movement. It has used the pretext that small bosses (often in reality small self-employed workers, that is, self-exploited workers) were participating in it. And France is no exception : many far-left groups have considered that the proletariat was not the political leadership of the movements that began with the "spring wave" of 2010-2011.

The revolutionary politics of the proletariat is the antithesis of such positions. Thus, both Trotsky and Lenin constantly assigned to the proletariat the role of leading the struggles of the petty bourgeoisie, and especially the peasantry. And it is by standing at the head of all the rebellious classes and social strata that the proletariat becomes capable not only of striking blows against capitalism and imperialism, but of taking the lead of all society, of seizing power, and of holding it. And only in this way do these struggles form part of the struggle for socialism.

All historical examples are clear : there has never been "class purity" in proletarian revolutions ! Who can ignore the direct participation of the petty bourgeoisie alongside the proletariat in the revolutions in France in 1848, in 1871, in the power of the Paris Commune, in the revolutions of 1905 and 1917 (February and October) in Russia, in the Spanish revolution, to name but a few !
Of course, if this discourse, which is currently held by certain anarchists, certain left communists, certain trade unionists, certain anti-racists and anti-fascists, meant that, in companies and neighborhoods, the workers themselves must set up mobilization committees within the movement, no problem !
But to stand aside and push workers to dissociate themselves from it under the pretext that there are petty bourgeois, or even that there are racists or fascists within it, is downright catastrophic ! Weren’t there any racists in the proletarian revolutions of the past ?!!! Is it enough for a racist or a fascist to participate in a strike or a demonstration for us to refuse to participate ?!!!
At this rate, no one is likely to participate tomorrow in a demonstration, a picket, a rally, and even less in a revolution !!!!
The proletarian revolution has nothing socially pure about it !!! Those who don’t know this have never read anything about revolutions !
Instead of purity, what the proletariat urgently needs is organization, committees in neighborhoods and businesses !!! The soviets, which were at their birth neighborhood organizations (and not company ones), mixed workers and petty bourgeois !
What the working class also needs is class objectives, which are not reformist objectives, which are not afraid to attack the sacrosanct bourgeois state and the sacrosanct private ownership of capital and the means of production. It is by defending its class program within the social movement that the proletariat can play a leading role.
But certainly not by rejecting en bloc all the "petty bourgeois" and thus pushing them into the arms of the big bourgeoisie and the fascists !!!

Left-led unions : a constant policy of open or covert support for national imperialism defended within the proletariat

Leon Trotsky writes in "Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decline" :

“There is one common aspect in the development, or more precisely, in the degeneration, of modern trade union organizations throughout the world : their rapprochement and integration with state power. This process is equally characteristic of neutral, social-democratic, communist, and anarchist trade unions. This fact alone indicates that the tendency to integrate with the state is not inherent in this or that doctrine, but results from the social conditions common to all trade unions. Monopolistic capitalism is not based on competition and private initiative, but on central command. Capitalist cliques, at the head of powerful trusts, trade unions, banking consortiums, etc., control economic life on the same level as state power and, at every moment, they resort to the latter’s collaboration. In turn, the trade unions, in the most important branches of industry, find themselves deprived of the opportunity to profit from the competition between the various enterprises. They must confront a centralized capitalist adversary, intimately linked to the power of the State. From this follows for the unions, to the extent that they remain on reformist positions - that is to say, on positions based on adaptation to private property - the necessity to adapt to the capitalist State and to attempt to cooperate with it. (…)

The essential slogan in this struggle is : complete and unconditional independence of the trade unions from the capitalist state. This means : the struggle to transform the trade unions into organs of the exploited masses and not into organs of a labor aristocracy. The second slogan is : democracy in the trade unions. This second slogan follows directly from the first and presupposes for its realization the complete freedom of the trade unions from the imperialist or colonial state. In other words, in the present epoch, the trade unions cannot be mere organs of democracy as in the epoch of free-market capitalism, and they can no longer remain politically neutral, that is, limit themselves to defending the everyday interests of the working class. They can no longer be anarchist, that is, ignore the decisive influence of the state on the life of peoples and classes. They can no longer be reformists, because objective conditions no longer permit serious and lasting reforms. The trade unions of our time can either serve as secondary instruments of imperialist capitalism to subordinate and discipline the workers and prevent revolution, or, on the contrary, become instruments of the revolutionary movement of the proletariat. The neutrality of the trade unions is completely and irretrievably a thing of the past and dead with free bourgeois democracy...

Just as it is impossible to return to the bourgeois democratic state, it is impossible to return to the old workers’ democracy. The fate of one reflects the fate of the other. It is a certain fact that the independence of the trade unions, in a class sense, in their relationship with the bourgeois state, can be ensured, under present conditions, only by a completely revolutionary leadership.

The struggle against the bureaucratic apparatuses does not only consist of militating against the bureaucracy within the unions but, first and foremost, of fighting for the construction of workers’ councils, independent of the apparatuses and formed of delegates from the proletarian assemblies elected and revocable, federating, developing and disseminating the revolutionary program, gradually becoming the true state power of the armed workers.

The "permanent revolution", the only theory that assumes the dialectical character of the proletarian revolution

The "revolution in permanence" (also called permanent revolution) is a philosophy of Marxism that opposes stage-ism, gradualism, progressivism, reformism and opportunism, from Marx to Trotsky, and not a conjunctural analysis of an exceptional situation and especially not a means of attributing a fundamentally revolutionary character to social forces that do not possess one.
History does not progress gradually by following one by one the steps of a staircase to heaven… It undergoes brutal and violent regressions as much as progressions that can even skip stages of historical gradation. Backward societies, reactionary situations and even regressions can provoke brutal revolutionary progressions.
Economic, social and political development is subject to uneven and combined development (in the sense that advanced pieces combine with others that are very backward).
The world does not progress together or at the same pace, and uneven development can make some links in the chain of domination of the world’s possessing classes more fragile than others, and a break in the chain at one point can fatally weaken the whole.
The contradictions arising from uneven and combined development must be understood and fully utilized by revolutionaries. Their consequence is that the national question cannot be resolved within the framework of capitalism and must be exploited by the proletariat. Their consequence is that the revolutionary struggle must penetrate the struggle for reforms and use it as a transition. They also mean that only the proletariat can achieve democratic, peaceful, and liberating goals for oppressed peoples, for all non-capitalist social strata, for all the oppressed. And the revolutionary program of the proletariat must clearly put forward these goals. The intervention of revolutionaries must be guided by a transitional program that leads from national to international struggles, from struggles for reforms to struggles for socialism, from struggles for peace to revolutionary war, etc.
Revolutionary communists must not stand aside or call on the proletarians to stand aside from reformist struggles, without themselves sinking into reformism, from national struggles, without sinking into nationalism, from petty-bourgeois struggles, without forgetting the proletarian character of their struggle, they must combine the various contradictory aspects in a single revolutionary class struggle against the capitalist class.
Many programmatic, social and political points flow from this vision of the march of the social revolution : transitional program instead of the traditional opposition between revolutionary program and reformist program, possible alliances with petty bourgeois layers and oppressed peoples, workers’ united front, etc.

The pseudo and false anti-imperialism of the extreme left : a moralism to vomit !

Instead of seeing in the current crimes of capitalism and imperialism a means of leading the proletariat towards an awareness of its tasks of radical transformation, the false extreme left spreads moral disapproval in full dose...

The opportunist far left has abandoned Lenin’s notion of imperialism. Far from seeing it as an objective evolution of capitalism linked to the limits of this mode of production, they denounce individual policies, those of Netanyahu, Biden or Trump, Putin, and so on.

Since the world war has spread from Syria to Ukraine and from Armenia to Palestine, pro-imperialist policies have been hiding behind the supposed defense of the people and the cover of moral indignation.

Moralists, whether well-intentioned or ill-intentioned, including those of the extreme left or those who claim to be, do nothing to help us navigate the tangle of the global situation or avoid the imperialist and capitalist traps that target the working people of the world and destroy their revolutionary potential.

The moralists denounce everything that displeases them but explain nothing, understand nothing, and arm the workers and peoples in no way, whether they denounce the violence of one camp or another or both, wars, fascisms, dictatorships and even possibly the possessing classes and the rulers.

Morality explains nothing, neither the collapse of capitalism, nor the violent oppositions between imperialisms, nor revolutions, nor counter-revolutions including fascisms and wars. It allows nothing, opens up a perspective on nothing and especially not a proletarian revolutionary perspective that would free humanity from the nightmare in which decaying capitalism claims to engulf it,

Moralists, including the opportunist far left, ask governments to do what is not in the interest of big capital, an absurdity in short. They reject revolutionary politics in the face of imperialism : advocating the defeat of our imperialism, including in war, calling on workers to destroy the capitalist state, including and especially its army and police, reminding them that workers will have to arm themselves, and denouncing pacifism, which primarily disarms workers.

Against the open sacred union of the CGT, hypocritical of the electoral far left (LO, NPA), the Zimmerwald program of the revolutionaries against the First World War and capitalism is once again relevant :

“The imperialist war inaugurates the era of social revolution. All the objective conditions of the present epoch place the mass revolutionary struggle of the proletariat on the agenda. It is the duty of socialists, without renouncing any of the legal means of struggle of the working class, to subordinate them all to this pressing and essential task, to develop the revolutionary consciousness of the workers, to unite them in the international revolutionary struggle, to support and advance all revolutionary action, to seek to transform the imperialist war between the peoples into a civil war of the oppressed classes against their oppressors, into a war for the expropriation of the capitalist class, for the conquest of political power by the proletariat, for the realization of socialism.”

The demands and tasks of revolutionary communists and the proletariat against the colonial and imperialist powers

Only the revolutionary proletariat is capable of fighting imperialism and overthrowing capitalism, even if others, such as terrorists claiming to be Islamic, claim the opposite. Revolutionaries and workers must not fight this or that imperialism any longer ; their main task is to fight the imperialism of their countries. And this requires an anti-imperialist program in the imperialist metropolises :

Denunciation of imperialist superprofits at the expense of the people

Control of capital that plunders countries dominated by imperialism

Expropriation and requisition of imperialist enterprises

Right to self-determination and the national question !

Elimination of all opposition between nationals and foreigners

Union of the peoples against imperialist domination, the peoples of the imperialist countries supporting every effort of the oppressed countries to liberate themselves

Elimination of the exploitation of countries oppressed by imperialism and large trusts and return of their wealth to the people

Abolition of all fascist legislation that incites hatred between peoples and authorizes rich countries to kill migrants at their borders

Elimination of all profit on the backs of the exploited

Elimination of national, racial, ethnic and religious oppressions

Removal of national restrictions : Anyone who earns a living from their work has the right to live in the country of their choice.

The tasks of revolutionary communists and the proletariat in the colonies and countries dominated by imperialism

Unmasking the imperialist goals of the great powers :

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article6673

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article6406

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article5969

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?breve231

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?breve482

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article3811

Demonstrate that any defeat of “our” imperialism is a victory for the workers

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article2597

To demonstrate that there will be no solution for oppressed countries other than socialism.

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article3668

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article3812

To unite the proletarians and oppressed peoples of the world with the clear and stated aim of definitively overthrowing imperialism !

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article7091

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article6278

Uniting “national” and immigrant workers and developing the internationalist consciousness of the proletariat

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article262

The so-called bourgeois or reformist anti-fascism is the fight against the socialist revolution !

When the opportunist far left supported the enemies of the proletariat under the pretext of fighting fascism

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article7014

The policy of the communists and the revolutionary proletariat in the face of war is neither bourgeois nor anarchist pacifism :
 
 
https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article7509

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article3400

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article1107

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article1927

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article620

Revolutionary Defeatism, Anti-Militarism and Arming the Proletariat : The Military Program of the Socialist Revolution

Either the world proletariat puts an end to capitalism, or capitalism puts an end to humanity ! Whoever rejects this alternative : dictatorship of the proletariat or widespread world massacre, also rejects any chance of a future for human society. The Fourth International will be that of raising the banner of the revolutionary proletariat (the number four is not a fetish, of course, and one could just as well call it the Fifth International).
The entire world situation, and consequently also the internal political life of the various countries, is under the threat of world war. The impending catastrophe is already filling the deepest masses of humanity with anxiety.
Left-wing parties, trade unions, and their extreme left-wing supporters are repeating the policy of treason that was that of the First World War of 1914 with all the more assurance because no consistent organization is currently fighting chauvinism and imperialism, all of them being based primarily on the labor aristocracy and the capitalist state. As soon as the danger of war took on a concrete aspect, the Stalinists, far outstripping the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois pacifists, became the champions of the so-called "national defense." They make exceptions only for fascist countries, that is, for those in which they themselves play no role. The revolutionary struggle against war thus falls entirely on the shoulders of the Fourth International.
The success of the revolutionary proletariat in the coming period (that of revolution and counterrevolution) will depend, above all, on its policy on the war question. A correct policy includes two elements : an intransigent attitude toward imperialism and its wars, and the ability to rely on the experience of the masses themselves.
In the question of war, more than in any other question, the bourgeoisie and its agents deceive the people with abstractions, general formulas, pathetic phrases : "neutrality," "collective security," "armament for the defense of peace," "national defense," "struggle against fascism," etc. All these formulas boil down, in the final analysis, to the fact that the question of war, that is, of the fate of the peoples, must remain in the hands of the imperialists, their governments, their diplomacy, their general staffs, with all their intrigues and plots against the peoples.
The Fourth International rejects with indignation all the abstractions which play the same role among democrats as "honor," "blood," and "race" play among fascists. But indignation is not enough. The masses must be helped, with the help of transitional criteria, slogans, and demands,capable of enabling them to verify and distinguish concrete reality from these fraudulent abstractions.
"DISARMAMENT" ? But the whole question is who will disarm and who will be disarmed. The only disarmament that can prevent or stop war is the disarmament of the bourgeoisie by the workers. But to disarm the bourgeoisie, the workers themselves must be armed.
"NEUTRALITY" ? But the proletariat is by no means neutral in a war between Japan and China, or between Germany and the USSR. Does this mean the defense of China and the USSR ? Of course, but not through the imperialists, who will strangle China and the USSR.
"DEFENSE OF THE FATHERLAND" ? But by this abstraction, the bourgeoisie means the defense of its profits and plunder. We are ready to defend the fatherland against foreign capitalists if we first strangle our own capitalists and prevent them from attacking someone else’s fatherland ; if the workers and peasants of our country become its true masters ; if the wealth of the country passes from the hands of a tiny minority into the hands of the people ; if the army, from an instrument of the exploiters, becomes the instrument of the exploited.
We must know how to translate these fundamental ideas into more specific and concrete ideas, according to the course of events and the orientation of the mood of the masses. We must, moreover, rigorously distinguish between the pacifism of the diplomat, the professor, the journalist and the pacifism of the carpenter, the farm laborer or the laundress. In the first of these cases, pacifism is the cover of imperialism. In the second, it is the confused expression of distrust of imperialism.
When the small peasant or the worker speaks of the defense of the fatherland, they imagine the defense of their home, their family and the families of others against invasion, against bombs, against asphyxiating gas. The capitalist and his journalist understand by defense of the fatherland the conquest of colonies and markets, the expansion by plunder of the "national" share in world income. Pacifism and bourgeois patriotism are complete lies. In pacifism and even in the patriotism of the oppressed, there is a progressive kernel that must be grasped in order to draw the necessary revolutionary conclusions. It is necessary to know how to set these two forms of pacifism and patriotism against each other.
Based on these considerations, the Fourth International supports any demand, however insufficient, if it is capable of drawing the masses, even to a small extent, into active politics, of arousing their criticism and of strengthening their control over the machinations of the bourgeoisie.
War is a gigantic commercial enterprise, especially for the war industry. That is why the "200 families" are the first patriots and the main provocateurs of war. Workers’ control over the war industry is the first step in the struggle against the war manufacturers.
To the reformists’ slogan : tax on war profits, we oppose the slogans : CONFISCATION OF WAR PROFITS and EXPROPRIATION OF ENTERPRISES WORKING FOR WAR. Where the war industry is "nationalized," as in France, the slogan of workers’ control retains all its validity : the proletariat has as little confidence in the bourgeois state as it does in the individual bourgeois.
Not a man, not a penny for the bourgeois government !
No weapons program, but a public works program !
Complete independence of workers’ organizations from military and police control !
We must once and for all wrest the free determination of the destiny of the people from the hands of the greedy and ruthless imperialist cliques that operate behind the people’s backs. In accordance with this, we demand :
– Complete abolition of secret diplomacy ; all treaties and agreements must be accessible to every worker and peasant.
Military training and arming of workers and peasants under the immediate control of workers’ and peasants’ committees.
Creation of military schools for the training of officers from the ranks of the workers, chosen by workers’ organizations.
Substitution of the standing army, that is, of the barracks, by a people’s militia in indissoluble connection with the factories, mines, farms, etc.
Imperialist war is the continuation and exacerbation of the bourgeoisie’s policy of plunder ; the proletariat’s struggle against war is the continuation and exacerbation of its class struggle. The outbreak of war changes the situation and partially the methods of the struggle between classes, but changes neither its aims nor its fundamental direction.
The imperialist bourgeoisie dominates the world. That is why the next war, by its fundamental character, will be an imperialist war. The fundamental content of the policy of the international proletariat will, therefore, be the struggle against imperialism and its war. The fundamental principle of this struggle will be :
"The main enemy is in our OWN COUNTRY," or :
"The defeat of our own (imperialist) government is the lesser evil."
But not all countries in the world are imperialist. On the contrary, the majority of countries are victims of imperialism. Some colonial or semi-colonial countries will undoubtedly attempt to use war to throw off the yoke of slavery. For them, the war will not be imperialist, but emancipatory. The duty of the international proletariat will be to help oppressed countries at war with their oppressors.
The workers of an imperialist country, however, cannot help an anti-imperialist country through their government, regardless of the diplomatic and military relations between the two countries at any given time. If the governments find themselves in a temporary and ultimately uncertain alliance, the proletariat of the imperialist country continues to remain in class opposition to its government and supports the latter’s non-imperialist "ally" by its own methods, that is, by the methods of the international class struggle (agitation in favor of the workers’ state and the colonial country, not only against its enemies, but also against its treacherous allies : boycott and strike in some cases, renunciation of boycott and strike in others, etc.).
At the beginning of the war, the sections of the Fourth International will inevitably feel isolated : every war takes the popular masses by surprise and pushes them to the side of the government apparatus. The internationalists will have to swim against the current. However, the devastation and evils of the new war, which, from the first months, will leave the bloody horrors of 1914-1918 far behind, will soon sober the masses. Their discontent and revolt will grow by leaps and bounds. The sections of the Fourth International will find themselves at the head of the revolutionary tide. The program of transitional demands will take on a burning topicality. The problem of the conquest of power by the proletariat will rise to its full height.
Before suffocating or drowning humanity in blood, capitalism poisons the world atmosphere with the noxious vapors of national and racial hatred. Anti-Semitism is today one of the most malignant convulsions of the death throes of capitalism.
The uncompromising denunciation of racial prejudice and all forms and shades of national arrogance and chauvinism, especially anti-Semitism, must enter into the daily work of all sections of the Fourth International as the principal educational work in the struggle against imperialism and war. Our fundamental slogan remains :
In the face of the coming world war, the revolutionary proletariat must defend a socialist military program based on the following points :
Revolutionary defeatism
Defeatism is the policy of the proletariat of the imperialist countries that desires the defeat of their imperialism and the use of this to definitively overthrow imperialism.
There is no true revolutionary defeatism that does not lead to the seizure of power by the armed workers !
We are not anti-militarists in general, but rather anti-arming the bourgeoisie and pro-arming the proletariat and the self-organized working people !
One of the mistakes of left-wing pacifists is to consider war itself as the enemy, and not the entire set of counter-revolutionary policies of the capitalist bourgeoisie.
By employing this policy, Marx here reveals the "secret" of the supreme effectiveness of the military art of the revolutionary proletariat, which is expressed primarily in the defeatism that disintegrates the enemy’s military apparatus and renders it ineffective in the face of the revolution. The principle is that by sabotaging militarism in one’s own country, the one where the revolution is taking place, one simultaneously sabotages the enemy’s militarism. The military policy of the proletariat that has come to power in a country, while naturally aimed at defending the victorious revolution, continues to apply the method of acting behind the lines of the bourgeois countries, by stimulating the revolutionary activity of the masses there.

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article7509
https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article3400
https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article7390

Revolutionary antimilitarism

ORGANIZE LOCAL ANTI-WAR, ANTI-IMPERIALIST COMMITTEES AND COMMITTEES AGAINST THE CIVIL WAR CONDUCTED BY GOVERNMENTS AGAINST THE WORKING PEOPLE ON AN ANTI-IMPERIALIST AND ANTI-WAR PROGRAM OF ACTION WHOSE Slogans and means of struggle would be :
The withdrawal of imperialist troops from all their zones of occupation (neo-colonial or not) and from all their bases in the world
Not a man, not a penny for the dirty wars of French imperialism
Down with the social war budget ! Down with all anti-worker counter-reforms
The organization of solidarity work stoppages !
The sabotage of the imperialist war effort and the blocking of the sending of troops or equipment
The organization of demonstrations in front of the barracks
The appeal to the soldiers called not to die for the bankers, the arms dealers f French soldiers, do not be cannon fodder for the capitalists ! Refuse to wage a war that the people do not want
The call to the soldiers to form soldiers’ committees f to elect their responsible and revocable delegates and to turn their weapons against the warmongers
The establishment of anti-imperialist strike and action committees in the companies and their equivalents, in the working-class neighborhoods and their federations throughout the country !
The abolition of the standing army and the general arming of the people to protect themselves from the murderous government and social war of the rulers and the capitalists !

 Rebuilding the Fourth International on Trotsky’s Foundations

Since the death of Lenin and Stalin’s victory over the revolution in Russia, we have been fighting for the new (Fourth) International of the proletariat, which must win and ensure victory. We are forging the new international party of the world proletarian revolution. We know that only the new revolutionary upsurge will crown our efforts with success. We also know that this new revolutionary upsurge would remain fruitless if our subjective efforts, today and always, did not prepare the weapon of victory and thus victory itself.

The revolutionary International is a single international party, a world party ; the national parties are sections of the revolutionary International. The proletariat is a single international class.
We need to know on what basis Trotsky intended to rebuild the revolutionary communist international :
https://www.marxists.org/francais/trotsky/oeuvres/1933/10/331001a.htm
We need to know why Trotsky’s international failed :
https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article4250
https://www.marxists.org/francais/4int/postwar/1947/06/nt_19470627.htm
https://www.marxists.org/francais/4int/urss/natalia.htm
The international to be built will not be based on an unprincipled gathering but on the following minimal bases :
The publicly acknowledged goal in all propaganda of the global elimination of capitalism and imperialism
The fight against the main deceiver : reformism (and its cousin opportunism), whether union, political or associative
The rejection of sectarianism and the isolation of the proletarians from other sections of the working people
The principles of the first four congresses of the Lenin and Trotsky International
Trotsky’s Transitional Program
Recognition of the need and struggle for a world party of revolution

The goal of workers’ power and the dictatorship of the Soviets on a world scale and the dictatorship of the proletariat
Against imperialism and war, revolutionary defeatism and the arming of the proletariat
The permanent and public defense of self-organization and committees/councils/soviets as class organs of the proletariat and the working people and as the future mode of organization of the workers’ state

THE GLOBAL COLLAPSE OF CAPITALISM AND THE FIGHT AGAINST THE THIRD GREAT INTER-IMPERIALIST WORLD WAR AND THE FIGHT FOR SOCIALIST REVOLUTION !

Workers, women and youth of the world, let us send a clear message : we will not accept being cannon fodder for the next global slaughter of an exploitative system at the end of its tether !

The American power, for its part, has sent a clear message : the "Western world" (this has no other meaning than the allies of the USA since it includes Japan, Australia or Canada as well as Europe and England) is called upon to prepare for world war at full speed and all the States which are part of this international alliance are aligning themselves one after the other and engaging their armies in the race for the most sophisticated and most deadly arms.

The exacerbated economic competition and the multiplying wars (from Syria to Yemen, from Ukraine to Armenia and Israel) are the pretext invoked. The world, once unified, is now divided into two capitalist economies (one around the USA and the other around the China/Russia bloc). The economic, financial and monetary war is engaged and war itself is looming. In all current conflicts, one bloc is on one side and the other on the opposing side. The barbarity of these wars is constantly increasing, as Ukraine and Gaza demonstrate every day.

This murderous division of the world is a choice and not an involuntary evolution on the part of the great powers that dominate not only the economy but all of human life. This choice is directly linked to the state of the capitalist economic system since its collapse of 2007-2008. Certainly, capitalism has never rhymed with pacifism, but since its historic fall of 2007 and since the wave of revolutions that began worldwide in 2011, bloodshed has been the new response of the exploiting classes, one of these massacres being the covid pandemic with its millions of dead and injured. Because, contrary to the dominant discourse, the ruling classes have done nothing to combat the disease, quite the contrary, too satisfied as they were that it struck the people in the midst of the wave of revolutions.

It’s just a crisis like the capitalist system is used to, all the world’s liars tell us. And that’s false : in a crisis, trusts, banks, and financial institutions in the red go bankrupt and close, and in 2008, the global system made the opposite choice. All were saved by massive financial intervention by states and central banks. And since then, all crises have been treated the same way : bailed out with public funds. They then considered that every trust, bank, insurance company, or other large financial institution that fell would be "systemic," that is, it would bring down the entirety of global capitalism ! But the debt of states and central banks, due to the rescue of capitalists "whatever the cost," as they put it, has become a veritable abyss that will engulf the entire system. And it is this perspective that is frightening them, along with that of the wave of revolutions that is leading the possessing classes to steer the world towards dictatorships, fascisms, civil wars and wars in general, even world war, although this can only bring about the destruction of humanity itself.

There is no solution to this catastrophe if we remain within the capitalist system. Saying no to generalized war means saying no to capitalism and imperialism (this system of domination of a few great powers linked to trusts and banks over the entire world and crushing the majority of the world’s population). The fight against war is nothing other than the fight for socialism, that is to say, to put an end to the exploitation of man by capital and to establish a new mode of production free from the private ownership of capital and businesses. It is a lie that economic liberalism was synonymous with freedom within society and political freedom. Under capitalism, people only have the choice between interchangeable politicians, each as liar as the next, but they have no choice over the policies that these politicians pursue once in government. Democracy and the possession of wealth by a tiny minority are antinomic. It is characteristic that people have never had the right to decide what to do in the face of economic crises, wars, or pandemics. More than ever, in the phase of the historic collapse of capitalism, there is no question of democracy anywhere in the world, neither in rich nor poor countries (and there are never so many poor people in rich countries). Everywhere, fascisms and dictatorships are returning to serve as crutches for a system in collapse. The violence of repression is growing everywhere, including in the richest metropolises.

It is up to the working people, women and young people to give a clear response to the rising barbarism : the struggle against war and for socialism led by committees resulting from the mobilization electing revocable delegates and controlled by general assemblies with decision-making power, this is where true democracy will come from, on which to found a new society, which is not subject to the owners of big capital.

At a time when all those in power are talking about are rearmament, mobilization, and military service, when they proclaim to have increasingly sophisticated death devices and sell them all over the planet, especially in war zones, at a time when even states that are not officially at war are supporting wars in the four corners of the world, it is important that we, workers, women, and young people, engage in the struggle to put an end to this dying and bloody system. There is no question for us of supporting one side against the other, no question of supporting "national" trusts and banks against their adversaries, no question of attacking peoples by supporting our own exploiters and the governments at their beck and call. We must be for the defeat of all the great powers and the victory of all the peoples who seek to free themselves from them.
No government in the capitalist world will bring us what we want because states, whether they claim to be democratic or not, are directly linked to big capital, and all parties, left, right, or far right, are in fact attached to the capitalist system and defend it more or less openly. We need a government that comes from the grassroots committees of the working people, women, and youth, as appeared here and there during the last wave of revolutions known as the Spring Revolutions. We need government of the people by the people, direct democracy that is self-organized and independent of all the institutions of the old, rotten society. We will not build the future with the structures put in place by its direct enemies. Those who claim that it is enough to elect good governments are deceiving us. Those who make us believe that we can win social struggles without claiming to take political power are also lying to us. These reformists are not reforming anything at all, and less than ever we will reform the killers of capitalism ; we must disarm them and arm the working people.
To end wars is to bring down states and to organize and arm the people ! Not to let ourselves be invaded by barbarism and generalized war is to build socialism ! There is no other way out !

The whole world is marching to war...

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article6783

Our class enemies are arming themselves massively...

https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article7588

 
THE FIGHT AGAINST IMPERIALISM AND WAR PRESUPPOSES THE FIGHT AGAINST BOURGEOIS REFORMISM, WHICH DERIVES FROM WORKERS’ REFORMISM AND IS STILL INFECTING THE PROLETARIAT !

 1914 : the death of workers’ reformism !
1/ the birth of the left or the antithesis of socialism (the Millerand case in France)
2/ The First World War crowns the bourgeois policy of integration of political and union apparatuses : from class collaboration to class governance. From the class struggle against the bourgeoisie to the class struggle against the proletariat : the false friends of the proletariat !
Building communist fractions in the reactionary and imperialist unions led by undeclared agents of the bourgeoisie like Binet and co.
3/ From socialism to the bourgeois policy of organizations claiming to be working class !
4/ Stalinism or the fascist counter-revolution under the guise of Bolshevism and the elimination of revolutionaries
5/ the role of the labor aristocracy : social basis of reformism and class collaboration !

 Bourgeois reformism and pseudo-progressivism : true anti-communism in the phase of capitalist collapse !

The challenge to the Enlightenment and universalism
Wokism
 Bourgeois feminism against proletarian women
 Critical race theory, a new racism and communitarianism
The fight against the opportunism of the electoralist and unionist extreme left (npa-lo-rp-ucl-cnt)
 The French case : LO, NPA, RP, Fraction, CNT, Libertarian Alternatives….

Requisition of companies that are fattened near or far by the war
 Dissolution of the standing armies and arming of the proletariat (PICKLE, WORKERS’ MILITIA)
Not a man not a penny for the army of capital
Requisition of all companies working near or far for the armament or profiting from the war by workers’ committees !
To the band of armed men who hold the monopoly of violence and weapons in the private interest of the ruling classes, we oppose the arming of the working people ! Call for the formation of committees of police and soldiers who will be responsible to the people !

In conclusion : To overthrow capitalism, which is leading us to world war, we must overthrow imperialism and its reformist agent within the working class.

We are in an era where the entire world is under the domination of a small number of countries ranging from the USA to Europe, from Japan to Russia, from China to Canada, including India and England, countries that are called imperialist, not because they are more wicked than the others but because they concentrate in their hands almost all the capital and weapons of war. Many nations are oppressed by imperialism, by economic and financial means as well as by direct war. Of course, other states are also enemies of the proletarians and the working people, but they are much less powerful and decisive. It must also be said that the proletariat is numerous in the imperialist countries and that it is the only one capable of breaking the chain of imperialist oppression, even if in these countries, imperialism has been able to develop a workers’ aristocracy that provides a basis for all reformists. The collapse of capitalism will also be that of imperialism and the labor aristocracy, as reformist illusions, but in the meantime, they all retain considerable influence in working-class opinion and continue to deceive the workers. It is essential that the latter be instructed in their task : to bring down their imperialism completely and definitively, in particular to disarm the imperialist states. This is a vital task because these states are actively preparing to massacre us en masse in a new imperialist war. One of the worst crimes of reformism and opportunism is to conceal the fact that the imperialist states are our mortal enemies. False democratic anti-imperialism, left-wing or false extreme left, denounces the rulers without saying that the workers must bring down the imperialist states and build the state of workers’ councils and committees of the working people.

THE REVOLUTIONARY COMMUNIST PARTY OR THE WORLD PARTY OF THE SOCIALIST REVOLUTION

Class, Vanguard and Party :

First of all, we want to say what a revolutionary party is not ! It is not an organization above the proletariat, above society, as the Stalinist party was ! Nor is it the distorted image that Stalinism and its supposedly extreme left-wing remnants give of Bolshevism today ! Nor, of course, does it have anything to do with the reformist and opportunist parties and unions.

Leon Trotsky :
"All modern history attests that the proletariat is nothing without its class organizations. At the same time, experience shows that workers’ organizations often become a brake on the revolutionary struggle. More than once has the proletarian movement broken against this contradiction. The most tragic example is the German catastrophe, in which the leading workers’ organizations, each in its own way, paralyzed the proletariat from above and delivered it unarmed to fascism."
A/ What type of revolutionary party does the working class need ?
What seems remarkable at first glance is that there currently exists no party in the world worthy of the name of workers’ party or revolutionary party, to the point that some commentators imagine that there will never be any more. But it’s a bit like some commentators thinking that there will be no more proletarian revolution...
In fact, this is far from being the first period in history that has been in this situation since capitalism and the industrial proletariat existed.
See here : https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article1328
Following the great proletarian defeats, there have always been long periods where the working class no longer had revolutionary parties, capitalism either returning to a phase of growth, or humanity suffering a violent setback, the propertied classes imposing mass murder on it and the masses falling back into political and sometimes social silence. There are even countries where workers have never had a workers’ political party. There is no automatic mechanism that defines in advance the progress and setbacks of the political consciousness or the political organization of the proletariat.
The vagaries of history are as unpredictable in this matter as they are in class struggles themselves. Countries like Portugal, Italy, France, and the United States have experienced, at certain times, explosions in the number of people who wanted to campaign as revolutionaries, explosions that nothing had previously predicted. And as a result, brutal opportunities to build revolutionary parties. But not necessarily genuine revolutionary policies to support these efforts...
The battle of ideas on the revolutionary party has its laws. Betraying them does not lead to success. The small and large manipulators of organizations do not lead the revolutionary proletariat to victories but to pitiful dead ends.
One of these inescapable laws is that of knowing the lessons of the past. Let us remember that the French Revolution got so far because it was steeped in the historical lessons of the English and American revolutions. The proletariat must be armed with this knowledge when it sets out again to attack. This is one of the essential tasks of the revolutionary party. Without it, workers cannot have such knowledge. They have no way of storing up the lessons of past struggles and analyzing them using a scientific and revolutionary method that they have never had the opportunity to study. Even less do they have the possibility of continuing to scientifically construct this method, Marxism. This is the number one task of revolutionaries : to connect the present struggles with the lessons of past struggles, not only those of the eras from Marx to Lenin and Trotsky, but also of the revolutions that followed, from the Vietnamese revolution to the Hungarian one and the revolutionary waves that began in 2011 until today. Their scientific analysis is an indispensable foundation for the policies of the ruling classes (it is by taking into account its lessons that they are currently planning world war, fascism, dictatorship and intercommunal civil wars) and must also be so for the exploited, to counter the traps of the exploiters.
An intimate knowledge of the entire historical past of class struggles (including those of bourgeois revolutions and even the revolutions of antiquity) is the first thing that distinguishes the revolutionary vanguard from the mass of the proletariat, whether or not it is influenced by political and trade union reformists. And it is not only a matter of knowledge of the facts but also of linking them with a scientific class analysis of the whole of history, dynamically linked to a scientific and philosophical method. We are, of course, referring to Marxism, that of Marx and Engels, enriched by Rosa Luxemburg, Trotsky, Lenin, and a few others. Here again, it is not a matter of bowing to the great revolutionaries of old, a quotation here and there, and a nicely turned compliment. No, our current studies must follow in the footsteps of these great authors, even if everyone will tell us that we are not capable of it, that we do not have their genius, that we do not have their experience of revolutions, etc. And it is true but necessity is the law… The living science of revolutionaries (science of revolutions but also of counter-revolutions) cannot be content to live on evocations of the past and it must penetrate the present and the future under penalty of being overtaken by that of the enemies of the proletariat. It must seize the best results of science and philosophy under penalty of being dominated by false ideas (derived from idealism and non-dialectical thought for example) which would block its reasoning. Ideas are not a secondary domain for revolutionaries but organization without revolutionary theory is a bit like the tree without the sap : it is dead, while being able to preserve all the appearances of life. Organization without revolutionary theory only freezes past forms without having the slightest dynamic role in transforming the world.
The working class, without an enlightened and trained vanguard, is forced to fall back into all the errors and illusions that previously led it to dead ends, to repeat the mistakes already known and to make others in addition. This is a major role of the revolutionary party. It does not depend on the number of its militants, even if this plays a role in the dissemination of ideas. It is also necessary that these ideas do not limit themselves to repeating that society is sick with capitalism and that it will one day have to be overthrown. And to repeating also that it will then be necessary to have a large proletarian revolutionary party. For it lacks the essential, namely how the proletariat will be able to have the strength to achieve this feat when the reformist struggles that constantly fail make it think that it would not even be capable of preserving its gains…
It is not enough to be revolted by the present situation to understand what is extraordinary (not magical but simply out of the ordinary) in social revolutions in which exploited masses who have been politically silent for decades begin to do politics themselves, to give themselves the means and the strength to assert and impose their law, mass organizations at the base which penetrate everywhere, get involved in everything and want to decide everything. We are talking about revolutionary workers’ councils, otherwise called soviets because it was the Russian Revolution (or rather the two revolutions of February and October 1917) which gave them the first striking manifestation of capacity, courage, strength and dynamism.
This last remark requires that revolutionaries who wish to build the revolutionary party of tomorrow be militants, from today and even in a non-revolutionary or pre-revolutionary phase, of the Soviet idea, permanent and unshakeable defenders of the self-organization of the workers in mass and at the base, which is a political organization on class bases and with openly revolutionary goals (which require at the same time the following objectives : the economic and social organization of the whole of society in the exclusive service of the greatest number without any respect for the interests of the richest, the end of the sacrosanct right of private property on the capital and enterprises of big capital, the arming of the proletariat organized into revolutionary militias and the disarmament of the capitalists and their States, the suppression of all state organizations and the dismissal of all high officials, including generals, the suppression of the laws put in place by big capital against the workers and the union of the workers’ councils with all those who, within the working people, are liberal professions who do not exploit anyone and do not want to defend big capital). Anyone who would not tirelessly carry out propaganda for these goals, in public as well as within workers’, trade union and political organizations, would in no way be empowered to build tomorrow the revolutionary party that is so necessary for the working class to play its historic role in transforming human society, from its exploitative phase to one freed from the barbarities of the past.
The organizations which, in the non-revolutionary or pre-revolutionary phase, showed opportunism towards the reformist parties and unions must, on the contrary, be marked with a sign of distrust in the eyes of the proletariat because they will be the worst enemies of the revolution, the surest means of deceiving it !
Those who constantly repeat that their sole aim is to build a revolutionary party are not the most qualified to succeed in this task :
https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article4923

Various conceptions of the revolutionary party :
https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article3919
Karl Marx and the goals of the organization of the proletariat (1850) in “Address of the Central Committee to the League of Communists” (1850) :
“The workers will themselves contribute to their final victory much more by the fact that they become aware of their class interests, establish themselves as an independent party as soon as possible and do not allow themselves to be diverted for a moment - by the hypocritical phrases of the democratic petty bourgeoisie - from the autonomous organization of the party of the proletariat. Their battle cry must be : Revolution permanently ! »
https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article7325
Rosa Luxemburg : The Role of the Proletarian Party in the Mass Strike (1906) :
"If it is therefore true that it is in the revolutionary period that the leadership of the strike falls in the sense of the initiative for its outbreak and the assumption of costs, it is no less true that in a completely different sense the leadership in mass strikes falls to social democracy and its leading organizations. Instead of posing the problem of the technique and mechanism of the mass strike, social democracy is called upon, in a revolutionary period, to take the political leadership. The most important task of "leadership" in the period of the mass strike is to give the slogan of the struggle, to direct it, to regulate the tactics of the political struggle in such a way that at every phase and at every moment of the struggle the entire power of the proletariat already engaged and launched into battle is realized and put into action, and that this power is expressed by the position of the Party in the struggle ; the tactics of Social Democracy must never, in terms of energy and precision, fall below the level of the balance of forces, but on the contrary, exceed it ; then this political leadership will automatically transform itself to a certain extent into technical leadership. A consistent, resolute, forward-moving socialist tactic arouses in the masses a feeling of security, confidence, and fighting spirit ; a hesitant, weak tactic, based on an underestimation of the forces of the proletariat, paralyzes and disorients the masses. In the first case, mass strikes break out "spontaneously" and always "at the right time" ; in the second case, the Party leadership may call for a strike directly - but it is in vain. The revolution offers us telling examples of both cases."
https://www.marxists.org/francais/luxembur/gr_p_s/greve4.htm
Lenin writes in The Infantile Disorder of Communism (1920) :
"What cements the discipline of the revolutionary party of the proletariat ?" "What controls it ? What supports it ? First of all, it is the consciousness of the proletarian vanguard and its devotion to the revolution, its steadfastness, its spirit of sacrifice, its heroism. Secondly, it is its ability to connect, to draw closer to, and, if you like, to merge to a certain extent with the broadest mass of workers, first and foremost with the proletarian mass, but also with the non-proletarian mass of workers. Thirdly, it is the correctness of its political strategy and tactics, provided that the broad masses convince themselves of this correctness through their own experience. Without these conditions, in a revolutionary party truly capable of being the party of the vanguard class called upon to overthrow the bourgeoisie and transform society, discipline is unrealizable. Since these conditions are lacking, any attempt to create this discipline inevitably reduces itself to empty phrases, words, and antics. But, on the other hand, these conditions cannot arise immediately. They are developed only through long work and hard experience ; their development is facilitated by a correct revolutionary theory which is not a dogma, and which is definitively formed only in close connection with the practice of a truly massive and truly revolutionary movement.
"History in general, and more particularly the history of revolutions, is always richer in content, more varied, more multifaceted, more alive, "more ingenious" than the best parties, the most conscious vanguards of the most advanced classes think. And this is understandable, since the best avant-gardes express the consciousness, the will, the passion, the imagination of tens of thousands of men, while the revolution is, - in moments of particular exaltation and tension of all human faculties, - the work of the consciousness, the will, the passion, the imagination of tens of millions of men spurred on by the bitterest class struggle. From this two practical conclusions of great importance : the first is that the revolutionary class, in order to fulfill its task, must know how to take possession of all forms and all aspects, without the slightest exception, of social activity (even if it means completing, after the conquest of political power and sometimes at the price of great risk and enormous danger, what it will not have completed before this conquest) ; the second is that the revolutionary class must be ready to replace one form by another quickly and abruptly. »
Lenin in « Militant Materialism » (1922) :
“One of the greatest and most dangerous errors made by communists (as, indeed, by revolutionaries in general who have successfully initiated a great revolution) is to imagine that the revolution can be accomplished by the hands of revolutionaries alone. Now, to ensure the success of any serious revolutionary action, it is necessary to understand and know how to practically apply the idea that revolutionaries can play a role only as the vanguard of the truly advanced and viable class. The vanguard fulfills its mission only when it knows how not to detach itself from the masses it leads, when it truly knows how to advance the entire masses. Without an alliance with non-communists in the most diverse fields of activity, there can be no question of any success in the construction of communist society. »
Trotsky on revolutionary organization in 1923 :
“If we now take our Bolshevik Party in its revolutionary past and in the period following October, it will be recognized that its most valuable fundamental tactical quality is its unsurpassed ability to orient itself quickly, to quickly change tactics, to renew its armament and to apply new methods, in a word, to make sharp turns. Stormy historical conditions made this tactic necessary. Lenin’s genius gave it a superior form. This does not mean, of course, that our party is completely free from a certain conservative traditionalism : a mass party cannot be ideally free. But its strength and power have been manifested in the fact that inertia, traditionalism, routine, have been reduced to a minimum by a far-sighted, profoundly revolutionary tactical initiative, both bold and realistic.
This is what the true tradition of the party consists of and must consist of.” The relatively strong bureaucratization of the party apparatus is inevitably accompanied by the development of conservative traditionalism with all its effects. It is better to exaggerate this danger than to underestimate it. The undeniable fact that the most conservative elements of the apparatus are inclined to identify their opinions, methods, and errors with the "old Bolshevism," and seek to identify criticism of bureaucratism with the destruction of tradition—this fact, I say, is already in itself the undeniable expression of a certain ideological petrification.
Marxism is a method of historical analysis, of political orientation, and not a mass of decisions prepared in advance. Leninism is the application of this method in the conditions of an exceptional historical epoch. It is precisely this union of the particularities of the epoch and the method which determines this courageous and assured policy of abrupt turns of which Lenin gave us the most beautiful models, and which he has more than once clarified theoretically and generalized. "
https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article6309
Trotsky in "Lessons of October" (1924) :
"Considered in the light of our own experience, the experience of the battles of recent years in Europe and principally in Germany, shows us that there are two categories of leaders inclined to pull the Party backward at the moment when it needs to make the greatest leap forward. Some are inclined to see primarily the difficulties and obstacles, and to assess each situation with the bias, sometimes unconscious, of avoiding action. For them, Marxism becomes a method used to motivate the impossibility of revolutionary action. The Russian Mensheviks represented the most characteristic specimens of this type of leader. But this type is not limited to Menshevism and, at the most critical moment, reveals itself in the most revolutionary party, among the militants occupying the highest positions. The representatives of the other category are superficial agitators. They do not see the obstacles until they encounter them head-on. Their habit of evading real difficulties by juggling with words, their extreme optimism in all matters, inevitably turn into impotence and pessimism when the moment of decisive action comes. For the first type, for the petty, petty revolutionary, the difficulties of seizing power are only the accumulation and multiplication of all the difficulties he is accustomed to seeing in his path. For the second type, for the superficial optimist, the difficulties of revolutionary action always arise suddenly. In the period of preparation, these two men behave differently : one appears as a skeptic on whom it is impossible to firmly rely from a revolutionary point of view ; the other, on the other hand, may seem an ardent revolutionary. But, at the decisive moment, both march hand in hand, rise up against the insurrection. Yet all the preparatory work is of value only to the extent that it makes the Party, and especially its leading organs, capable of determining the moment of the insurrection and of directing it. For the task of the Communist Party is to seize power in order to proceed with the remaking of society. "
https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article1461
Trotsky in "The Questions of the Internal Party Regime" (1928) :
"Lenin and we with him feared, above all, that the Russian Communist Party, with its powerful state resources at its disposal, would exert an excessive, crushing influence on the young parties of the West that had just been organized. Lenin tirelessly issued warnings against a premature increase in centralism, against any exaggerated advance of the Executive Committee and the Presidium in this direction, and especially against forms and methods of assistance that would be transformed into direct command, admitting no recourse to appeal.
The break occurred in 1924, under the name of "Bolshevization." If by Bolshevization we mean the cleansing of the party by the elimination of heterogeneous elements and habits, that of the Social Democratic functionaries clinging to their posts, of the Freemasons, of the pacifist democrats, of the spiritualist confusionists, etc., then this task was accomplished from the first day of the existence of the Communist International ; at the Fourth Congress it took very active forms with regard to the French Communist Party. But this real Bolshevization was indissolubly linked, in the past, to the specific experience of the national sections of the Communist International and spread from this experience ; its touchstone was questions of national policy, which rose to become international problems. The "Bolshevization" of 1924 was only a caricature ; The gun was put to the heads of the leading organizations of the Communist Parties, demanding that they, without information or debate, immediately and definitively take a position on the internal differences of opinion within the Communist Party of the USSR ; they knew in advance that the positions taken would determine their continued membership in the Communist International or their expulsion from its ranks.
However, in 1924, the European Communist Parties did not have the means to resolve the problems posed by the Russian discussion, where two principled tendencies were barely emerging in the new stage of the dictatorship of the proletariat. It is obvious that after 1924, the work of purification remained indispensable, and in many sections, heterogeneous elements were rightly eliminated. But, considered as a whole, "Bolshevization" consisted each time in disorganizing the leaderships that were forming in the Western Communist Parties, using as a wedge the Russian differences that the State apparatus was driving in with a hammer. All this was hidden under the banner of the fight against factionalism.
When, within the party of the proletarian vanguard, factions begin to crystallize, threatening to render it unfit for combat for a long time, it is obvious that the party is forced to make a decision : should it allow time to carry out a further verification, or should it immediately recognize that the split is inevitable ? A fighting party cannot be a sum of factions pulling this way and that. In its general form, this idea is incontestable. But to use the split as a preventive means against divergences of opinion, to amputate any group or grouping that makes the voice of criticism heard, is to transform the inner life of the party into a succession of organizational abortions. Such methods, far from contributing to the perpetuation and development of the species, only exhaust the generative organism, that is, the party. The struggle against the factional spirit becomes more dangerous than this spirit itself.
At present, the original founders of almost all the world’s communist parties have been expelled from the International, including its former president. In almost all parties, the groups that guided its development for two consecutive periods have been expelled or sidelined. In Germany, the Brandler group now has only one foot in the party ; the Maslow group has not crossed its threshold. In France, the former groups of Rosmer-Monatte, Loriot, and Souvarine have been expelled ; the same is true of the Girault-Treint group, which held the leadership during the following period. In Belgium, the Van Overstraeten group has been expelled. If Bordiga’s group, which gave birth to the Italian Communist Party, is only half expelled, this is explained by the conditions of the fascist regime. In Czechoslovakia, Sweden, Norway, the United States, in a word, in almost all the parties of the world, more or less analogous events have occurred since the death of Lenin. »
https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article6671
The revolutionary party, seen by Trotsky in 1931 :
https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article1461
Trotsky in "Answer to questions concerning the United States" (1940) :
“First of all, what characterizes a proletarian party ? No one is obliged to be an activist in a revolutionary party, but if they do, they take their party seriously. When one dares to call the people to a revolutionary change in society, one bears an enormous responsibility that must be taken very seriously. And what is our theory, if not simply the tool of our action ? This tool is Marxist theory, because, until now, we have not found a better one. A worker does not indulge in any fanciful things with his tools : if they are the best tools he can have, he takes great care of them ; he does not abandon them and does not demand fanciful tools, which do not exist.”

Many revolutionary activists believe they summarize Lenin’s thought by saying : we need a revolutionary party, and Trotsky’s thought by saying that the crisis of society boils down to the absence of revolutionary leadership.
Of course, the party is a crucial issue. But what cook would say that the question of gastronomy boils down to adding a lot of salt ?
Of course, we are victims here of the Stalinist version of the October Revolution and Bolshevism.
We will try here to show that our glorious predecessors did not see things that way. They were in favor of the working class intervening on the political terrain, unlike the anarchists, and seeking political power through revolution. But they did not isolate this question of the party from another crucial question : the link with the autonomous action of the masses.
Many revolutionary activists forget that communist revolutionaries saw the proletariat as the revolutionary class, not its organizations, whether revolutionary or trade union.
The party or the union do not replace the class. The party or union activist who believes that his organization must decide... in place of the workers is not revolutionary, even if he honestly does not know it...
We do not want to develop a thesis according to which the spontaneity of the masses would be enough to solve all problems. We are in favor of the construction of a revolutionary party but we believe that the meaning of this is completely lost when activists believe that revolutionary organization is an end in itself.
https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article843
Leon Trotsky in "France at a Turning Point" (March 1936) :
"Clearly understanding the social nature of modern society, its state, its law, its ideology constitutes the theoretical foundation of revolutionary politics. The bourgeoisie operates by abstraction ("nation", "fatherland", "democracy") to camouflage the exploitation which is the basis of its domination. (...) The first act of revolutionary politics consists of unmasking the bourgeois fictions which poison the popular masses. These fictions become particularly harmful when they are amalgamated with the ideas of "socialism" and "revolution." Today, more than at any other time, it is the makers of this kind of amalgamation who set the tone in French workers’ organizations.
Leon Trotsky in "The Decisive Stage" (June 1936) :
"The slogan of committees can only be addressed by a true revolutionary organization, absolutely devoted to the masses, to their cause, to their struggle. The French workers have just shown once again that they are worthy of their historical reputation. We must trust them. Soviets were always born of strikes. The mass strike is the natural element of the proletarian revolution. From workshop to workshop, from factory to factory, from neighborhood to neighborhood, from city to city, the action committees must establish close liaison among themselves, meet in conferences by city, by branch of production, by district, in order to crown it all with a congress of all the action committees of France. »
A point that should never be forgotten : neither the revolutionary communist party nor the workers’ state can replace the revolutionary proletariat
https://www.matierevolution.fr/spip.php?article4731
Leon Trotsky in "France at a Turning Point" (March 28, 1936) :
"The emancipation of the workers can only be the work of the workers themselves. There is therefore no greater crime than to deceive the masses, to pass off defeats as victories, friends as enemies, to buy off leaders, to fabricate legends, to mount imposture trials, - to do, in a word, what the Stalinists do. These means can only serve one end : to prolong the domination of a clique already condemned by history. They cannot serve the emancipation of the masses. This is why the Fourth International supports a fight to the death against Stalinism.
It goes without saying that the masses are not without sin. We are not inclined to idealize them. We have seen them in varied circumstances, at various stages, amidst the greatest upheavals. We have observed their weaknesses and their qualities. Their qualities : decision, self-denial, heroism, always found their highest expression in periods of revolutionary upsurge. At such times, the Bolsheviks led the masses. Another chapter of history then opened, when the weaknesses of the oppressed were revealed : heterogeneity, insufficient culture, lack of horizons. Tired, disappointed, the masses collapsed, lost faith in themselves, and gave way to a new aristocracy. In this period, the Bolsheviks (the "Trotskyists") found themselves isolated from the masses. We have practically gone through two similar cycles : 1897-1905, years of flux ; 1907-1913, years of ebb ; 1917-1923, years marked by an unprecedented upsurge in history ; then a new period of reaction that is not yet over. Thanks to these events, the "Trotskyists" learned to understand the rhythm of history, in other words, the dialectic of the class struggle. They learned and, it seemed to me, succeeded in subordinating their subjective designs and programs to this objective rhythm. They learned not to despair because the laws of history do not depend on our individual tastes or our moral criteria. They learned to subordinate their individual tastes to these laws. They learned not to fear the most powerful enemies, if the power of these enemies is in contradiction with the requirements of historical development. They know how to go against the current with the profound conviction that the historical influx of a new power will carry them to the other bank. Not all ; many will drown on the way. But to participate in the movement with open eyes, with a tense will, such is indeed the moral satisfaction par excellence that can be given to a thinking being !"
Leon Trotsky in "Their Morality and Ours" :
"Lenin explained to the lovers of "concrete political problems" that our policy is not of a conjunctural but of a principled character ; that tactics are subordinate to strategy ; that, for us, the fundamental meaning of each political campaign is to lead the workers from particular questions to general problems, that is to say, to bring them to the understanding of modern society and the character of its fundamental forces."
Leon Trotsky in "Defense of Marxism" in the paragraph "against pseudo political "realism" :
"Reactionary epochs like ours not only disintegrate and weaken the working class by isolating its vanguard, but also lower the general ideological level of the movement by throwing political thought far back, to stages long outdated. Under these conditions, the task of the vanguard is above all not to be carried away by the general ebb. It is necessary to go against the current. If the unfavorable balance of forces does not allow one to retain the political positions previously held, one must at least hold on to the ideological positions, for it is in them that the dearly paid-for experience of the past is concentrated. Such a policy appears to fools as "sectarianism." In reality, it only prepares for a new gigantic leap forward, with the wave of the next historical upsurge."
Leon Trotsky in "Bolshevism Against Stalinism" :
"The world political situation as a whole is characterized above all by the historical crisis of the leadership of the proletariat. »
Leon Trotsky in "The Transitional Program" :
"Engels once wrote that Marx and he had remained in the minority all their lives and had always been ’well-off’. The periods when the movement of the oppressed classes rises to the level of the general tasks of the revolution represent the very rare exceptions in history."
Leon Trotsky in "Moralists and Sycophants Against Marxism" (1939) :
"The revolutionary party, because it represents the permanent interests of the working class, is obliged, perhaps for the longest period of its existence, to struggle against the current, against petty-bourgeois conceptions. There are shorter moments in the party’s existence when the grouping that has been able to struggle against the current goes with the current, and events come to give striking confirmation to its earlier conceptions."
Barta in a text from early August 1944 :
“The party is not primarily an apparatus of activists or a mass of members, it is not primarily organizational structures. It is not only a leadership but above all an orientation, analyses, perspectives and a policy. The latter must not have as their criterion the safeguarding of the group, but first and foremost class interests. Communists have no particular interests of their group to defend, said Marx in “The Communist Manifesto”. Being a communist does not mean isolating oneself from the rest of the workers’ movement, but neither does it mean putting one’s flag in one’s pocket as soon as there are clashes between opposing perspectives. The communist perspective is one that never forgets the perspective of the total, worldwide and definitive overthrow of capitalism, even in a period when this change might seem very distant, even if the workers themselves seem far from being sensitive to this perspective. Revolutionary communists do not use their particularity to turn away from the real workers’ movement and withdraw. But neither do they practice opportunism, which consists of adapting to achieve greater success. In short, neither sectarianism nor opportunism : the path is narrow. Confidence in the communist future does not stem from trust in supreme leaders but from the abilities that proletarians have already demonstrated in history and from knowledge of the laws of class struggle.
In the past, it was revolutionary groups and parties that often did themselves far more harm than the bourgeoisie did to them. It was not in prisons, under torture, or in the face of firing squads that revolutionary groups theorized their retreats, their capitulations, their deviations, or their renunciations. On the contrary, it was at the height of their success that they yielded to the pressure of success. Even the Bolshevik Party. It was when they were in a position to play an important and even decisive role that revolutionary communist groups (at least those that claimed this perspective) retreated politically. It is not enough to denounce these renunciations. They must also be analyzed. They do not only concern their authors but all revolutionary activists. In this area too, those who do not learn from the lessons of the past will be caught up by it. The first lesson is that sectarianism and opportunism are twin brothers. The second is that those who place the organization (or its leadership) above perspectives, those who renounce theoretical analysis, are preparing themselves for a difficult future. It is not enough to claim to make a group a homogeneous body, supposedly impervious to external influences (especially that of other revolutionary groups) to build political cohesion. We must study, first study and study again… Study past struggles, the conditions of revolutions, the ways in which society and nature function. Those who continue to learn from the constantly changing world are not subject to the disease of self-centeredness. The world does not revolve around our navel. Staring at it with admiration or fascination cannot be a policy. Gargling the phrase "party building" is in no way a recipe for building it. Appropriating awareness of the workings of the world brings us much closer to it and also makes it much easier to one day join another movement of consciousness : that of a proletariat that will learn the lessons of its own experiences. Other shortcuts or so-called shortcuts lead to a wall...