State capitalism, i.e., the result of the world tendency to centralization, so powerful in Europe, has brought with it not only a labor bureaucracy determined to destroy the national state. A glance at Europe today will show how altered are the conditions from those which existed as late as 1940. In 1947 in The Invading Socialist Society, we wrote as the second of the two points which summed up our ideas:
"II. THE STRATEGIC ORIENTATION IS THE UNIFICATION of PROLETARIAN STRUGGLE ON AN INTERNATIONAL SCALE AS EXEMPLIFIED IN THE STRUGGLE FOR THE SOCIALIST UNITED STATES of EUROPE".1
At the World Congress in 1948, our European co-thinkers presented no separate resolution on Russia. For them, as for us, that is over. They presented one resolution for the whole International situation and on the Russian discussion presented for voting merely extracts from the International resolution. The point of view may be gathered from this brief extract from the resolution:
"Today the movement toward the centralization of European capital, which ensured the victory of statified property against the kulak, has solidified the power of the bureaucracy at home and projected its state and its army into the heart of Europe, in the interlude of peace as well as in war. Once more, in World War II, the great masses of the Russian peasantry, organized in the army, were injected into the political, struggles of Europe, this time as far as Berlin. Despite withdrawals, substantial elements have been left there and tomorrow will be reinforced by even greater numbers. Great numbers of the European proletariat are under essentially Russian domination. Great numbers of the advanced proletariat of Germany and the rest of Europe have been conversely incorporated into all levels of the proletariat in the gangrenous society of Russia. Only a perspective of the complete defeat of the proletariat and the reversal of bourgeois society to outmoded forms (the theory of retrogression) can therefore see as the axis of policy the danger of the restoration of private property in this struggle of the Russian proletariat against the Russian bureaucracy, in peace or in war".2
The resolution analyzed the European socialist character of the coming Russian Revolution;
"The Russian struggle is in reality the struggle between the Russian proletariat and the Russian bureaucracy for the control of the Russian statified economy and for the emancipation or enslavement of the labor movement of Europe and Eastern Asia. In 1929 the pressure of world capital compelled the bureaucracy to side with the proletariat against the kulak. Today the centralization of European capital and the penetration of the Red Army into the heart of Europe has thrown into insignificance the danger of the kulak restoration. The Russian proletariat and the masses of peasants organized in the Red army have become an integral part of the concrete struggle on a European scale for the revolutionary seizure of power and its uninterrupted transformation into socialist revolution. The task today and tomorrow is the integration of the European proletarian revolutionary forces, particularly in Eastern and Central Europe, with the Russian proletariat. Inside Russia and outside, the great oppressed masses of Europe, burning with indignation at the totalitarian apparatus, will seek to split the great masses of the Russian peasants and workers from the MVD, the Kremlin bureaucracy, the officer caste and their bureaucratic colonial satellites...".3
Never was the perspective of world revolution so concrete:
"If World War III is not prevented by proletarian revolution and takes its projected course, the vast millions of the basic revolutionary forces in Europe will more or less rapidly be transformed into an international army of resistance movements. The revolutionary vanguard, steeled by the conviction that humanity moves inexorably and concretely to the proletarian power on a world scale, or universal ruin, sinks itself deeper and deeper into the mass movement, preparing the proletariat for the vast revolutionary upheavals on a continental scale which it knows must come, in peace or in war. In the present conditions of Europe, any policy which impedes, confuses or deflects the proletariat from this course in peace or in war can have ruinous consequences for that party which is responsible for them".4
It is from our economic analysis also that we judge the present tendencies in world politics: the politics of the atomic and hydrogen bombs and the Berlin air-lift; the domination of Eastern Europe by Russia; the Marshall Plan, the division and occupation of Germany, the Truman Doctrine, Truman's program for sending capital to underdeveloped countries, the end of isolationism in the US, the International activities of the CIO and the AFL, the Assembly for a United Europe, to which must be added the hopeless economic situation of China and other colonial areas without aid, economic, social and political, from the proletariat of the advanced countries. That is why in the resolution previously referred to there appeared the following:
"As far back as 1932, Trotsky in the face of the German counter-revolution, urged upon the Left Opposition the publication and popularization of a plan for the joint proletarian development of German and Russian economy. In a world situation in which even the bourgeoisie must envisage and as far as possible plan the reorganization of economy on a Continental and world scale, the Fourth International has remained helpless and impotent before this responsibility which it and it alone can carry out.
"Since 1943 the Fourth International has been ceaselessly warned of the necessity for giving as concrete an expression as possible to the slogan of the Socialist United States of Europe. Precisely because of its complete failure to do this, it has suffered and continues to suffer a series of terrible blows.
"a. It has allowed the bourgeoisie and the Stalinist bureaucracy to take the initiative by a spurious, counter-revolutionary but at any rate concrete 'internationalism'.
"b. It leaves the European proletariat politically disarmed before the vigorous theoretical and practical Intervention of the American bourgeoisie and the Kremlin in to every aspect of European economy and politics.
"c. Lacking a concrete plan of its own in opposition to the Marshall Plan, it not only allows the labor administrators of American capital to pose as the apostles of internationalism and proletarian aid. By the abstractness of its posing of the strategy of the Socialist United States of Europe, it is reduced to a shameful tail-ending of the powerful Stalinist opposition and still further encourages pro-Stalinist tendencies.
"d. The absence of a plan which includes the Russian economy under the control of the Russian proletariat leaves the Russian proletariat, the proletariat of Eastern Europe and the Russian occupation troops without a glimpse of a perspective opposed to the two imperialisms and still further facilitates the penetration in to the movement of the unparallelled lies and falsifications of Stalinist propaganda".5
The resolution stressed the interpenetration of imperialist and civil wars in our epoch, in Europe, Asia and Africa, and warned that only the concrete strategy of coordinating the revolutionary actions of the oppressed masses across national lines would advance the proletarian revolution:
"It is the task of the Fourth International carefully to watch each concrete situation and to safeguard the proletarian vanguard from committing itself to support of the Russian regime or to opposition movements, disguised as national movements which are in reality agents of American imperialism. Without missing one opportunity of tactical support of any section of the oppressed masses in its concrete struggle against oppression, the Fourth International bases its policy on the concrete stage of development and strives in peace as well as in war to unite the revolutionary elements in both camps. In areas like Eastern Europe, the objective situation demands that the workers base their revolutionary policy on the unification of the oppressed masses in both the oppressing and the oppressed countries against the oppressing powers. The same basic strategy must guide the Fourth International in Korea and Manchuria".6
The resolution included a special warning on colonial revolutions in our epoch:
"The experience of China indicates the economic perils of colonial revolution in the age when the export of surplus capital has practically come to an end. After nearly forty years of unceasing civil war, the economy of the country is falling to pieces. The socialist economic reconstruction of China, integrated with the industrial potential of Japan and Manchuria, must form the fundamental theoretical basis of the struggle against the native bourgeoisie and the imperialism of the US and Russia. Vast revolutionary movements in Africa and historical and geographical conditions similarly link the struggle for the Socialist United States of Africa to the European and world economy".7
The same tendency to centralization explains our opposition to the support of the struggle for the national independence of Yugoslavia. We did not arrive at this when Tito broke with Stalin. In 1947, in The Invading Socialist Society (p. 31), we explained with great care why for Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Rumania and Hungary, the struggle for national independence since World War II is an illusion and cannot fail to have reactionary consequences.8
The same centralization, state-capitalism and the capitalist bureaucracy it brings, also determines what was expressed as follows:
"In France and Italy any movement of the masses brings them immediately into direct conflict with their own leaders as rulers or direct representatives of the government. The simplest of the immediate demands concerning the high cost of living or the right to strike become questions of state policy and continually pose before the workers the fundamental question of state power. Thus the social structure of state power in statified production places the workers in a situation where any determined struggle compels them to face the problem of creating their own organization in order to bring pressure upon, and if necessary, to break the power of the labor leadership as virtual functionaries of the existing government...
"Every crisis of production, whether resulting in increase or decrease of wages, becomes merely an opportunity of the bourgeois state, behind constitutional forms, to limit and circumscribe the most elementary rights, right to strike, etc., of the masses. Thus, the struggle for democracy, particularly in advanced countries, is no longer the struggle for the extension of popular rights. Liberalism is now the advocate, instead of the enemy of states (Wallace). ... Thus, in the statified production, the constant struggle for democratic rights becomes the struggle for militant independent mass organizations by which the workers can mobilize themselves to bring pressure upon, control, renew and ultimately over-throw the trade union bureaucracy and the labor leadership on the road to the proletarian revolution. This is the strategic basis for the tactical orientation toward the struggle for democratic demands in this period".9
All these are strategic orientations for an international movement. Practical politics consists of the art of applying them in infinitely varied circumstances, but the variety is in the circumstances, not in what is to be applied. It is our opinion that to point, on the one hand, to the contemporary barbarism, the imminent destruction of civilization and not to put the boldest program concretely before the masses is equivalent to saying that they do not yet understand the nature of the modern crisis. We believe that they understand it better than any other section of the population, taught by the very structure and insoluble contradictions of state-capitalism.
1 CLR James, Raya Dunayevskaya and Grace Lee The Invading Socialist Society, (1947). The reference is to the section '1938 and 1947', in Chapter Five.
2 The editor has been unable to identify the document this quote is from.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid.
8 CLR James, Raya Dunayevskaya and Grace Lee The Invading Socialist Society, (1947). The reference is to the section '(c) The Interweaving of Imperialist, Civil and National Wars', in Chapter Three.
9 The editor has been unable to identify the document this quote is from.
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