The differences between the Third International and the Fourth must be seen first as profoundly antagonistic theories of sociology, of accumulation, of capitalist collapse, of planned economy, of what constitutes bureaucracy, of what constitutes the party - a totally different methodology which in the end amounts to the aims and methods of different classes. "Johnson-Forest" are confident that our theory presents such an opposition to Stalinism.
We shall analyze and confront these two point by point. And each time we shall also show how inadequate is the theory of the Fourth International as an opposition to Stalinism.
1. (a) Stalinist sociology rests on the theory that the conversion of private property in to state-property is the conversion of capitalism into socialism.
(b) The Fourth International must oppose to this that the basis of socialism is the emancipation of the proletariat from enslavement to capital, i.e., soviet power, the state power in the hands of the proletariat in its own proletarian organizations. This and this alone constitutes socialism, a new society, and a new state, or a transition to a new society.
(c) Trotsky denied absolutely that it was possible for private property to be concentrated into the hands of the state except by proletarian revolution.* He put state-property on the proletarian side of the barricades. On this proposition Trotsky was wrong but not confused.
(d) Today, however, on this simple but basic proposition, official Trotskyism shows a mass of equivocation and confusion which grows every hour and from which it is impossible to extract any guiding line whatever.
2. (a) The Stalinists claim today that the distinguishing characteristic of capitalism in contrast with socialism is anarchy of production due to individual appropriation based on private property. Therefore, according to them, the fundamental economic crisis of capitalism is due to ineffective demand, the inability of markets to absorb production. State-property abolishes these fundamental antagonisms of capitalism and thereby becomes a superior society which can plan.
(b ) The Fourth International must show that the basic economic contradiction of capitalism is in production, the falling rate of profit. This a totally centralized capital cannot overcome.1
(c) Trotsky obviously was familiar with this (the fundamental theoretical question of Marxian economics for two generations). He never committed him self to any theory of underconsumption. But his whole conception of the superiority of planned economy was based on the law of value as anarchy and the superiority of state-property because it and it alone allowed society to plan.
(d) Today the press of official Trotskyism is ridden with underconsumptionism. On the other hand, on the question of the capacity of centralized capital to plan, it is today impossible to get any guiding line, as witness the resolution of the IEC, as to why planning is impossible in the satellite countries, very properly exposed by Hansen.2 Germain does not know the difference between the falling rate of profit and the average rate of profit and by a not at all accidental fatality, he follows Leontiev in writing average rate of profit where he should write falling rate.
Pablo tells us that within a society with the "new property relations" of general statification, "the laws of capitalist economy operate in a changed fashion and not automatically or blindly".** (Yugoslavia and the Rest of the Buffer Zones, p. 13, emphasis in original).3 In the same bulletin he tells us that a capitalism which achieved complete statification would be a "regenerated capitalist state," and it would "mean considerable progress and in no sense a decline". (Ibid., p. 4). Just note, please, the phrase "in no sense a decline".
We have made it clear that, in harmony with all the great Marxists, we believe that capitalist planning does not in the slightest degree allow it to escape the laws of capitalism, which are at this stage intensified and irresistible. But observe, if you please, a leader of our movement, in this period, the death-agony of capitalism, can find laws of capitalism which, however, will show no decline. Observe, too, that nobody attacks him.
3. (a) The theory of Stalinism denies that the economic manifestation of the new society is the qualitatively increased productivity of labor. It substitutes instead as criterion the quantitative accumulation of goods, or growth of "the socialist sector," i.e., state-property. It sees the problems of Stalinist production exclusively as a problem of relations between means of production and means of consumption, a relation which it claims to control. This can be modified to the eventual advantage of the proletariat solely by increase of capital. The inequalities and sufferings of the Russian workers are, therefore, due to lack of consumption goods, the result of the need for accumulation. Upon this basis the distinguishing feature of Stalinist production is the need for increase of norms and intensification of labor, an incessant hounding and driving of the workers in production in the name of increased accumulation. This is the Stalinist theory, refined and elaborated in a thousand documents.
(b) To this the Fourth International must oppose the view that the new productive system of socialism is primarily distinguished by an entirely new organization of labor within the process of production itself, in a reorganization of society beginning in the factory, the center of production relations, resulting in a form of labor that will as far surpass capitalism as capitalism surpassed feudalism. Marx's theory is based upon the fact that as long as production is carried on "within the conditions of production themselves by special agents in opposition to the direct producers", accumulated labor is in opposition to living labor; as it accumulates, misery accumulates, and the class struggle paralyzes productivity and production.
(c) Trotsky saw the strictly economic decline of capitalism in the fact that world capitalism could no longer quantitatively increase accumulation. This has been proved utterly false. All that this conspicuously false theory of accumulation does is to fortify the Stalinist contrast between the presumed incapacity of capitalism to accumulate and the presumed power of Russia to accumulate indefinitely.
Historically, i.e., concretely, the monopoly of capital is a "fetter" upon production. It is not an absolute barrier. Lenin vigorously denied that the stagnation of capitalism meant cessation of growth. The Marxist analysis is increase of conflict, of crisis and of degeneration, as a result of increase of growth.
Trotsky declared that the proletariat does not grow under world capitalism and declines in culture. This is absolutely false and is in direct opposition to the thesis of Marx that in the very crisis of capitalism the proletariat is "always increasing in numbers and is united, disciplined and organized" i.e., prepared socially for its tasks, by the very mechanism of capitalist production itself.
(d) Today with Russian production far beyond what it was in 1936, the year of The Revolution Betrayed,4 orthodox Trotskyism, as is shown in the World Congress Resolution of 1948, still teaches that the Stalinist barbarism is rooted in the struggle over consumption goods.5 This theory fails to expose the greatest crime in Russia, the monstrous daily persecution of millions of workers in the very process of production. It does more. It attributes the Stalinist state-power, the most monstrous in history, of more unbridled savagery than the state of German fascism, it attributes all this to the struggle over consumption goods within the framework of a higher form of economy.
The Stalinists attribute any crisis in production in Russia to "remnants of capitalist ideology in the working class". Orthodox Trotskyism finds the remnants of capitalist ideology in the thieving bureaucracy. But the method is the same, subjectivism.
Sociology based upon form of property, i.e., relations between men and things, a theory of accumulation based upon consumption, socialism as the plan by which these inequalities of property and consumption are readjusted - this is the sociology, the economics and the politics of Stalinism inside and outside Russia.
Sociology based upon relations of production, that is to say, relations between people, a theory of accumulation based upon production, socialism as the organization of a higher mode of labor, that is the theory the International of world revolution must adopt. That is the theory of "Johnson-Forest," the theory of state-capitalism, Marxism of our period.
It is this theory which the Stalinists wish to destroy, root and branch, in every implication and manifestation. And that is not in the least surprising. What we call the theory of state-capitalism is the theory of the proletariat as a class directed against capital and any agent of capital, in this case the bureaucracy. Thus the difference between Stalinism and "Johnson-Forest" is a difference of class. Every line of Stalinist theory aims at the obliteration of the question of class in the theory and practice of what they call socialism. And regrettably, very regrettably, we shall have to show that the theories of the Fourth International have fortified the theories of Stalinism. The true significance of Pablo is that he has brought this that was implicit in the theories of the Fourth International out in to the open.
* On this Hansen and E. R. Frank have said all that is necessary and cannot be answered. They are striving to apply the doctrine they have been brought up on. That is why they are so wrong.
** This is precisely the revision in the Marxist analysis of the law of value which Leontiev introduced in 1943.
1 The meaning of this sentence is unclear. It appears to be missing some elements, but was never corrected in any of the subsequent publications of the document.
2 Joseph Hansen (1910-1979) was an American Trotskyist. He was a member of the Socialist Workers' Party and served as Trotsky's English language secretary in Mexico from 1937 until his assassination in 1940. He became a member of National Committee of the SWP on his return from Mexico in 1940.
3 Michael Pablo, Yugoslavia and the Rest of the Soviet Buffer Zone, International Information Bulletin, May 1950.
4 Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, (1936).
5 this appears to be a reference to the resolution, of the Second Congress of the Fourth International, on The USSR and Stalinism, (1948).
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