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From New Militant, Vol. I No. 28, 6 July 1935, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Hardly one week after the Tories took over the British government the new foreign minster, Hoare, resorted to direct action to resolve the contradiction between the reality of German rearmament and the fiction of the maintenance of the Versailles Treaty. The tripling of the German navy is “legalized” by the Anglo-German agreement. In this fashion British imperialism tries to solve a number of its problems, external and internal. Faced with the possible danger of a new naval race in the North Sea with a resurgent German militarism, British capitalism preferred to make concessions relatively harmless to herself, even if a menace to her former allies. England thus takes one step further in encouraging Germany to seek the salvation of its capitalism by expansion to the East, at the expense of the U.S.S.R. A German navy of the size permitted means the control of the Baltic Seas, hence the possibility of attacking Leningrad safely.
At the same time the English ruling class serves notice to France that the latter had better come to terms also with Hitler and abandon the Soviet Union to its fate. This act makes of the Franco-Soviet pact virtually a scrap of paper, for in that pact France can “legally” be released from its operation in case England and Italy refuse to define the aggressor in the coming war. England is doing everything possible to force France to repudiate the military alliance with Stalin. Internally the British tories are preparing for the coming general elections. They can point to the naval agreement as being one step in the direction of limitation of armaments, which adds nothing to the British naval budget at the moment. If the tories are successful in the elections there will be an entirely different aspect of things after the elections. The naval race will then be resumed full speed ahead.
The nearer the war of intervention, the more desperately the Stalinists grovel before world imperialism to prove that the Soviets are not really a menace to the bourgeois ruling class. Ambassador Troyanovsky, former Menshevik and fit representative of the corrupt Stalinist bureaucracy, assures America that the Soviet Union under Stalin is merely the continuator of the policies of the Kerensky Provisional Government. And in this he tells the truth. The Stalinists are engaged in erasing every trace of the October Revolution in order to prove their worthiness to exist side by side with reactionary world imperialism. As the preliminary to further concessions to reaction, the Stalinists are proceeding to annihilate physically all Bolshevik oppositionists, past or present. This can only mean a further attack on the working class in the Soviet Union, an added preparation for the betrayal of this working class as well as the world proletariat to bourgeois reaction, solely for the purpose of maintaining in power the reactionary Stalinist bureaucrats.
Only one force stands in the way of Stalin and endangers his “success” in blocking the road to power of the proletariat of Western Europe. That force, still small but growing in influence through the power of its correct Marxist approach to the revolutionary tasks of the working class, is the nucleus of the Fourth International, the inheritors of the militant traditions of the Second and the Third Internationals. To the Stalinists the Fourth International is a greater menace than capitalist imperialism. The next wave of revolution, organized under the banner of the new international, will sweep out of power and into utter oblivion the corrupt bureaucracy that exists only so long as the workers suffer defeats. The venomous hatred manifested by Stalin for the “Trotskyists,” the attempt to confuse the workers by slanders and by lumping together the counter-revolutionary imperialist robbers and the Bolshevik-Leninist vanguard – the two extremes of the class struggle – are themselves the recognition that the Stalinists will have to pay for their crimes the moment the workers become aware of them.
The Fourth International alone can accomplish this necessary task of ridding the working class of the poison and treachery of Stalinism. It is the builders of the Fourth International who alone can forewarn the advanced workers against the betrayers who are already sowing the seeds of social patriotism in preparation for the next war. The justifiers of the Franco-Soviet Pact, the lackeys of Soviet diplomacy, are working, in the interests of a privileged clique, to fasten more firmly on the necks of the workers the yoke of capitalism. The Stalinist Defenders of the Soviet Union are ready to become also the Defenders of the Allies of the Soviet Union, the upholders of French militarism. With England already openly tossing aside the Versailles Treaty, the Stalinists are becoming the champions of this treaty insofar as it aids Stalin in his reactionary alliances with capitalist imperialism.
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