The Change in the Objective and Subjective Conditions for Building Revolutionary Parties in Capitalist Europe since 1967
Since 1967, the conditions in which revolutionary Marxists go about carrying out their central strategic task — the building of Leninist parties capable of leading the proletariat toward the victorious socialist revolution — have greatly changed in capitalist Europe. These changes, which are in part the product of upheavals in other parts of the world, in the final analysis reflect the deepening of the basic crisis of bourgeois society in Europe. This crisis manifests itself at all levels of the society.
The Deepening Crisis of Capitalism
The crisis of the international imperialist system underwent a new deepening with the end of the long period of accelerated economic expansion carrying forward the 'Korean war boom' that came on the heels of the end of the post-war revolutionary crisis in western Europe. The West German recession in 1966-7 was quickly followed by a recession in Italy and Japan (1970-71), a new, minor recession in West Germany (1971-2), and a general slowing down of economic growth in all the imperialist [countries. After the second world] war, attempts to reduce these crises of overproduction through stepped-up inflation ran into obstacles — inflation went hand in hand with economic stagnation in a whole series of imperialist countries. The stepped-up inflation of the dollar finally precipitated the collapse of the international monetary system created at Bretton-Woods and opened up a profound worldwide monetary crisis that threatens to undermine international credit and, as a result, the expansion of world trade.
The reversal of the general economic climate is the result not only of conjunctural factors but also of profound structural factors. The main stimuli of the rapid expansion of the post-war years are fading away one after the other. The decline of the old industrial branches — such as the coal industry, the textile industry, copper, shipbuilding, and no doubt also steel — is irreversible. At the same time, the pace-setting industries that 'carried' the post-war growth have one by one been hit by an excess capacity and as a result have been forced to cut back their investment. This is already the case in the electrical appliance industry, the automobile industry and petrochemicals; it will also soon be the case in the electrical machine industry and in electronics itself. The declining rate of profit is showing up more and more clearly, choking off rapid growth. This effect is reinforced by the market steadily shrinking in proportion to enormously expanding productive capacity.
The still limited buying power of the bureaucratized workers' states, including China, on the world market does not enable them to provide any important supplementary outlet absorbing some of the excess capacity of imperialist industry as a whole. In certain branches, however (steel pipes, equipment for automobile and petrochemical factories), it has been possible to stave off sharp crises by filling orders from these states — orders prompted, moreover, by specific temporary scarcities in the Eastern countries (cereals, for example).
The slow-down of growth in the international capitalist economy necessarily accentuates inter-imperialist contradictions, including competition in East-West trade (this is one of the reasons for Nixon's overtures to Peking and Moscow). This declining growth rate comes, in fact, in the wake of a period during which the relationship of forces among the imperialist countries underwent a major shift. American imperialism has progressively lost the absolute superiority it enjoyed within the imperialist camp during the immediate post-war period. Its share of the world market — the capital market as well as the commodity market, even if there is several years' lag between the trends in the two — is continuing to shrink to the advantage of Japan, West Germany, and the other imperialist countries in the EEC. The weakening of British imperialism has been especially pronounced during the last fifteen years.
The result of this reversal of the inter-imperialist relationship of forces has in particular been a growing penetration of European and Japanese goods into the domestic U.S. market, which is what prompted the (essentially protectionist) countermove announced by Nixon's speech on 15 August 1971. Far from reducing inter-imperialist competition or the general crisis of the system, these defensive measures on the part of American imperialism can only serve to exacerbate them.
The Crisis of Social Relations
The end of the long period of rapid [growth in capitalist Europe has involved a sharpening] of social contradictions in capitalist Europe that, since May 1968, has taken the form of a general social crisis in several European countries (France, Italy, Spain, Great Britain). Any spectacular new upsurge of this crisis could drag in all the rest of capitalist Europe. The socialist revolution is once again on the agenda in Europe, not just in a broad historical perspective (in this sense, it has been on the agenda since 1914), but even from a conjunctural point of view.
The most profound source of this social crisis lies in the fact that the basic contradiction of the system — the contradiction between the level of development attained by the productive forces and the maintenance of capitalist relations of production — has been considerably aggravated by the post-war phase of growth of the productive forces. Even more than the phase of stagnation from 1914 to 1939, this growth has objectively undermined capitalist relations of production.
We are increasingly approaching the limits of the adaptibility of these relations of production both as regards the functioning of the market economy, the profit drive of the private trusts, the financing of long-term productive investments and the development of the material and intellectual infrastructure of production, and as regards their ability to satisfy — even in an elementary way — the new needs generated in the working population by the growth of the productive forces themselves. A good part of these new needs, keenly felt especially by the youth, clearly cannot be met within the context of bourgeois society. In this category must be placed requirements of high-quality social consumption, met according to the 'satisfaction-of-needs' principle (health, education, culture, news, retirement, etc.), as well as the need for creative activity radically breaking from alienated labour.
This general crisis in social relations had begun to manifest itself even before the turn in the world economic [situation]; the turn itself has obviously made it worse. The more growth slows, the more inter-imperialist competition is intensified. The more the crisis of the international monetary system spreads, the less the European bourgeoisie is able to grant new concessions to the working masses and the more it finds itself even forced to call into question a series of gains granted during the preceding phase which are considered by the proletariat as permanent acquisitions. The attempt to make the workers pay the cost of inflation and the general reappearance of unemployment (for two years, there have been about five million unemployed in capitalist Europe) are two aspects of the same basic orientation of big capital, which is trying to restore the rate of profit by intensifying its exploitation of the working class.
Strikes and other forms of workers' struggles have remained on the rise throughout capitalist Europe since May 1968 because of the fierce resistance with which the [working class has fought against the increased] proportion of surplus value extracted. This upsurge has taken its most spectacular forms in Italy, Great Britain, Spain and France. It is only just beginning in countries like the German Federal Republic, the Scandinavian countries, the Netherlands and Switzerland. As a result of a fifteen-year decline in the industrial reserve army of labour, the whole proletariat has confronted this phase with firm ranks, a higher degree of unionization, and an increased confidence in its own strength. In these conditions, a rapid and crushing defeat of the working class is virtually ruled out. We must therefore prepare ourselves for years of intense social struggles, in which there will be ups and downs, and for enduring possibilities of revolutionary upsurges, depending on advances in raising class consciousness and strengthening the revolutionary [vanguard].
[Contributing to] this rise of workers' [militancy], in addition to the direct reactions against the evils of the system (inflation, factory closings, lay-offs, attacks on the right to strike and the social security benefits won in previous struggles), there are deeper motives disputing in an autonomous way the whole of capitalist relations of production — revolts against speed-up and piece-work that fundamentally challenge the bosses' authority; attempts to raise the question of workers' control and dispute the whole notion of profit as the ultimate goal of production; attempts to enlarge considerably the scope and quality of public services (right to free, high-quality health-care and education; right to free urban transport; right to housing; retirement at 60 on 75% of previous pay; longer paid vacations etc.). These goals of the workers' struggle are all the more important inasmuch as they run counter to the efforts of the capitalists to increase the rate of surplus-value, above all through an increase in the intensity of exploitation, in order to reduce the tendency of the average rate of profit to fall.
The crisis of capitalist relations of production has become a crisis of social relations as a whole. In the beginning, it was expressed more and more sharply by the youth attending school (the college and high school revolt), and then became generalized as a crisis of all social relations (education, family, church, army, etc.), penetrating into the working class, particularly through the young cadres and apprentices, [and giving rise to a massive extension of the] bourgeois crisis into a crisis of all the capitalist relations of production.
The Political Crisis of the Bourgeoisie
Confronted with a worsening of the economic situation and of social contradictions, the bourgeois political system has been, and is continuing to be, shaken by a crisis no less deep — crises in the bourgeois leadership teams; crises of political alternatives; crisis of the bourgeois political parties; crises of the entire governmental system of the bourgeois state. The most striking signs of this crisis have been the spectacular fall of De Gaulle, the semi-paralysis of successive governments in Italy and Great Britain and the persistent political tension in West Germany — long the most stable and the most depoliticized country of post-war capitalist Europe. The increasingly pronounced crisis of the Franco regime fits into this same context.
The basic choice with which the bourgeoisies in capitalist Europe have been confronted is between an 'integration' (aimed at reducing the combativity of the workers through concessions strengthening the mechanisms of conciliation and class collaboration) and an intensification of repression (involving a frontal attack on working-class freedoms, especially on the right to strike and on free collective bargaining). Both variants, moreover, accentuate the decadence of classic bourgeois parliamentary democracy, continue shifting the bourgeois state's centre of gravity toward an executive that increasingly stands outside of any control, and thus highlight the inherent tendency of monopoly capitalism toward setting up strong states.
Nonetheless, neither this reinforcement of the executive nor the variant of frontally attacking some working-class rights should be confused with a new rise of fascism. The main characteristics that distinguish fascism from a strong state are based on the one hand on the destruction of all workers' organizations (including the reformist organizations), and on the other the mass mobilization of a frenzied and pauperized petty bourgeoisie, greatly magnifying the striking power of the classical repressive apparatus. Today the objective conditions for a new rise of fascism have not yet come about in Europe. The workers' movement, especially in Germany, has paid too dearly for confusion in evaluating different forms of rule by capital to accept any loose talk about an [imminent fascist threat]. The [slow-down in economic growth], and especially the [intensification] of inter-imperialist competition, have undermined the preconditions for implementing a 'reformist' policy. What the bourgeoisie has in fact been able to offer — in the form of 'joint worker-boss management', 'profit-sharing', 'payment in stocks' and other reforms, has been too meagre to make a serious dent in the proletariat's fighting ability. The failure of bourgeois reformism is clearest in Italy: neo-capitalist reforms — which are more [urgent] there from the point of view of a [modernization] of the capitalist economy — [could] not [be carried] out during an entire decade under the aegis [of the Christian Democracy]. In Great Britain, the pronounced decline of imperialist economic strength obliges the bourgeoisie even to call into question some of the main reforms [of the 1945 Labour government, beginning with the welfare state]. [The relationship between] the classes remains such that an overall repressive assault cannot [succeed. The response of] the workers' movement, which for the most part remain intact, would respond to such an overall assault on a scale that the bourgeoisie is well aware of and correctly fears. As a result of this fear, for the moment it rejects as provocative any attempt to set up an openly dictatorial regime on the Greek model.
In these circumstances, the most probable political perspective remains a prolonged period of instability, with successive bourgeois teams wearing themselves out in 'centre-right' or 'centre-left' forms of government and with spectacular periodic recoveries by the traditional workers' organizations, but without either of the two contending camps being able firmly to impose its will. The proletariat is still being hamstrung by its crisis of leadership; by the paralyzing role of the traditional leaderships. At the same time, the bourgeoisie remains too weak to impose a radical solution. In France and Italy, where the rise of workers' struggles reached a peak in 1968 and 1969, the bourgeoisie has been able temporarily to resume the initiative, without, however, being able to impose its fundamental solutions. The fighting potential of the proletariat in these countries remains intact.
To be sure, such an unstable equilibrium cannot go on indefinitely. In the absence of a victorious counter-offensive by the bourgeoisie, the very continuation of the social crisis contributes toward solving the crisis of leadership in the proletariat. On the other hand, the continuation of this crisis of leadership, resulting in successive waves of struggles that fail to change anything in the area of state power, ends up tiring out the working masses and lowering their capacity for mobilization, and thus could create favourable conditions for setting up a bourgeois strong state.
There is therefore no reason to look on the present impasse in the class struggle with complacency. If a decisive revolutionary breakthrough does not occur, the bourgeoisie will finally impose its solution. But the fact that we are only at the beginning of the deepening social crisis, that neither the extent of unemployment nor the political level of the workers' struggles yet confronts the bourgeoisie with an immediate question of life or death, allows us to envisage a period spread out in most cases over four or five years before the decisive battles are fought.
A specific manifestation of the crisis of European bourgeois leadership can be seen in the political attitude towards the European question. The extension and interpenetration of capitalist enterprises throughout the area (a tendency which the entrance of Great Britain, Denmark, Norway and Ireland into the EEC can only reinforce), and the need to compete with American and Japanese imperialism, would tend to favour a strengthening of European supranational structures of a pre-state nature — European currency, common industrial policy, common executive, autonomous European nuclear striking force, etc. But since each concrete step in this direction involves sacrifices for this or that 'national' bourgeoisie, and since the room for manoeuvre on an international and national scale is dwindling as a result of intensifying inter-imperialist contradictions and social contradictions, the hesitations and political divisions within the European bourgeoisie grow as the hour of decision approaches.
The inability of the Spanish bourgeoisie to 'liberalize' its political structures, however slightly — its feeling that it must perpetuate Francoism even without Franco — is a sign of the explosive character of social contradictions in the Iberian peninsula. At the same time it is a reflection of the political crisis within the European bourgeoisie. It deprives the bourgeoisie of any means of averting the development of a revolutionary situation in the south-west of the continent — a situation whose subjective repercussions, reinforced by the presence of large numbers of emigré Spanish workers in other countries, could cause it to spread rapidly throughout Europe as a whole.
The resumption of the centuries-old struggle of the Irish people for unity and independence coincides with a sharpened crisis of British imperialism and in turn accentuates this crisis. The tendency has been to move rapidly toward higher forms of struggle and to mobilize and organize the vanguard of the masses, above all in Northern Ireland, where dual power existed de facto for several months, forcing the imperialists to resort to massive repression.
The Crisis of the Traditional Organizations of the Working Class
Alongside the political crisis of the bourgeoisie, the traditional workers' movement has also gone through a deep crisis in the course of the past few years. In part, this has the same roots as the crisis of the instruments of capitalist domination: the aggravation of the social [crisis, undermining the credi]bility of reformist and neo-reformist orientations; the new rise in workers' struggles, which are beginning to escape the control of the traditional leaderships of the workers' movement; and the general crisis of bourgeois social relations (especially capitalist productive relations), which has freed powerful anti-capitalist energies in the vanguard which can no longer be channelled through traditional reformism. There is yet another reason for this crisis in the traditional workers' organizations: the crisis of Stalinism, which — after the ebbs and flows following the 20th congress of the CPSU, the crushing of the Hungarian revolution, the eruption of the Sino-Soviet conflict and the fall of Khrushchev — has undergone a new, important leap with the Czechoslovak crisis since 1968 and with the rightward turn of the Maoist leadership since 1970.
The new rise of workers' struggles and the radicalization of a sizeable vanguard of the working class are coming more clearly into conflict with two phenomena, whose significance must be analysed without underestimating their limitations — the increasing integration of Social Democracy into the bourgeois state apparatus on the one hand, and a process of social-democratization of the official Communist parties on the other.
Within the Social-Democratic parties during the past decade, an important shift in the relative weight respectively of the representatives of the bureaucracy of the workers' organizations as such, and the representatives of the bureaucracy of the bourgeois state, has taken place. The latter have gained considerably in strength in relation to the former. We have even witnessed high Social-Democratic state functionaries beginning to slide into leading positions in private capitalist trusts. These processes have unquestionably promoted the eruption of conflicts between Social-Democratic leaders trying to express the 'general interest', i.e. the interest of the bourgeoisie, and the unions, including the trade-union bureaucrats, who have traditionally been the most solid props of Social Democracy.
The Khrushchevist Communist parties have in general increased their drift to the right, adopting strategies and tactics aligning themselves with the trade-union bureaucracy (on its 'left' wing) in countries where Social Democracy has hegemony, and orienting completely toward an electoralist and neo-reformist strategy in the countries where they themselves have hegemony. Whatever the complex and contradictory pressures from the ranks for such a turn, when these CPs 'disassociated' themselves from the Kremlin at the time of the occupation of Czechoslovakia by the armies of the Soviet bureaucracy, they did so under compulsion from the Social Democrats, ushering in a new stage in this process of social-democratization.
Still, the conclusion to be drawn from these two phenomena is not that the Social-Democratic parties have become bourgeois parties, or that the Communist parties have become Social-Democratic ones. Social Democracy remains dependent — in certain countries like West Germany and Belgium, more than ever dependent — upon its working-class electoral base. This is an electoral base that, unlike that of the Democratic Party in the United States, expresses an elementary class reflex through its vote; that is, the determination to vote for a working-class party instead of voting for a bourgeois party. The class nature of these parties is also reflected in their links with the trade-union movement. The counter-revolutionary and pro-capitalist nature of the policy of the leaders of these parties (a policy that dates neither from today nor yesterday, but that has been a constant phenomenon for almost sixty years) changes nothing in this objective fact, any more than the objective neo-reformism of the CPs allows them definitely to cut the cord that ties them to Moscow.
The crisis in the traditional organizations of the workers' movement is not developing in a straight line. If it is sometimes marked by not unimportant splits (e.g., the 'Manifesto' group in Italy), it can also be expressed through the reappearance of broader centrist tendencies within the traditional parties (the 'Jusos' in West Germany). It can be expressed both by a temporary sag in the electoral strength of these parties (Belgium and Great Britain 1970, for Social Democracy) and by a new electoral thrust — especially when these parties appear to newly politicized layers to be a 'lesser evil' by comparison with the corrupt and bankrupt bourgeois parties. But the main characteristics of this crisis remain no less salient in all the countries where the resumption of workers' struggles and the youth radicalization have been of sufficient scope.
a) The traditional [electoralist and parliamentarist perspective is] losing credibility and must be more and more spiced up with promises of 'moving toward socialism', as exemplified by the Common Programme of the CP and SP in France.
b) The common ground in the orientation of the Social Democrats and the CPs — namely the electoralist and parliamentary road — is being increasingly challenged objectively by broad masses, who are rediscovering direct, extra-parliamentary action as the main instrument for defending their interests, even if they continue to vote for the traditional parties.
c) The traditional leaderships are losing their attraction for an important part of the youth — both workers and students — who are becoming open to a political orientation differing fundamentally from the reformism of the Social Democrats and the neo-reformism of the CPs.
d) The fact that the traditional political organizations become compromised by accepting anti-working-class and anti-union measures (which they are inclined to do especially when they are in the government, but also when they are in opposition — note the hardening of the French Communist Party's apparatus against militant strikes in France), together with the absence of mass revolutionary parties, creates a political vacuum to the left of the traditionally dominant working-class political formations (the CP in France, Italy and Spain; Social Democracy in other countries of capitalist Europe). A section of the trade-union movement has tended to fill this vacuum, at least temporarily, by offering an alternative channel for the most radicalized sector of the working class. This was especially true with the trade-union 'left' in Great Britain in 1970-71, the Italian unions in 1969-71, part of the left wing of the Belgian unions, of the CFDT in France and of the Dutch unions. Thus, the identification between the unions and the traditional workers' parties is beginning to blur. A certain room for independent manoeuvre on the part of the union is reappearing. And we are seeing the beginning of a recomposition of the organized workers' movement as a whole. This process can even go so far as to impel a wing of the unions to assume clearly political tasks, as for example in Great Britain with the struggle against the anti-strike legislation of first Wilson and then Heath, or the 'struggle for reforms' in Italy in 1970-71.
We must not lose sight of the conjunctural nature of this evolution. We must especially not deduce from it that we are witnessing a full, so to speak spontaneous, confluence of the economic struggles and the political struggles of the proletariat. The unions' room for independent manoeuvre remains limited by the bureaucratic nature of their leadership, including its left wing, which has little inclination to undertake a general struggle against the capitalist regime. The nature of the period not only imparts an objectively political thrust to mass struggles, but also carries with it an urgent need to raise the question of political power — a question that the unions take special care not to raise. Still less now than in the past can trade-unionism, including the syndicalist variety, substitute for building a revolutionary party.
On the other hand, it is clear that the reformist and Stalinist bureaucracies cannot remain passive in the face of this incipient recomposition of the organized workers' movement, which threatens to undermine their hegemony over the proletariat — the basis for all their manoeuvres and all their privileges. Therefore, the possibility remains for abrupt adaptations to the radicalization of important sections of the proletariat in an attempt to regain control where it has been lost and to channel the mass movement toward goals that are compatible with the fundamentally reformist strategy of these parties.
The Appearance of a New Vanguard
All the above changes result in a change in the objective and subjective situation for building revolutionary parties in capitalist Europe that is of decisive and immediate importance for revolutionists. A new vanguard of mass proportions has appeared, by and large eluding the control of the traditional workers' organizations. This development marks the beginning of a change in the historical relationship of forces, between the bureaucracies of the traditional organizations and the revolutionary vanguard, that resulted from the defeats of the world revolution during the twenties and thirties and from the bureaucratic degeneration of the USSR and the Communist International. For the first time since the immediate post-war period of 1918-23, the revolutionary vanguard has taken a qualitative leap. It arose first of all on the basis of solidarity and identification with the colonial revolution (Cuba, Vietnam), under the influence of the heightened worldwide crisis of imperialism and Stalinism. This is why it developed on an especially broad scale among the radicalized youth (university students, high school students, apprentices). But as the domestic social crisis of the capitalist countries of Europe worsened — beginning especially with the May 1968 revolutionary crisis in France — a powerful current of radicalized workers joined the specifically youth current, reorienting it toward workers' struggles.
The new rise of workers' struggles and the scope assumed by the clearly anti-capitalist demands these have raised, as well as the growing differentiation within the union movement that is impelling layers of the working class out of the control of the bureaucratic apparatuses (as for instance in the wildcat strikes and hard-fought local strikes that are taking place despite the excommunications of the bureaucratic leadership), are becoming the decisive factors in determining the orientation of the new vanguard. And, progressively, they are bringing about a change in its composition (although this process is still only on a very modest scale in countries like West Germany, the Scandinavian states, the Netherlands, etc.). What chiefly distinguishes this new vanguard from the one we have known throughout the preceding decades is its ability to intervene in the class struggle in its own right, to take political initiatives, and here and there to take the leadership of mass workers' struggles.
In order to define more clearly the nature and limitations of this new mass vanguard, we must combat two illusions. The first illusion is that this new vanguard, as a whole, is revolutionary. The second is that the appearance of this vanguard means a fundamental change in the relationship of forces in the workers' movement and the working class.
Because of its very origins, the new mass vanguard harbours within it numerous elements with a petty-bourgeois consciousness and ideology who, depending on the circumstances and the relationship of forces with the revolutionary Marxist organization, can at best play a secondary role in the unfolding of the struggles, or at worst profoundly distort and pervert the forms and the results of these struggles. This vanguard was born out of a movement of spontaneous revolt against capitalist society and against the adaptation of the bureaucratic leaderships of the workers' movement to it. But the road from spontaneous revolt to effective struggle for socialist revolution can be a long one. Some of the participants in this vanguard, who remain prisoners of spontaneism, sectarianism, ultra-leftist infantilism, apolitical workerism or primitive syndicalism, will never travel this distance. Others will go it only on the condition that the revolutionary Marxist organization acquires a decisive political weight within the vanguard, remaining always equal to the tasks confronting it. While this vanguard has attained a mass character and is for the first time in a long period becoming capable of effective action, it is no less true that it still remains very much a minority within the mass movement, and even more so within the organized workers' movement. The essential task of the vanguard is not constantly to measure its strength against the masses still following the traditional leaderships, but to change the relationship of forces in the mass movement through its ability to impel masses much broader than those consistently associated with it into action that overflows the channels of bureaucratic control. Unless it goes through the necessary apprenticeship in learning the tactics for exploiting this capacity, even a vanguard of 50,000 or 100,000 individuals can become isolated and disoriented in a mass movement of millions of workers. It can be bypassed by events, be buffeted about by partial and temporary setbacks, and vacillate impressionistically between an opportunistic adaptation to the leaders of the traditional workers' movement and sectarian abstentionism and defeatism.
The Central Task
From these five changes in the objective and subjective conditions for building revolutionary parties in capitalist Europe, we have drawn and continue to draw the conclusion that the central task for revolutionary Marxists in the stage that opened in 1967-8 is to win hegemony within the new mass vanguard in order to build qualitatively stronger revolutionary organizations than in the preceding stage, to make the transition from revolutionary propaganda groups to revolutionary political organizations beginning to sink roots into the proletariat.
It is illusory, in fact, to think that propaganda groups can transform themselves in one leap into revolutionary parties already possessing decisive political influence over a section of the proletariat — at least in countries like those of capitalist Europe, where there is a long-established workers' movement with a bureaucratic apparatus exerting tremendous weight among the working masses. The masses do not take their orientation in the first instance from programmes, platforms or ideas. Their orientation is determined by their immediate needs and the tools for waging effective struggles that are available to meet these needs.
Only when the revolutionary organizations have demonstrated not only the lucidity and correctness of their programme but also their effectiveness in action, if only on a limited scale, will the defeats brought on by the opportunism of the traditional leaderships and the anti-bureaucratic revolts inspired in turn by these setbacks result in a massive influx into our organizations. The stage that leads from the essentially propagandistic group to the revolutionary party, in the scientific sense of the term, is therefore one in which a revolutionary organization begins to sink roots in the class, i.e. begins to achieve through its intervention in the class struggle a relationship of forces enabling it to project itself as a credible alternative leadership for the workers' movement, beginning with a vanguard sector of the working class.
Setting our main goal as winning political hegemony within the mass vanguard follows from the overall analysis of the present stage of the class struggle in capitalist Europe:
a) Unless the revolutionary left achieves such hegemony, there is a danger that the strength of the mass vanguard will be dissipated.
b) Unless this mass vanguard is crystallized out into a serious and powerful revolutionary Marxist organization, its potential for influencing broader masses is in danger of being neutralized and lost.
c) Unless this potential of the vanguard to influence greater masses makes itself felt with increasing forcefulness, the upsurge in workers' struggles will arrive at a dead-end, which in the long run will facilitate a decisive counter-offensive by the bourgeoisie.
It is no easy task for revolutionary Marxists to win hegemony within this new mass vanguard. Such an objective can be achieved neither by adapting opportunistically to the lowest common denominator of this politically disparate vanguard, nor by an (in the final analysis, no less opportunistic) attempt to make a 'synthesis' out of the various currents running through it. Achieving this goal requires a constant political struggle within this vanguard to transform it, making it an adequate instrument for recomposing the organized workers' movement.
The upheavals of 1967-8 have created an exceptional opportunity for a breakthrough by a new revolutionary leadership of the European proletariat — the biggest opportunity since 1917-23. But it will not persist indefinitely. Within a finite period of time, we must assemble all the conditions necessary for a qualitative strengthening of the revolutionary Marxist organizations, or else this historic opportunity will be lost.
We reject any spontaneist illusion to the effect that the scope of the present crisis of capitalism and Stalinism — which is, in fact, unprecedented — could, through the pressure of the masses, force the leaders of the trade-union bureaucracy, the leaders of the SPs and the CPs, to lead a socialist revolution in Europe to a successful conclusion. If a new revolutionary leadership is not built in the time remaining to us, after successive waves of mass struggles (some of which will certainly surpass even May 1968 in France), the European proletariat will experience new and terrible defeats of historic scope.
Concrete Forms and Content of the Revolutionary Perspectives in Capitalist Europe
Revolutionary Upsurge and Dual Power
The experiences of more than a quarter century, as well as our economic, social and political analysis of contemporary European capitalism, make it possible for us to define clearly the revolutionary perspectives of our work. The perspectives can be divided into two broad categories of problems: the problems relating to the revolutionary upsurge; and the perspectives for the revolutionary struggle for power.
Aside from exceptional cases where bourgeois states have collapsed as the result of defeat in an imperialist war (e.g. Germany 1918-19), or bourgeois states have completely collapsed owing to defeat and occupation in an imperialist war (Yugoslavia and Greece 1941-4), the upsurges of exceptional mass struggles by the European proletariat during the past half century have exhibited a great number of common features. These characteristics were present equally in the struggles in Germany 1920-23, Italy 1919-21, Great Britain 1925-6, Spain 1931-7, Belgium 1932-5 and France 1934-7 as well as in the more recent examples of Italy 1945-8, Belgium 1960-61, Greece 1963-5, France 1968, Italy 1968-9, and Spain at the present moment. They can be listed as follows:
a) Through mass strikes and general strikes, mass struggles on an exceptional scale can completely paralyze not only the economy but even most of the functioning of the bourgeois state apparatus. They thus objectively pose the question of state power even when the masses themselves are not conscious of this and are not in fact setting out to overthrow the bourgeois state. Such struggles are objectively revolutionary in that they raise the possibility that the working class could take over the leadership of society and rebuild it along the lines of their socialist programme.
b) The ripening of the historical conditions for socialist revolution is also revealed by the fact that during these explosions of mass struggle, numerous intermediary petty-bourgeois layers are instinctively drawn by the proletarian [struggle and rally to it].
c) Although these explosions often occur suddenly and unexpectedly, they always take place as the culmination of a phase of radicalizing struggles, marked by the appearance of more militant forms of combat, by violent skirmishes between part of the working class and its vanguard, on the one hand, and bourgeois society, on the other — that is, as the expression not only of a structural but of a conjunctural crisis of bourgeois society.
d) The immediate detonator of these explosions can vary greatly: economic demands (1919-20); acute economic crisis (1923); abrupt change in economic situation (1960-61); reaction to a violent move by the far right (Spain 1936, Greece 1963); hope for a fundamental political change (June 1936 in France); student revolt (May 1968); monetary crisis; colonial war; defence of rights the workers' movement has won (right to strike, trade-union freedom), etc., etc. It would be futile to attempt to set up a possible timetable in advance. But what should be emphasized is the fact that the detonator, whatever it is, can only play its role after a whole molecular process has taken place in which the proletariat has become radicalized, grown in self-confidence and lost some of its electoralist illusions, while the social and political 'temperature' has risen. Apart from such a trend affecting a considerable part of the proletariat, no limited explosion, no matter how major, will touch off struggles embracing millions of workers.
e) In the imperialist countries like those of Europe, even a weakened bourgeoisie, even one facing a sharp social and political crisis, normally has many resources it can fall back on to absorb objectively revolutionary explosions, as long as the proletariat's level of class consciousness and the breadth (as well as the political ability) of its revolutionary vanguard are not sufficient to prevent it. Such resorts include electoral manoeuvres (turning over the government to left coalitions or parties); immediate economic concessions; selective repression, i.e. repression concentrated against the vanguard alone or the forces spearheading the mass struggle; or a combination of some or all of these methods. Save for exceptional times of imperialist war and occupation, or in an exceptional economic crisis like the one that struck Germany in 1930-33, we have to rule out any notion that the imperialist bourgeoisie will prove incapable of manoeuvring or making concessions to the masses. This is an essential difference between the situation in the imperialist countries and that in the colonial and semi-colonial countries. Furthermore, the vast political experience of the European bourgeoisie has taught it that as long as it retains state power and control over the main means of production and exchange, it can rapidly take back any concession granted during a time of acute revolutionary crisis. The main thing is to preserve these two basic instruments of domination intact, i.e. to see that the mass movement recedes and breaks up. The rest will flow automatically from this.
f) For these same reasons, any tumultuous upsurge of the mass movement is always limited in time. If victory is not achieved, if at least a point of no return — a break with the bourgeois state and capitalist relations of production — is not reached (that is, if a situation of dual power does not arise), the mass movement is condemned to go into an ebb, which in such cases is synonymous with a return to the 'normal' functioning of capitalism.
What really characterizes a situation of dual power is the fact that it constitutes a state of affairs that cannot be absorbed into the normal functioning of bourgeois institutions. As long as this dual power persists, a 'return to normal' is impossible. Even a temporary ebb or a partial defeat of the mass movement has no longer the same significance. An overall test of strength between the classes remains inevitable within a more or less short period of time.
It flows from this that the main task of revolutionists in case of an explosion of tumultuous mass struggles consists of preparing for and ensuring the appearance of organs of dual power that can prevent the rapid absorption of the upsurge by bourgeois state and economic relations, and, as a result, give the class struggle the form of a series of general confrontations, thereby creating the best conditions for a rapid growth of class consciousness and for a rapid strengthening of the revolutionary party.
The organs of dual power do not necessarily have to [illegible].
Dual Power and Revolutionary Victory
[illegible — scan page 50 was captured in the OCR text layer rotated 180 degrees and cannot be recovered as text; it carries the remainder of the preceding paragraph and the whole of this subsection 'Dual Power and Revolutionary Victory'. Flagged for re-OCR from the source PDF.] ...[the moment when the explo]sion will occur is the exhaustion of all these variants and the unconcealable impasse of bourgeois policy that results. The question therefore boils down to this. Is the objective scope of the crisis in capitalist social relations such that in spite of all the lessons the bourgeoisie and the reformist apparatuses within the workers' movement have learned from the past, similar blind-alleys have to periodically (though obviously not constantly, nor even every two or three years) reappear? Our answer to this question is an unequivocal Yes. It is based on the main lesson of European history since 1914 and arises from the very nature of the epoch — the epoch of the crisis and decline of the capitalist system.
Inadequacies of the Subjective Factor
The failure up to now either to direct the explosions of mass struggles in capitalist Europe into culminating in situations of dual power, or to bring about a revolutionary victory in cases where dual power was achieved (especially Spain 1936-7, and in part Germany 1923 and Italy 1919-20), is not the result, in the final analysis, either of the inherent strength of capitalism or of insufficient combativity on the part of the masses. It is essentially the consequence of subjective deficiencies — insufficient level of class consciousness of the proletariat and inadequacy of its revolutionary leadership. In the perspective in which revolutionary Marxists in capitalist Europe are presently working, their main task remains to overcome these deficiencies.
The concrete character of these subjective deficiencies during the present stage can be described precisely. In spite of the fact that the working class is beginning, in action, to go beyond its bureaucratic apparatuses, it is still having a great deal of difficulty developing forms of struggle and bodies for leading struggles that truly unite its forces and function independently (elected strike committees, general strike assemblies, federation and centralization of strike committees, etc.). It is still only beginning to break loose from the grip of an electoralist and parliamentarist conception of governmental and state power (this is both the result of prevailing bourgeois ideology and of three quarters of a century of opportunist practices and miseducation by most of the mass workers' organizations). During its initial phase, the radicalization of the proletariat results in fragmented struggles and an even more pronounced separation between those minority layers that are ready to engage in 'tough' action and the majority who continue to follow the established apparatus. The working masses, and even part of the vanguard, have not yet made a clear distinction between the objectives of reformist struggles (which can be co-opted and assimilated within the framework of the capitalist system) and truly transitional and anti-capitalist objectives (which lead to the creation of organs of dual power). For the great majority of workers, the question of arming the proletariat and of disarming the official and semi-official repressive apparatus of the bourgeoisie remains an abstract and theoretical problem. They do not really see it as an indispensable necessity on the road to taking power.
We reject the two parallel illusions that up to now have derailed or stifled so many revolutionary plans throughout the history of the imperialist countries: the spontaneist, opportunist and tail-ending illusion on the one hand; and the sectarian, propagandistic and ultimatist illusion on the other.
The spontaneists have the illusion that by the very logic of their struggles, the working masses will come to remove these subjective deficiencies that in the past have blocked the victory of every revolutionary upsurge in the industrialized capitalist countries. The broadening and expansion of workers' struggles create the precondition for a rapid rise in class consciousness; but they do not automatically ensure it. There is no reason to suppose that the masses, educated for decades in the spirit of respect for bourgeois parliamentarianism and the 'electoral road to socialism', will be transformed, as if by magic, into adepts of the Leninist theory of the state simply because they have unleashed a general strike. It is even more improbable that, just by occupying factories, masses deprived for decades of all class-oriented political education will gain the capacity to put together a coherent programme of transitional demands and to wage a successful fight for this programme against the manoeuvres of the bourgeoisie and the reformist apparatus.
On the other hand, there is absolutely no reason to suppose that, simply by increasing its numbers and expanding the circulation of its press, a revolutionary vanguard organization can succeed through education and propaganda in raising the level of class consciousness among entire layers — let alone the majority — of the proletariat. Only individuals can absorb ideas through reading or study. The masses absorb ideas only through their experience in struggle. Any revolutionary propaganda divorced from the real experiences of proletarian struggle — on the pretext, say, that these experiences were too elementary, reformist, 'purely' economic, etc., etc. — is condemned in advance to remain without effect on the course of history.
By defining the obstacle, it is easier to see how to overcome it. What makes the progressive elimination of the subjective deficiencies of the proletariat objectively possible is the opening up of a period of struggles taking on broader and broader dimensions, raising more and more social problems of various kinds, able little by little to politicize wider layers of the proletariat and the working masses, and which are unfolding under the conditions of a progressive recomposition of the labour movement (i.e. of a shift in the relationship of forces between the vanguard and the traditional leaderships, both within the mass movement and within the traditional organizations themselves). This progressive recomposition need not, by the way, necessarily coincide with an organizational restructuring of the workers' movement, although it will inevitably bring about at least a partial one in the end.
What makes a solution to the crisis of the subjective factor subjectively attainable is for the revolutionary Marxist organization to have a correct overall orientation (programmatically, strategically and tactically), for it to increase its strength organizationally and politically (that is, to sink roots increasingly in the class), and for its revolutionary propaganda and agitation to gain increasing credibility by making a general political impact and scoring some initial successes here and there.
There is therefore a dialectical interrelationship between the radicalization and the politicization of workers' struggles, the growth of the mass vanguard, the strengthening of the influence of revolutionary Marxists within it, their increasing participation in the workers' struggles, and the response to their general revolutionary propaganda and to the practical steps they take to multiply experiences in which the workers assume the leadership of their own struggles and these are oriented towards transitional demands. It is this dynamic that will smash the barriers on the road to socialism one after the other. This dialectical interrelationship is one of active intervention and programmatic steadfastness, of initiating action and of mass education; it is one in which revolutionary propaganda leads to action.
Our Central Political Tasks
The main political tasks that the revolutionary Marxist organizations must accomplish during the present stage flow from the whole preceding analysis. The following are the tasks whose achievement will stimulate the dynamic of mass struggles and the growth of class consciousness outlined in the preceding section:
a) Systematic intervention in all agitation among workers, in all strikes and campaigns around economic demands, striving to link up these actions to the general approach outlined in the transitional programme — that is, to propagandize for a series of demands (essentially around the axis of the demand for workers' control) that objectively lead the workers to challenge the authority of the bosses and of the bourgeois state and to create organs of dual power.
b) Supporting the day-to-day struggles of the masses around all economic demands, even the most modest and 'reformist' ones, to the extent that these struggles educate the workers to seek solutions through direct action and mass initiative and push them in the direction of broadening and extending their struggles.
c) Popularizing and spreading so-called 'qualitative' demands that arise out of mass struggles themselves and that either undermine the very foundations of capitalist market economy or serve as a powerful stimulus for solidarity and unity among all layers of the proletariat — i.e. equal wage rises for everybody; no speed-up; free high-quality public services, etc., etc.
d) Pressing for, spurring on, broadening and, as soon as possible, extending examples of workers themselves organizing their own struggles (democratically elected strike committees, general strike assemblies, shop stewards democratically elected and recallable at any time, councils of shop stewards, etc.) — these are a great school preparing the workers for the soviet-type bodies that will spring up.
e) Conducting a systematic propaganda campaign in the organized workers' movement around transitional demands and helping in the recomposition of this movement by getting these demands — especially the demand for workers' control — adopted by radicalized sections of the trade-union movement and the traditional workers' organizations.
f) Organizing a systematic internationalist propaganda campaign around the axis of solidarity with anti-imperialist struggles, solidarity with workers' struggles in other European countries, solidarity with immigrant workers (in opposition to any form of racism and anti-foreignism), and solidarity with the anti-bureaucratic struggles of the workers, students and intellectuals in the Stalinized workers' states.
g) Educating the workers' vanguard and broader layers of workers systematically in a non-electoralist and non-parliamentarian view of the question of power. Using propaganda for the slogan of a workers' government — including in its concrete form of government by the workers' organizations, as can be appropriate during particular moments of the political conjuncture — to project primarily the idea of a government resulting from mass struggles and action. The use of this slogan in a more electoral sense must be strictly limited to specific circumstances depending on particular conjunctures. Otherwise it threatens to run counter to one of the essential goals to be attained — the systematic destruction of electoralist illusions and reformist ideology.
h) Taking credible steps to initiate unity of action: steps toward immediate unity of the entire vanguard in action around goals for which this unity of action is objectively necessary and possible, despite the various political and ideological differences running through it (cf. funeral for Pierre Overney in France); propaganda for a united front with the traditional organizations once a threshold in the relationship of forces within the workers' movement has been crossed; propaganda for a united front of the traditional organizations when the objective necessity presents itself (struggle against the threat of fascism or a bonapartist dictatorship; defense of the right to strike and working-class freedoms; defense of important strikes that the bourgeoisie is trying to crush, etc.).
i) Through general propaganda, but also and especially by pointing to actions, incidents and concrete events that have an obvious pedagogical value, to systematically educate the workers' vanguard and broader working-class layers on the need for armed self-defense against the violence of big capital, both in its extra-legal variety (fascist gangs, private armed forces of the capitalists, secret police forces, strike-breakers) and its 'legal' variety (police, riot squads and armies). To undertake a campaign of anti-militarist propaganda, including in the bourgeois army itself.
j) Systematically popularizing our 'socialist model' — our conception of socialist democracy, of a state based on workers' councils (councils of the working people), of democratically centralized (planned) self-management, of consciously organizing the withering away of market categories by both gradual means and abrupt leaps forward. This model can inspire political activity in several ways. It can mobilize people against capitalism, strengthen the vanguard vis-à-vis the reformist and Stalinist apparatuses, and help to preserve the future soviet state against bureaucratic deviations.
These central political tasks make up a coherent plan. The aim is to make sure that when the next explosion of mass struggle occurs — whether it takes the form of mass political strikes, a general strike, or a general strike involving an occupation of the factories, and no matter what the occasion and whatever sets it off — there will be a sufficient number of revolutionary worker cadres in the factories, with enough influence and prestige, the revolutionary Marxist organization will be established in enough places, and the broadest layers of workers will have acquired enough experience in struggle, for organs of dual power to spring up in the main factories and regions of the country, for these to federate rapidly into a single system of dual power (a system of the soviet type, even though its name and its origins might vary considerably), and for the logic of a revolutionary situation thereby to unfold fully on all levels. In other words, we are working in the conviction that every success today in sinking revolutionary Marxist roots in the class, in carrying out propaganda for transitional demands, and in recomposing the workers' movement will result a few years from now in a cumulative and qualitative improvement in the preconditions for the spread of a system of organs of dual power.
The Central Problems in Building Sections of the Fourth International in Europe at the Present Stage
Three Tactics
The tactic of party-building to which the central tasks of the present stage correspond — winning hegemony within the mass vanguard, transforming our sections from propaganda groups into revolutionary political organizations in the process of sinking roots in the proletariat — is peculiar to the present stage. It is neither a tactic of entryism (which was by and large valid during the preceding phase) nor one of massive organic growth by huge influxes of members (which could become valid during a subsequent stage).
These three different tactics in party building — used in a non-mechanical way, i.e. in combination with various transitional forms, such as fractions inside mass organizations, groups for sympathizers and contacts, etc. — correspond in a fundamental sense to three objective perspectives on the predominant form of radicalization. The entryist tactic for building a revolutionary party proceeded from the hypothesis that the process of radicalization — of forming a new mass vanguard — was taking place for the most part within the traditional mass organizations. Such a hypothesis was shown to be correct in capitalist Europe in the period that extended from the early fifties until the beginning of 1969 (e.g., Bevanite left and the Cousins tendency in the British Labour Party; Communist Youth and Ingrao tendency in the Italian CP; opposition tendencies and the UEC within the French CP; Social-Democratic left within the SFIO, giving rise to the PSA and the PSU; Renard tendency in the Belgian workers' movement; trade-union left and Communist opposition giving rise in Denmark to the SF; etc.).
The error committed in conceiving this tactic did not, therefore, lie in the objective perspective — which events have by and large confirmed — but in underestimating the numerical relationship between our own forces and [those] we could impel to break with the mass parties, in a social climate where no revolutionary tensions had yet appeared.
The tactic of building the revolutionary party through massive organic growth proceeds from the hypothesis that this party already represents in itself a pole of attraction that can attract radicalized workers and intellectuals directly through its propaganda, its agitation, and its activity (including its united-front initiatives), with whole segments breaking away from the traditional organizations to join it. Such a situation, which is by and large the [situation] in which the Western European Communist parties found themselves at the beginning of the twenties, around 1934-5 and again following the second world war, does not yet exist in the case of any revolutionary organizations on this continent today.
The tactic for building the revolutionary party which underlies our present orientation in capitalist Europe is [based] on the fact that the process of radicalization is already for the most part unfolding outside the traditional organizations, but is not yet taking place around the established pole of a revolutionary Marxist party, and is also having important repercussions — which could even become quantitatively decisive during a later stage — inside the traditional organizations. But the initiatives and general activity of the independent revolutionary Marxist organizations are already, at the present stage, decisive for the overall success of the process of radicalization at work both outside and inside the traditional organizations.
This tactic is based on a dialectical analysis of the relationship — at first glance, an intricate and even contradictory one — between the vanguard's need for ideological clarification and a regrouping and strengthening of its forces, on the one hand, and the rate of progress of that section of the masses who are still largely following the traditional organizations, on the other. We have already emphasized the fundamental fact that today the former process in the long run determines the outcome of the latter as well. There will not be any extensive and decisive splits in the traditional organizations without the appearance of credible enough and strong enough poles outside of these organizations around which such splits can crystallize.
An important factor must be added here that makes it possible to lessen, and within the not too distant future to resolve, the contradictory nature of the tasks imposed by the present stage — namely the fact that in addition to the gradual change in the relationship of forces between the traditional bureaucratic apparatuses and the vanguard, a change is also taking place in the relationship between the traditional parties and the masses who continue to follow them. Today this relationship is much more ambiguous than it was throughout the post-war period. The bitter experiences of the past have not been erased from the memory of the workers. After the experience of four Labour governments since the war, those British workers who are still convinced that Wilson & Co. want to introduce socialism by means of parliamentary legislation have dwindled to a very small number. The number of French or Italian workers who see Social-Democratic ministers as forces capable of overthrowing capitalism is even smaller.
For every capitalist country in Europe a more precise analysis is needed of the specific relationship between the proletarian masses and the traditional workers' parties. Such an analysis would, in any case, show that if the gap between the consciousness of the vanguard and the broader masses is still large, it is nonetheless smaller than that indicated by election results reflecting traditional loyalties and lesser-evil reflexes. There is less of a difference between the ability of the vanguard, on the one hand, and of the broader masses, on the other, to outflank the reformists and the Khrushchevite neo-reformists in action, than there is between the levels of consciousness of these two groups. The tactic for building revolutionary parties suited to the present stage of working-class radicalization must be based on an analysis of these concrete processes.
The Uneven Development of the Radicalization
In the same way as we must attach a prime importance to the dialectical relationship between the radicalization of the vanguard and that of the broader masses, so too the dialectical relationship between the radicalization of different layers of the population ready for revolutionary action takes on a great importance for building our organizations. This dialectical relationship, reflected in the dialectical relationship between areas of activity, comprises the following elements:
a) During the initial phase of the present social crisis, the broadest political radicalization developed within the university and high-school student milieu. Independently of the ups and downs in the student movement proper in the universities and high schools — that is, the movement around the social and material problems specific to this milieu — a broad and highly politicized vanguard has crystallized among the student youth, oriented toward general political problems, primarily problems of solidarity with the colonial revolution and anti-imperialist movements throughout the world.
After May 1968 and, more generally, after the revival of workers' struggles throughout Europe, an irreversible turn has taken place in this milieu everywhere in the world. This milieu takes up a position today primarily in function of intervening in workers' struggles and of the perspectives of these struggles. In view of the continual renewal of the student population, and in view of the continuing explosion on campuses, it remains both possible and necessary to politicize younger layers by means of anti-imperialist propaganda and action, above all in periods of ebb in workers' struggles. Demands peculiar to the university and high-school student milieu continue to provide a ferment of agitation and organization that can radicalize the less politicized layers. But the capacity of revolutionary Marxists to bring these strata to a general understanding of the revolutionary programme and to the revolutionary party depends on the overall activity of the revolutionary Marxist organization and its political initiatives, as well as the extent and effectiveness of its intervention in the working class.
In the present conditions of the recomposition of the workers' movement, of the expansion of the vanguard and growing politicization, it is becoming easier and easier to move from supporting the specific demands of university and high-school students to upholding the revolutionary Marxist programme in its entirety.
b) The most important phenomenon is the radicalization of the working class. This, however, is developing unevenly. The growing militancy of the class has not been accompanied by a corresponding politicization. The radicalization is most extensive among the natural leaders of the class — the worker and trade-union activists who are detonating and leading militant and wildcat strikes, who are constituting the nuclei of class-struggle tendencies within the unions, who are the principal bearers of the radicalization within the traditional workers' organizations (first of all, the unions). The increasing number of examples where the bureaucratic apparatuses have been outflanked as a result of the initiative given by these vanguard worker militants shows how widespread and important this development is. This radicalization is often limited to more advanced conceptions regarding methods of struggle and immediate objectives and divorced from a clear understanding of political problems, notably the question of power.
Therefore, in the present stage, the recruitment of these working-class leaders into the revolutionary organization is creating manifold problems. These arise from the different levels of politicization of these worker elements and activists coming out of the high-school and university student movements; different life-styles and levels of activity; different interests; etc. The older workers remain less ready in the present stage to join a revolutionary Marxist organization, even if it has already shown its effectiveness in intervening in the class struggle.
The section of the working class in which the most important gains can be made at the present time, both in recruitment and in creating a revolutionary Marxist political periphery in the proletariat, is thus the layer of young working-class leaders and activists, those who personify the new mass vanguard that is developing within the working class, who have already won their first stripes in working-class struggles, are already respected as trade-union builders, and are already winning influence in the eyes of their older workmates.
c) A phenomenon becoming widespread in all the capitalist countries of Europe is the appearance of rebellious young workers and apprentices who represent a kind of extension of the revolt of the student youth into the working class proper. It is vital for the European sections of the Fourth International to respond to this radicalization and win hegemony in this stratum of the youth. There is no mechanical separation between the radicalization of the student youth on the one hand and that of the apprentices and young workers on the other. The average level of the politicization and consciousness of the latter categories has risen considerably in recent years, above all in the big metropolitan centres. In many big plants, the young working-class strata represent an element less easily controlled by the bureaucratic apparatuses and more likely to move into action boldly and to express out loud what masses of older workers are thinking, half hopefully, half sceptically. The struggle for revolutionary Marxist hegemony within the new mass vanguard is in large part a struggle for winning the radicalized working-class youth.
d) Besides the main currents of radicalization affecting the working class and the student youth, there is a secondary current of radicalization manifesting itself in the petty-bourgeois milieu — technical 'new middle strata', scientific and artistic circles, and in some countries, notably France, young peasants. Without shifting their principal focuses of activity, the revolutionary Marxist organizations must keep a close watch on these currents, offering them the perspective of our socialist 'model', which responds to their fundamental concerns, and trying to attract their most advanced elements into our own ranks. Forming ad hoc bodies or publishing ad hoc magazines may be useful in reaching this milieu. But the primary thing is to attract them by our full programme and the full range of our political initiatives.
The New Revolutionary Left
Within the mass vanguard that has appeared in the countries of capitalist Europe, we must make a distinction between unorganized elements (unorganized, that is, except in mass organizations like trade unions) who are mobilizable essentially for broad struggles and demonstrations but do not take the path of building specific vanguard organizations, and those elements who are grouped in such organizations. Little by little, a new organized revolutionary left is taking the place of the 'political mass movement' of preceding years (which was based primarily on a still united high-school and university student movement).
The organization of this new revolutionary left has developed in two stages. The first period was dominated by tendencies that crystallized under the influence of developments in the world revolution (assimilated critically or uncritically, depending on the specific case) and of the first spontaneous reflexes produced by the first reawakening of independent working-class activity. In this stage, we can distinguish, in general, three currents: the spontaneist current, the Maoist current and the Trotskyist current (with a few intermediary phenomena, i.e. Mao-spontaneism). The Maoism that largely predominated in this phase in certain countries (above all, Italy, Sweden and Norway, but also partly in West Germany) was a naive Maoism. It was based largely on the vague formulas of the cultural revolution, which the radicalized student left thought reflected its concerns and solutions. Orthodox, uncritical Maoism, taking its inspiration from Stalin as well as Mao, has remained marginal, like those currents that have kept their bridges open to the traditional SPs and CPs, which are rejected in toto as 'betrayers' and 'revisionists'. The only exceptions are Holland and Finland, where the CPs continue to influence an appreciable section of the student movement, thanks notably to their role in workers' struggles.
During the second phase, a more political, less naive differentiation has been taking place, helped along by the sudden right turn in the foreign policy of the People's Republic of China (e.g. Bangla Desh, Ceylon, Sudan, Nixon's visit to Peking) and the Lin Piao affair. Naive and vague Maoism, and its extreme form Mao-spontaneism, are experiencing a definite decline. Pure spontaneism, which rejects any concept of a vanguard organization, has been reabsorbed into more classical anarchist and semi-anarchist formations and has become marginal. Political currents have evolved or are in the process of evolving toward the following main physiognomies:
a) Classical ultra-left currents (of a third-period Stalinist or a Bordigist type), rejecting as 'capitalist' not only the USSR but China, rejecting the idea that there is any difference between bourgeois democracy and fascism, and often rejecting the idea that there is any need for working in the unions (e.g. Potere Operaio in Italy).
b) Ultra-left Maoist currents (like Cause du Peuple in France), which combine a general lack of understanding of the organized workers' movement and classical ultra-left positions (of a third period type) with an analogous position regarding the USSR, but which at the same time approve (with some minor criticisms) the course of the Chinese bureaucracy.
c) Originally ultra-left currents evolving toward centrism, with large openings toward the mass CPs and SPs, which limit working-class agitation to immediate demands and raise the tactic of the united front to the level of a strategic principle. (The KFml in Sweden, the International Socialists in Britain, Bandera Roja in Spain).
d) 'Purified' and 'orthodox' Maoist currents evolving toward neo-Stalinism and aligning themselves uncritically with all the diplomatic manoeuvres of the Chinese bureaucracy. This current is rapidly declining everywhere (the German KPD and the Unione in Italy).
e) Currents that might be called 'sophisticated semi-Maoists' or 'half-Trotskyist Maoists', of the type of Avanguardia Operaia in Italy or Revolution in France, which, while taking their distance from Maoist foreign policy and from the lingering Stalinist odours of the orthodox Maoist groups, are trying to hold onto an eclectic political orientation from the previous period, based on a sentimental longing for 'revolutionary unity' or even for a 'third current in the international Communist movement'. The demand for 'theoretical depth' advanced by this current in reality represents an opportunistic refusal to defend a revolutionary Marxist programme for fear of being identified with 'despised and outmoded Trotskyism'. In a general sense, it is the uneven rate of radicalization between the student youth and the rebelling young workers on the one hand, and the organized workers' movement on the other, that is at the root of all the deviations of these currents. They are characterized fundamentally by their incomprehension not only of the organized workers' movement as such but also of the forms and dynamic of the differentiation going on within it. They therefore by their nature oscillate between ultra leftism and centrism, depending on the preponderant conjunctural pressures.
The Decline of Centrism and the Reorganization of the Workers Movement
This reorganization of the European revolutionary left coincides with two phenomena that determine its limits and pre-figure its dynamic — the rapid decline of the centrist formations that emerged at the beginning of the 1960s (disappearance of the PSIUP, the break-up of the PSU in France and the VS in Denmark, the decline of the PSP in the Netherlands and the SF in Norway), and the revival of the influence of the traditional organizations in a not inconsiderable sector of the vanguard (the CP in Great Britain and Italy, Social Democracy in West Germany and to some extent in Sweden).
The revolutionary Marxists struggling for political hegemony within the new vanguard cannot reject all of this organized revolutionary left as simply 'ultra-leftist'. They continue to advocate unity in action of all revolutionaries for precise objectives and at precise moments (e.g. the funeral of Pierre Overney in France) when these objectives coincide with the real interest of the working class and its vanguard. The revolutionary Marxists are striving, as the political differentiation develops, to become the principal pole of regroupment for the revolutionary left, on the basis of their political analyses (China, the USSR, permanent revolution, working-class bureaucracy, attitude toward the unions, transitional demands, organization of workers' struggles, workers' democracy, 'model' of socialism, etc.), which have been confirmed by events, and on the basis of their growing implantation in the working class.
At the same time, the revolutionary Marxists are deliberately trying to bridge the gap that developed in the preceding period between the revolutionary left and the organized workers' movement. In this they have a dual objective. To reduce the risks of the revolutionary left finding itself isolated in the face of repression by the bourgeois state — which in these circumstances would be largely successful — and to bring the weight of the revolutionary left to bear in order to radicalize the organized workers' movement, which is in the process of recomposition. In this regard, specific united campaigns involving important sections of the organized workers' movement together with the revolutionary left play a vital role. This aim is best served by the campaign in defense of the Vietnamese revolution; the campaign in defense of the victims of repression; the campaign in defense of the unions' right to strike and freedom of collective bargaining; and more generally the campaign in defense of democratic rights that have been undermined or openly attacked by the bourgeoisie.
The role of pivot that the revolutionary Marxists are seeking to play between the revolutionary left and the organized workers' movement by no means represents a centrist scheme of balancing on electoral combinations or inter-bureaucratic agreements, as the PSU and PSIUP have done. To the contrary, it represents a profound understanding of the dialectical inter-relationship that dominates the whole present phase: the interaction through manifold intermediary stages between a mass vanguard forming and going into action, and radicalization in the traditional organizations (a classic example in this regard is what has been happening in Great Britain since the start of the struggle against the Tories' anti-strike bill). While we are convinced that the Social Democratic, Stalinist, and trade-union bureaucracies remain an essential roadblock on the path to the socialist revolution — a roadblock that must be shattered, as the workers' struggles broaden and radicalize, by the pressure of rising class consciousness and the strengthening of the revolutionary-Marxist organizations — we are equally convinced that no revolutionary mass party will see the light of day, that no generalized system of dual power bodies can arise from these struggles, without mass currents breaking off from the traditional leaderships on the basis of their own experience. The precise tactic the revolutionary Marxists adopt toward the organized workers' movement, and of whose correctness they try to convince broader sections of the new revolutionary vanguard, has the objective of stimulating, facilitating and politically orienting this polarization and splitting-off process.
The period we have entered into since 1968 — with differences from country to country — is characterized by the fact that the masses are tending periodically to unleash vast struggles which outflank the traditional organizations, and that initiatives by these organizations are no longer indispensable for the spread of such battles. But, on the other hand, the masses are still not capable of projecting general political solutions, and thus of posing the question of political power, independently of these traditional organizations. Our orientation of 'unity in action plus outflanking the bureaucrats' takes into account these two sides of reality, thereby avoiding the twin traps of opportunist tail-ending on the Lambertist model and sectarian isolation.
Transforming the sections of the Fourth International from propaganda groups into revolutionary political organizations which, as a result of winning political hegemony within the new mass vanguard, will be on the way to sinking roots in the working class, calls for recruiting hundreds, and in certain countries thousands, of new members. The objective is to create a political and organizational striking force that can serve as the springboard for this transformation.
Sinking roots in the working class itself raises the problem of the relationship between the new reinforced revolutionary organization and the broader vanguard sectors (in the working class, the student youth and other radicalizing sectors) that the revolutionary Marxists influence and seek to direct politically but which are not ready to join our sections or, if they did join them en masse, would threaten to undermine their political unity and programmatic foundations. There are two sides to the problem — contact and sympathizer organizations and stable alliances.
In the student youth sector and the radicalized petty-bourgeois layers, contact and sympathizer groups are most suitable for broadening the sphere of influence and activity of our sections, at the same time as enabling the youth who have recently come to activity based on the full revolutionary programme to demonstrate political seriousness and consistent activism. By nature these organizations should be broad, which means a large turnover. While this is disastrous for a revolutionary-Marxist organization, it does not threaten structures whose precise aim is to select out the serious revolutionary activists from a mass of people who are active only sporadically. The broader the mass involved in this selection process, the more effective the process will be and the more substantial its results. Thus, we must not artificially limit the expansion of these contact and sympathizer organizations (Taupe Rouge, Red Mole Circles, local groups of the JGS, shop groups, etc.), nor apply to them in practice the standards demanded of probationary members of our sections.
While in specific circumstances this type of transmission structure may be extended to sections of young workers, it is not suited to creating the basis of confidence and mutual collaboration necessary for continuous activity among workers. Besides the factory cells of our sections, a base in the working class necessitates creating permanent bodies linking revolutionary-Marxist militants and worker and trade-union activists who agree with the revolutionists on a programme for their factory or trade-union but are not ready to engage in continuous political activity based on the full revolutionary-Marxist programme. The most adequate bodies for this purpose are trade-union tendencies or worker groups in factories.
Just as trade-union tendencies have proved historically to be instruments of continuous revolutionary activity, so 'struggle committees' always prove to be purely conjunctural instruments. Revolutionary Marxists favour creating such committees for precise objectives, such as preparing for a union campaign or preparing for a strike. But they will try to convince their fellow fighters that transforming such committees into permanent bodies that would continue to exist outside periods of acute struggle is condemned to failure. Such formations shrink rapidly and threaten to cut off the most militant activists from the broader mass, by leading them to act in practice like a small minority union or like a semi- or sub-political group. The basic orientation of the revolutionary Marxists toward these 'struggle committees' in the factories is to transform the potential for militancy and activism that emerges in every bargaining campaign, militant strike or anti-bureaucratic struggle in a plant, into a trade-union tendency that will open up a fight for democracy in the union — and, as soon as the relationship of forces permits, for class-struggle militants taking the leadership of the union.
Just as it is necessary in periods of struggle to outflank the trade-union organizations without fear of possible sanctions in order to create a working-class base, so in periods of ebb or indifference on the part of the rank and file it is advisable to pay attention to the risks involved in confrontations with the union bureaucracy.
The intervention of revolutionary Marxists in other radicalized groups (women, artists, scholars, users of public services, tenants, groups defending the environment) can give rise to analogous problems. The priority of winning a base in the working class and strengthening the organization and its general political activity has consequences for the involvement of revolutionary Marxists in these sectors. The revolutionary Marxists will organize themselves into communist fractions operating within mass movements or specific existing groups and seek to bring the most advanced elements from these radicalized sectors first into transmission groups of the Taupe Rouge type, and then to recruit them to the revolutionary Marxist organization, on the basis of three types of activity — propagandizing for our full programme; agitating for those immediate and long-term solutions which are most suited to the needs of these sectors, at the same time as being integrated into a firmly revolutionary anti-capitalist orientation and in harmony with the socialist 'model' we support; advocating forms of organizing and mobilizing that stress self-organization, direct action, linking up with the struggles of the working class, and the convergence of the struggle for workers' control and these various forms of struggle for social control.
The Type of Organisation most suited to the Present Capabilities of Revolutionaries in Capitalist Europe
The Renewal of the European Sections of the Fourth International
In the present stage starting in 1967-8, the Fourth International began a turn towards independent activity aimed at winning political hegemony in the new mass vanguard. Since its sections had undergone a process of over-specialization in applying the entry tactic, they generally went about making this shift in too slow and stiff a way. The turn was carried out in the best conditions everywhere there existed real youth organizations led by revolutionary Marxists existing independently, that could get round the problem of a section identified in the eyes of the vanguard with an entryist orientation.
On the other hand, there was a real danger that youth organizations lacking a sufficient number of experienced Trotskyist cadres would let themselves be caught up in a sectarian (or spontaneist) tendency to underestimate and misjudge the organized workers' movement, and would transmit these pressures, of petty-bourgeois social origin, that were typical of a large part of the new revolutionary vanguard during the first phase, into the Fourth International itself. This danger subsists, moreover, in those countries where this evolution has occurred, or is in the process of occurring, several years behind the countries where the mass vanguard is most extensive (France, Italy, Great Britain, Spain).
For these two reasons, the Fourth International opted for a rather rapid fusion between the pseudo-youth organizations, that in reality were substituting for revolutionary-Marxist organizations that did not function within the new revolutionary left, and the old sections which had kept a varying — but in most cases appreciable — number of experienced Trotskyist cadres rooted in the organized workers' movement. This pragmatic solution has paid off in all cases where it has been applied. It has permitted a considerable increase in our numerical forces, as well as a broadening of our following in the mass vanguard, without the loss of positions or prestige in the organized workers' movement — in fact the contrary. It has enabled us to avoid grave political errors — minor ones of course have been inevitable — as a result of a sudden expansion of our forces and our tasks. The only case where this integration was not carried out in time (Italy) is where we suffered heavy losses, losing the major part of the youth under our influence, along with part of the older Trotskyist cadres.
The position adopted thus opposes building or long maintaining pseudo-organizations of revolutionary youth which, in a given context and in view of the relationship of forces, would continue to function as substitutes for adult revolutionary organizations, while showing many of the failings typical of the radical student milieu. But this position is by no means opposed in principle to building genuine youth organizations, that would confine themselves to the specific tasks of youth work on the basis of the sphere of activity, base and influence already achieved by adult revolutionary organizations. The possibility for taking a turn to form (or rebuild) such a youth organization thus depends strictly on the relationship of forces, i.e. the influence that the adult organization has already acquired in the vanguard, its base in the working class, and the number of cadres that can be put at the disposal of the youth organization. As long as it has not [reached] the critical threshold in forces and roots in the working class necessary to attempting such a project, the adult revolutionary organization will strive to organize sympathizer groupings specifically adapted to youth, such as were mentioned above.
A special problem is raised by the increasing opportunities for members or sympathizers of revolutionary Marxist organizations to win positions of leadership in youth organizations that are not specifically revolutionary (trade-union youth groups, high school and university student organizations, etc.). In each concrete case, it will be necessary to assess the advantages of such an investment of forces, by weighing the gains that could be made (especially in winning a base in the unions and the plants, achieving mass influence on specific issues, and playing a part in recomposing the organized workers' movement) against the gaps such a deployment threatens to create elsewhere (notably in reducing the number of cadres of leadership ability ready to assume the tasks of leading the organization or directing its open external activities).
Three Priorities in Employing our Forces
Every small revolutionary organization faces a multiplying number of tasks that overstrain its strength and grow as it grows. The essential job of any leadership worthy of the name is to set an order of priorities based on general analyses and perspectives and to resist temptations to depart from it in an impressionistic way, under the pressure of new opportunities turning up in this or that sector.
Of course, this order of priorities must be periodically reviewed and revised critically in the light of an assessment of the results achieved and possible changes in the objective situation (conditions in the organized workers' movement also being an element of the objective situation from the standpoint of the revolutionary-Marxist organisations). Adhering to these priorities must also be combined with the tactical flexibility necessary to take advantage of abrupt turns and major opportunities that suddenly open up. But such flexibility must play the same role as utilizing reserves in military strategy. It cannot substitute for the strategy itself. Otherwise the basic orientation, the order of priorities, is lost, giving way to impressionistic leaps from one 'opening' to another.
From all the preceding analysis, there flow three priorities for employing our forces, which, moreover, are closely linked together:
— a primitive accumulation of forces, to make it possible to reach the take-off point of effective political intervention on a national scale, without which winning hegemony within the mass vanguard is absolutely unachievable.
— a central political breakthrough to transform our numerically increased forces into a revolutionary political striking force, keeping them from being worn away in discontinuous actions, or those confined to isolated sectors, which would threaten to result in their being caught up in workerist, tail-ending, spontaneist and other deviations.
— a growing implantation in the workers' and trade-union movement, to enable us to transform the numerically and politically strengthened revolutionary organizations into a permanent factor in raising the level of consciousness and organization of the most militant layers of the workers; into a driving force in preparing for future explosions of mass struggle and for their culmination in a system of dual power.
From these combined priorities — which are not the same as the ones in the preceding period and are not yet those of a struggle to win control of the broad masses away from the traditional parties — flow conclusions about the type of organization needed in the present stage, the deployment of our forces, their mode of operating and intervening, etc. These questions are eminently concrete and take on a special character for every section, depending on the point reached in the primitive accumulation of forces, in acquiring the capacity for making a central political breakthrough, in winning a base in the working class. Nonetheless, a certain number of general rules can already be discerned from the experiences of the last four years.
a) In the present stage, in view of the nature of the mass vanguard and the new highly politicized revolutionary left, no serious progress can be accomplished by means of febrile activism and superficial, primitive agitation. What is absolutely essential is to demonstrate the superiority of our analyses, to defend and illustrate our full programme, to stand out as the main centre of living Marxism in our time. Anything that is not won on this basis, especially in the student and intellectual milieu, will not be definitively won. From this logically flows the importance of cadre training and theoretical and political elaboration on a high level.
b) The vanguard does not recognize, has never recognized and will never recognize self-proclaimed 'new revolutionary leaderships'. This status must be won by the overall activity of the organization. In this regard, it is vital not to let ourselves be deceived and to distinguish carefully between the influence and prestige that can be won by revolutionary Marxist militants in a specific milieu in the mass movement, on the basis of their individual talents and leadership abilities, and the influence of the revolutionary Marxist organization as such on sections of the working class, on the basis of the organization's full programme. This second kind of influence is by no means the result of the former, although, among other factors, the respect won by individuals is an essential element in winning general political influence. The most striking example of this distinction is presented by the Communist Party of Great Britain. During the last twenty years, this party has seen thousands of its members win dominant positions in the lower echelons of the trade unions (enabling them to lead major struggles in the last three years), while its political influence on the British working class is doubtless at its lowest point since 1940.
Revolutionary Marxist organizations the size of the present sections of the Fourth International cannot hope to win a general political following in the working class as a whole in one fell swoop. But they can, after reaching a certain threshold, win a political following among a layer of young vanguard workers, by means of two tactics that must be used as much as possible in the present stage: 1. organizing national political campaigns on carefully chosen issues that correspond to the concerns of the vanguard, do not run against the current of mass struggles, and offer a chance for demonstrating a capacity for effective initiative, even if still modest, by our sections; 2. our sections' ability to centralize their forces on a regional and national level in order to break the wall of silence and indifference surrounding certain exemplary, 'wildcat' workers' struggles, and to start off solidarity movements with them.
c) The presence within the working class, in the plants and the unions, of thousands of elements that have an oppositionist attitude towards the traditional organizations and can be drawn into important struggles is confirmed by all the experience of the last years. But these workers are scattered, isolated from one another, often disillusioned by their experiences in new organizations into which they have let themselves be drawn unthinkingly, almost always under the pressure of a threat of repression from the bosses and the trade-union bureaucracy. It is illusory to think that we can absorb these people into our sections in one stroke. Individual cases aside, they will only become a social base for revolutionary Marxist organizations to the extent that these organizations demonstrate their political and organizational seriousness. And such seriousness involves, in addition to the tasks mentioned above, regular, persistent, long-term intervention in the plants and unions regardless of the immediate results and regardless of the ups and downs in the class struggle.
Centralized Leadership and Autonomy of Activity
The priorities that flow from the preceding analysis imply a [certain] type of revolutionary leadership, [both] as regards the [hierar]chy of its tasks but also as regards its own [structure]. More than ever the political and organizational strength, the stability and continuity, of the [leadership] are decisive in successfully carrying out the [tasks that flow from a choice of priorities]. Without this type of leadership, neither a choice of priorities nor a [concentration] of our forces can be achieved. Without the presence of such a central leadership, a sudden [and massive] influx of a large number of young [members] would rapidly lead to the development of regionalist and localist tendencies, which would result in grave political [mistakes and] incorrect generalizations from particular [experiences]. This would also lead to grave [organizational mistakes], the [repercussions] of which would be felt by all revolutionary militants in connection with the objective tasks of the present stage themselves.
[This type of leadership is not one of the] creation and [imposition of decisions from above by an elite raised above the] others. What needs to be stressed is not a purely administrative centralization but political centralization of the Leninist type, which would make it possible to unify the experience of the entire organization, to test the [correctness] of its analysis in the light of practical experience nationally and internationally. This in turn [wou]ld make it possible to concentrate forces at the right time in the most opportune sector, thus multiplying the effectiveness of a given number of activists, whose individual effecti[veness] [would] be greatly reduced by the absence of a [central] leadership and [precise] priorities. [Such a leadership must be able to unify the experience and lead the organization] through secondary leaderships already formed or in formation. It must have a central press with a [maxi]mum readership, and a material and financial [base (a cen]tral print shop and regional apparatuses) that make it possible to intervene rapidly in strikes and various mass movements and support in practice the national campaigns of the organization.
On the other hand, with the growth of the organization, the multiplication of its tasks, and the previously mentioned priorities of the leading bodies, we must aim for more and more independent activity on the part of the cells, the local and regional leaderships, the work commissions and fractions in specific milieus and specific struggles that do not have national significance. The absence of such autonomy would threaten to create continual bottlenecks at the level of leading bodies and tend to interfere with or even overshadow their main role, which is general political elaboration and setting priorities. To the contrary, by encouraging such independent analysis and activity at the [l]ower levels, the revolutionary Marxist organization will be transformed into a permanent school for leaders, which is, moreover, indispensable if it is to become the nucleus of a mass revolutionary party.
The national leadership cannot encourage such a selecting out of secondary cadres by constantly substituting itself for regional and local leaderships, or by intervening constantly in work commissions and trade-union tendencies. In this regard, it must concentrate on the above-mentioned tasks of political centralization, and conceive its job with respect to the intermediary cadres as one of training and selection — which involves, of course, making critical balance sheets periodically. Expanding the central committees of the sections, getting these bodies to function as collective instruments of high-level political elaboration and education, calling periodic national conferences on special subjects and organizing leadership schools, will help solve the problem of training intermediate cadres.
[Similar considerations apply to the] national weekly of the organization — which is its principal instrument of political intervention. [At the] same time, meeting the organizational priorities mentioned above creates an imperious necessity, at certain stages of the section's growth, for a network of [factory and] plant papers, complemented by local organs in regions or localities where a stronger base exists, and by a theoretical journal for those sections where the milieu the organization [addresses and its own maturity] make it essential to present supplementary political [and theoretical] analysis of a higher level. [The functioning of] this whole [press] system depends on [the] strength of the organization [that] must [be built up].
Similar considerations apply also to problems of finance and the material base of the organization. Solving the central financial problems of the organization (ensuring adequate functioning of the national [apparatus and the] publication of the central political organ of the section, a basic mini[mum of full-time functionaries, etc.]) has [top] priority. But above a certain threshold it becomes an essential precondition for realizing the benefits of the leadership and influence that has been won and for continued progress to leave the regional and local bodies [with a portion of] their own [fi]nancial resources and for there to be a certain minimum technical apparatus at this level — and, in a later stage, regional and local full-timers. In this area also, the national leadership must follow a flexible system of [centralization and periodic] review, [avoiding] choices being made in a routine way, under the impact of pressures from the outside, or without taking account of the interests of the organization as a whole.
The Fight Against Repression
The perspective unfolding is one of rather rapid progressive growth of the revolutionary Marxist organizations, in a climate favouring radicalization of the working class and the gradual infusion of the revolutionary programme into an increasingly broad vanguard. The bourgeoisie is also aware of this perspective, as it realizes the grave risks involved for the survival of its system and its state. It would, of course, be illusory to think that the bourgeoisie is going to sit by passively and watch the development and strengthening of the revolutionary Marxist organizations.
The two principal dangers threatening the revolutionary Marxist organizations in this regard are the following:
a) A selective state repression aimed essentially at the revolutionary left, possibly going as far as outlawing it (the way would be paved by a campaign to stigmatize it as 'criminal', like the ones unleashed in France at the time of the vote on the 'anti-wrecker law', in Italy around the Valpreda and Feltrinelli affairs, and in Germany under the pretext of the Baader-Meinhof affair). This danger arises from a precise conjuncture in which the bourgeoisie considers the relationship of forces still unfavourable for unleashing massive repression against the entire labour movement, but seeks to prepare for this by repression against the revolutionary left alone. The foundations must be laid now for a counter-attack, by creating a climate of general solidarity against repression, of defending all the democratic rights of the workers' movement, and of de facto recognition that the revolutionary left organizations are part of the organized workers' movement. Our fundamental line for blocking this first danger is to prevent the revolutionary left from becoming isolated from the mass workers' organizations.
b) The danger of extra-legal repression at the hands of hired gangsters acting as supplementary police, private security forces of employers, and armed semi-fascists. This weapon, already used extensively by the Brazilian, Uruguayan, Argentinian and Mexican bourgeoisies, has been imported to Europe via Franco's Spain and the Greece of the colonels, and its use is spreading today in France and Italy. The danger of this method of terror being introduced into most capitalist European countries cannot be underestimated.
The most effective response to this danger is to revive the reflexes of self-defense and preparation for workers' militias on the basis of worker and student strike pickets. But it has already proved indispensable in Spain and France for the revolutionary organizations themselves to take initiatives in self-defense. This may be the case tomorrow in other European countries. Such initiatives must be conceived and executed in such a way that they will be understood and endorsed by the workers, link up with the workers' organizations' tradition of self-defense against fascists, and serve as exemplary strongpoints to encourage more massive forms of self-defense on the part of the working class.
The existence of these dangers, as well as the logic of an objective situation that can shift rapidly toward pre-revolutionary or even revolutionary conditions, oblige the sections of the Fourth International to give special attention to the problems of security and to the systematic preparation of an apparatus that can enable the organization to continue functioning with the maximum efficiency possible when the imperialist repression seeks to drive it underground. The more effective these responses and preparations are, the more the bourgeoisie will hesitate to go further down the road of repression or of using semi-fascist bands.
The spirit in which our sections will have to educate the entire mass vanguard, moreover, is this: to show the bourgeoisie in practice that the price it will have to pay for any attempt to establish an open dictatorship will be a civil war in which both camps will use arms. History has shown that from any point of view, such an eventuality is preferable to an institutionalized civil war in the form of a bloodthirsty dictatorship where the bourgeois camp murders and tortures at will, while the proletariat and the worker militants, disarmed and disoriented, stand by helplessly and watch the massacre of their own.
Build the International Simultaneously with the National Organizations
Building revolutionary-Marxist organizations in capitalist Europe is inseparably linked to building the Fourth International as an international organization. The two tasks interpenetrate, from the standpoint both of the objective needs of the class struggle and of the specific job of strengthening the Trotskyist current within the mass vanguard.
The internationalization of workers' struggles is an inevitable trend produced by the growing internationalization of capital. The existence of the Common Market, the international interpenetration of capital, the weight of multinational corporations owning factories in many European countries, the trends to more advanced economic and monetary integration in capitalist Europe — all these factors bring international collective bargaining and contracts, international wage actions and Europe-wide strikes more and more onto the agenda.
The revolutionary Marxists who years ago foresaw and predicted this evolution must not limit themselves to supporting or encouraging trade-union initiatives that go in this direction. They must give the indispensable push to move this internationalization of the class struggle beyond the stage of being confined to a purely economistic, corporative or sectoral level. The propaganda of the revolutionary Marxists for a socialist United States of Europe — for solidarity not only with economic strikes abroad, but also with the political struggle of the Spanish, Portuguese, Greek and Irish proletariat and with the anti-bureaucratic fighters of the deformed and degenerated workers' states — must lead to organizational results. It must lead on the one hand to broad international fronts of solidarity, and on the other to training the first revolutionary-Marxist cadres, forming the first Trotskyist nuclei and reinforcing the sections of the Fourth International respectively in a series of countries. Likewise the revolutionary Marxists must take concrete initiatives in those sectors where multinational firms have a decisive weight.
A powerful revival of the workers' reflexes of international solidarity, moreover, plays a major role in the development of the class struggle in Europe in the present period in the following ways:
a) To neutralize the negative effects of the internationalization of capital on the efficacy of national strikes, effects that will become more and more important in the years to come.
b) To accelerate the integration of the immigrant workers into the phalanx of the workers' movement and to block attempts by the bourgeoisie to utilize racism and anti-foreignism aimed at these workers as a weapon for dividing the proletariat — attempts which are going to increase.
c) To prepare the European proletariat to resist massively any attempt at counter-revolutionary intervention against a socialist revolution winning victory first in a single country of capitalist Europe — a preparation that must be undertaken in advance and in a systematic way as the proletariat returns to its internationalist traditions.
In the broad framework of their general tasks of solidarity toward the struggles of all oppressed peoples, the European sections of the Fourth International bear a special responsibility to:
a) Defend the Vietnamese revolution by maintaining a high degree of mobilization of the vanguard in support of the victory of this revolution, so as to neutralize to some extent the pressures of the Soviet and Chinese bureaucracies on the Vietnamese leadership to seek a compromise with Washington.
b) To defend the Irish struggle against the attempts of British imperialism to isolate it from the British and European proletariat and crush it militarily.
These internationalist political tasks, moreover, impose specific organizational tasks on the revolutionary Marxists of capitalist Europe: tighter co-ordination in the day-to-day work of the European sections of the Fourth International (on special problems, such as the immigrant workers and anti-imperialist and anti-bureaucratic solidarity; through special campaigns on the occasion of strikes with international ramifications, and so forth). Such co-ordination calls for creating ad hoc bodies under the control of the international leadership.
Closer co-ordination of the day-to-day work of the European sections of the Fourth International will have the goal notably of transforming the still very uneven development of these sections into a combined development. Every success in a given sector, every specific breakthrough by one of its sections, can become a reference point, a training experience and a point of departure for similar successes by other sections. This effort must go hand in hand with a systematic effort to give an international amplification to the most advanced forms of working-class struggle and organization achieved by the advanced strata of the proletariat in one or another European country.
Of all the currents of the new mass vanguard, of all the currents of the organized workers' movement, the Trotskyist current alone proclaims the necessity of building an international organization simultaneously with the construction of national revolutionary organizations; alone rejects as a reactionary utopia in our time the conception calling for building strong national revolutionary organizations first, in order to arrive later — by a sudden transformation whose secret has never been revealed — at a politically homogeneous International. The eminently international character of the economy, of politics, of society, of the class struggle in our time is no 'Trotskyist fixation' but a concrete and tangible reality constantly impressed on the vanguard and the conscious workers by the facts. If internationalism — not platonic and literary but practical and organizational — is the distinguishing mark of the Trotskyists in the mass vanguard, this is an argument that already pleads in favour of our movement and will do so more and more powerfully as a result of the lesson of events. Every increase in the strength of the Fourth International, every success in transforming any of our sections from a propaganda group into a revolutionary organization capable of taking the initiative politically and beginning to win a base in the working class, will have favourable repercussions on the construction and growth of all the other sections. In this sense also, building the sections and building the International interpenetrate and form a single organic process, not simply the sum total of national successes or failures.