'The masses will rule in their own name'
1988Jeff Mackler 1988-09Read it in the scan (PDF at ETOL), page 13 →
Jeff Mackler's speech to the Aug. 6 rally, Special Supplement p. 1 (scan p. 13), transcribed from the scan; read from the scan 3 Nov 2026 (van Gelderen pass). Charlie Van Gelderen's letter, which the split had run into it, is now its own article (18a).
Transcribed from the scan by hand, after a reader reported the machine-read text; the scan remains the authority.
Scan page 13
Jeff Mackler is co-National Secretary of Socialist Action.
Leon Trotsky was driven from the country where he led the most powerful explosion of working class solidarity the world has ever seen. He was hounded and driven from nation to nation and finally assassinated by Stalin's agent in Mexico with a pickax through his brain.
Trotsky's co-thinkers who led the Russian Revolution were slaughtered. This includes virtually every member of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party with the exception of Trotsky, who escaped and later was killed, and Stalin. Most of Trotsky's family was murdered.
And yet Trotsky's ideas survived. His ideas are embodied in the program of the Fourth International, and they are alive today on every continent of the globe.
What are these ideas? What are the central ideas that bind the Fourth International today, that give it life, that make it the expression of the best aspirations of humankind?
Trotsky's idea, Lenin's idea, Marx's ideas, Engels's idea, was very simple. There is no more simple idea. It was that only the working class and the oppressed masses could liberate themselves from the chains of capitalist exploitation, racism, and oppression. No other class is capable of the liberation of all humanity.
That is the fundamental difference between revolutionary socialists today, on the one hand, and Stalin and all those who have followed him, including Gorbachev, who continue to preach the need for the oppressed to look to sectors of the ruling class for their liberation. This road has only led working people to bloody defeats.
Gorbachev is now posturing about rehabilitating some of those who died at the hands of Stalin and his heirs. But rehabilitation by the Stalinists means nothing because what was destroyed in the Soviet Union was not just a few names but the concept that was the very basis of the Russian Revolution: the concept that the working class should rule society, democratically, through its own organizations. That was the meaning of the word "soviets." The soviets were the first form of workers' rule.
Every time the masses rise, they give the lie to Stalinism and all its ideologues. When a single child hurls a stone at an Israeli oppressor in Gaza, the power of the oppressed, of the Palestinian people, goes far beyond the entire power of the Zionist, racist, colonial state of Israel.
The Palestinian youth had no guns, no planes, no tanks. Their country had been robbed from them with the help of imperialism and the vote of the Soviet Union. And they stood up against the mightiest military power, and they demonstrated to every person who loves freedom on this planet that their cause was just. Their cause is our cause.
When they told us that the Shah of Iran had the seventh most powerful army in the world, and that 60,000 Iranians were in his jails, and that nothing could stop him, four million workers in Tehran toppled that regime in a second.
No, it wasn't the masses who were at fault in Iran, it was their leaders. It has not been the masses, since the day the Russian masses took power, who have been at fault. In every case, the crisis in a particular country has been the crisis of leadership of the working class and the oppressed.
That's the function of the Fourth International: to help resolve the crisis of leadership; to give expression to the power of the masses; to put forward the simple idea that we, the overwhelming majority, can rule this world in our own interest—that we will not kill ourselves from the "greenhouse effect" by destroying the environment, that we will not blow up the people of the world with nuclear war, that we will only be able to live together in a world without exploitation, racism, sexism, national oppression, and oppression of gay people.
That's the program of the Fourth International. But this program can only be won by the oppressed themselves—not by the Democratic Party, not by Gorbachev and the "reformers," not by paper reforms, not by substituting one great leader for another—but by organizing the workers to build a revolutionary party and take the future into their own hands.
Trotsky's ideas live because the masses realize there is no other way out. That's why you're here with us tonight. That's why 20 comrades, founding members of the Fourth International, stood up to be recognized. Together they represent 1000 years of struggle. And they still believe the simple idea that the masses will rule in their own name.