Prospects for political revolution in China, Eastern Europe, and USSR

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In China, pro-democracy supporters beseech soldiers; in the Soviet Union, coal miners demand economic democracy.

By NAT (The following are major excerpts from a talk given by Nat Weinstein, co-National Secretary of Socialist Action, at the Socialist Action Educational Conference in Kent State, Ohio, on Aug. 4, 1989. The full talk is reprinted in the recent Walnut Publishing Co. book on the Soviet Union titled, "Gorbachev's USSR: Is Stalinism Dead.")

To this day, the world imperialist system remains unable to stabilize itself at its colonial extremities. Starting in 1917, it lost Russia. Since then, Eastern Europe, North Korea, China, Cuba, and Vietnam have also freed themselves from imperialist domination.

These overturns, of course, are but the beginning; world capitalism continues to face serious crises in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. And as the overall crisis deepens, it must ultimately disrupt the equilibrium in the imperialist centers themselves.

The increasing incapability of imperialism's dependent states to maintain payments on usurious loans threatens to upset the U.S. and world banking systems. The U.S. national treasury, which is a major guarantor of last resort, teeters on the brink of bankruptcy—into which it will tumble if no way out can be found. And the hyper-inflation sweeping through one dependent country after the other is both a symptom of the developing crisis and a harbinger of things to come in the world's imperialist centers— including in the United States, the heartland of world capitalism.

There is an intimate connection between all three spheres of the coming world revolution-in the imperialist centers, in the workers' states, and in the semi-colonial countries. The delicate balance in the world economic, financial, and political structure is increasingly more difficult for capitalist rulers to maintain. Should the balance slip out of control in one of the key areas, it will tend to destabilize the entire structure-ultimately opening up a new revolutionary period on a global scale.

The objective historic tendency taking place before our eyes is not easily perceived. In the short time we have on earth, most of us do not become aware of the connection between slow changes taking place beneath the surface of society. When these accumulating quantitative changes break out into the open, they are most often separated by years; they 14 SOCIALIST ACTIOI therefore perceived as events.

Even when profound confrontations dramatically erupt, such as has occurred in China, there is a tendency to see them apart from their integral place in the stream of history.

But the underlying revolutionary process, which has led to the liberation of nearly a fourth of the earth's population since 1917, is a continuous and uninterrupted process.

Mileposts in political revolution The first sign of the political revolution we are seeing unfold in the bureaucratized workers' states surfaced in 1953—soon after Stalin's death. There was a general strike in East Germany which shook the Stalinist bureaucracy there to its knees.

At the time, I heard U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles comment in the course of a television news interview on the enormous power of striking East German workers. He couldn't restrain himself from gloating over how the Communist regime was paralyzed by workers who had stopped buses and trains in their tracks, and shut factories down tight.

The East German strike was followed a year later by mass strikes in Vorkuta in the Soviet Union (which in July 1989 was one of the areas experiencing a rebellion of coal miners).

In 1956, Nikita Khrushchev, the head of world Stalinism at that time, responded to these earthshaking warnings of coming events with his unprecedented 20th Congress speech denouncing Stalin as the murderer of almost the entire leadership of the Bolshevik Revolution.

The Militant, the newspaper of the Socialist Workers Party, correctly headlined this event in two words: "Trotskyism Vindicated!" Khrushchev's admissions, however, were not judged to be evidence of self-reform, but of a deep crisis developing in the bureaucratized workers' states.

Rebellion in Hungary

Life was quick to confirm this analysis. Later that year, Hungarian workers rose up in rebellion, took control of their factories and streets, and formed workers' councils genuine soviets—as their democratic instrument of proletarian political power. The Stalinist regime there was sent reeling.

The Hungarian army could not be relied upon to put down the uprising, and the OCTOBER 1989 White Svoms paralyzed bureaucracy didn't dare to send them from their barracks against the people. Meanwhile, the hated police were driven from the streets by vengeful masses of revolutionary workers.

The Hungarian workers' uprising could only be put down by Soviet tanks, and Khrushchev, without hesitation, ordered them to do so.

In the next 23 years, we saw repeated uprisings in Czechoslovakia and Poland-and now in China and the Soviet Union itself. Up to now only the Soviet army could suppress and intimidate the elemental workers' movement against bureaucratic oppression in Eastern Europe. But the counterrevolutionary repressive role of the Soviet armed force was possible only to the extent that Soviet troops remained unaffected by the processes of revolutionary change.

That period is now near its end. We are now witnessing a mass mobilization in the Soviet Union itself. And while still in its earliest stages, it is already approaching, and in some respects surpassing, the upsurges in Poland and China.

It is already clear to Gorbachev that Soviet workers-in-uniform cannot be relied upon to continue to put down strikes and revolutionary mobilizations anywhere. Each use of force-such as when troops, tanks, and a deadly version of "tear gas" were used to crush a peaceful nationalist demonstration in Tbilisi, Georgia, in April 1989, leaving men, women, and children wounded and dead— brings closer the time when Soviet troops will rebel and go over to the people.

The 1980s-Poland and China In one sense, the Polish workers went further than any of the others in these bureaucratized workers' states so far. In 198081, they had organized a massive occupation of the nation's workplaces, which enabled them to hold the Stalinist regime at bay for a prolonged period.

Still they were unable to resolve the question of power, or to even think in terms of taking physical control over the state. This was because of the presence of Soviet and other Stalinist-controlled armed forces on their borders. They correctly judged, at the time, that these foreign troops were relatively impervious to appeals for solidarity.

Chinese students and workers went further than Poles in at least that respect. They mobilized in the hundreds of thousands to employ the tactic of revolutionary fraternization with the People's Liberation Army. They instinctively knew that their army could be neutralized and won over, and that there was no foreign army close enough to intervene—much less, capable of putting down the mass mobilizations without evoking greater outrage and opposition from the awakening millions.

But workers' efforts in China to organize themselves into class institutions had only just begun. They were only at the earliest stage of organizing unions and other class institutions. They did not get much beyond spontaneous outpourings from working-class neighborhoods in support of student demonstrators. They had neither reached the point of organizing themselves in their workplaces nor had they begun to advance their own class demands.

Nevertheless, these outpourings of as many as 1 million people, the bulk of whom were workers, into Tiananmen Square and at strategic points leading into the Square, had amazing success in dissuading military convoys from attacking student demonstrators for weeks.

Soviet workers' political demands The revolutionary logic of proletarian struggle continues to develop throughout the "socialist" world. Now, Soviet workers are carrying consciousness to a higher level. In beginning to organize through their workplaces, they very naturally discuss and vote on their demands, and elect their committees to lead their struggle for workers' power— following the example of their Polish worker comrades.

Soviet workers are especially positioned to most rapidly reach the highest levels of consciousness and self-organization. The natural course of their struggle cannot fail to evoke the memory of October 1917, when their predecessors carried the logic of proletarian revolution to its final conclusion.

Almost at the very outset, coal miners began the Soviet workers' mass mobilizations with very advanced political demands. Miners made emphatically clear their aspiration for control over their workplaces and the right to determine who gets the fruits of their labor. Their demands unambiguously point toward the goal of democratic workers' management of the Soviet economy.

Today, mass consciousness is further reflected by Soviet coal miners demanding the right to decide where to put the profits from the mines. The message they sent to the Soviet parliament set up by Gorbachev is abundantly clear. Their demand to immediately change the Soviet constitution to guarantee basic civil rights and liberties has little to do with abstract or bourgeois democracy.

Above all, the miners want their right to organize fighting class institutions to be guaranteed by law. Tomorrow, they will not fail to insist that their strike committees, factory committees, and elected workers' councils make all economic and political decisions, and be responsible for carrying them out.

Nor will they fail to follow this logic to its end—to drive the bureaucracy out of their positions of power. This is what is meant by "political revolution."

Gorbachev and the bureaucracy The Nightline television program on July 20, 1989, focused on the Soviet coal miners' strike going on at the time. The commentators had a different analysis than ours. They suggested that the miners' revolt was the intended result of Gorbachev's new political program of glasnost and perestroika (democratization and restructuring of the economy by introducing capitalist market forces as an incentive for increasing production).

They suggested that the revolt of miners is what Gorbachev was after all along; that this is what Gorbachev needed to "break the resistance" of the "conservative wing" of the bureaucracy to his economic reform program.

Anyone who really believes that Gorbachev aimed for or hoped for this working-class mobilization —or that Gorbachev or any other representative of the Soviet bureaucracy has the slightest intention to reform themselves

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'Gorbachev's main preoccupation is to break the resistance of the workers to his economic reforms, which are based on austerity for the workers and the most offensive forms of SOCIALIST ACTION OCTOBER 1989 15 (continued from preceding page)

out of existence, or that workers want or will accept the reintroduction of unemployment or any other of the capitalist evils their grandparents and great-grandparents abolished in 1917—must also believe that the moon is made of green cheese.

Gorbachev's main preoccupation is to break the resistance of the workers to his economic reforms, which are based on austerity for the workers and the most offensive forms of capitalist incentives (such as the planned reintroduction of capitalist-style hiring and firing).

Gorbachev was convinced that this worker rebellion was coming-and soon. He feared that the threatened upsurge, which we are now witnessing, could not be put down by naked force, as in the past.

Gorbachev knew, on the contrary, that terror could set into motion the speedy deterioration of morale in the Red Army itself—as we see it having begun to do in China. And, no less importantly, it would make any attempt to find a way out of the Soviet economic crisis-which requires the toleration, if not the active support of the workers-impossible.

Parliament or workers' democracy?

Gorbachev's motives for glasnost have nothing to do with a revolutionary reform of the Stalinist political system. His aim was to get out in front; only to appear to be leading a meaningful reform of the bureaucratic system. His policy of glasnost is entirely designed to put the bureaucracy in position to head off revolt before it begins. His aim is to contain the discontent within the framework of controllable forms of parliamentary demo cracy and bourgeois economic reforms.

Just as in capitalist America, "free elections" regularly replace one group of legislators with another; but the executive agencies of the state—the police, the army, and the ubiquitous bureaucracy which fills in all the pores of the capitalist state-remain beyond the control of the "democratically elected" legislators.

So too is this the case in the Soviet Union. The parliamentary system is inherently structured to maintain a monopoly for those in control of the executive agencies of state power, which in workers' states is proletarian only to the extent it defends workers' forms of property ownership.

Gorbachev's "democracy" is purposefully constructed to separate the legislative from the executive powers of government. This is designed to permit the state to remain ruled by a caste of unremovable bureaucrats—in the military, as well as in the civil structure. And his parliamentary-style democracy is being implemented in the context of his policy of weakening the anti-capitalist economic foundation of the workers' state.

In the United States, this guarantee of the dictatorship of the capitalist class is touted as "the democratic system of checks and balances." In the Soviet Union it is presented, with even less credibility, as a "revitalization of the soviets."

But the parliamentary system remains in bourgeois democracies, nonetheless, a bulwark of the continued social and economic dictatorship by the capitalist class. And in the Soviet Union, it is being introduced-albeit, still a caricature of the bourgeois version—to bolster a continued political dictatorship by the bureaucratic caste.

Taking a page from Stalin Gorbachev's democracy is entirely in the spirit of Stalin's "democratic" constitution of 1936. Leon Trotsky explained, at the time, the spuriousness of Stalin's claim. In his book, "The Revolution Betrayed," he pointed out:

"In the political sphere, the distinction of the new constitution from the old is its return from the Soviet system of election according to class and industrial groups, to the system of bourgeois democracy based upon the so-called 'universal, equal, and direct' vote of an atomized population. This is a matter, to put it briefly, of juridically liquidating the dictatorship of the proletariat."

Stalin, of course, followed up his "democratization" of the Soviet constitution with his launching of the infamous Moscow Trials, which purged in blood virtually the entire leadership of the October Revolution.

History has so far permitted Gorbachev to go further than Stalin down the path of "democratic reform." He has succeeded, through glasnost, in his immediate purpose— to give false hope to the workers that real improvements in their living standards are on their way, and to provide the bureaucracy with an extended base of support among the Soviet middle class. This, he hopes, will give him time and the opportunity to patch up the faltering Soviet economy.

The middle class is most entranced by bourgeois-style democratic elections; and from their ranks comes the largest majority of professional officeholders—an indispensable byproduct of the parliamentary system and bulwark of the status quo. And similarly, the middle class is among the first to enter into the ranks of the new bourgeoisie being created by perestroika. The middle class also provides the bureaucrats with a more reliable base of support in the population.

The bureaucracy is counting on inspiring these new allies to help pacify the workers and harmlessly channel the mass discontent that will grow along with inflation and unemployment when Gorbachev unleashes market forces.

Gorbachev has also placed himself in position to co-opt a wing of the independent workers' institutions that is gestating—if he is unable to block them—just as Jaruzelski is doing in Poland. But he will prove unable to make it stick if he cannot successfully carry through his economic program to the point of significantly increasing the supplies of capitalist incentives?

desperately needed consumer goods.

Therein lies the bureaucracy's desperate gamble: If market reforms are unable to improve mass living standards in the near future, workers will increasingly mobilize to impose their own solutions, and their own methods.

Divisions in the bureaucracy But no one should misunderstand this. In rejecting the notion that Gorbachev seeks to diminish or abolish the bureaucratic dictatorship which he heads, we do not give one iota of credibility to the more Neanderthal sectors of the bureaucracy. The latter's concern is not over Gorbachev's tactics. What they fear is that these tactics won't work and will, instead, inspire greater worker opposition.

The division in the bureaucracy is a product of their eroding position. It is entirely tactical and is fueled by the mounting threat of political revolution-not a division between Stalinists and anti-Stalinists, or reformers and conservatives.

Trotsky, again, showed his keen understanding of this dynamic in his prescient analysis of Stalin's Constitution of 1936. H wrote in "The Revolution Betrayed:"

"In introducing the new constitution, the bureaucracy shows that it feels this danger [the beginning of an open political crisis] and is taking preventive measures. However, it has happened more than once that a bureaucratic dictatorship, seeking salvation in "liberal' reforms, has only weakened itself.

"While exposing Bonapartism, the new constitution creates at the same time a semilegal cover for the struggle against it. The rivalry of bureaucratic cliques at the elections may become the beginning of a broader political struggle. The whip against 'badly working organs of power' may be turned into a whip against Bonapartism. All indications agree that the further course of development must inevitably lead to a clash between the culturally developed forces of the people and the bureaucratic oligarchy.

"There is no peaceful outcome for this crisis. No devil ever yet voluntarily cut off his own claws. The Soviet bureaucracy will not give up its positions without a fight. The development leads obviously to the road of revolution."

Source of economic crisis With remarkable insight, Leon Trotsky further foretold the current crisis of Stalinist rule in the degenerated and deformed workers' bureaucratic mismanagement of the planned economies in the "socialist" countries:

"While the growth of industry and the bringing of agriculture into the sphere of state planning vastly complicates the tasks of leadership, bringing to the front the problem of quality, bureaucratism destroys the creative initiative and the feeling of responsibility without which there is not, and cannot be, qualitative progress. The ulcers of bureaucratism are perhaps not so obvious in the big industries, but they are devouring, together with the cooperatives, the light and foodproducing industries, the collective farms, the small local industries-that is, all those branches of economy which stand nearest to the people.

"The progressive role of the Soviet bureaucracy coincides with the period devoted to introducing into the Soviet Union the most important elements of capitalist technique. The rough work of borrowing, imitating, transplanting, and grafting, was accomplished on the bases laid down by the revolution. There was, thus far, no question of any new word in the sphere of technique, science, or art.

"It is possible to build gigantic factories according to a ready-made Western pattern by bureaucratic command-—although, to be sure, at triple the normal cost. But the farther you go, the more the economy runs into the problem of quality, which slips out of the hands of the bureaucracy like a shadow. The Soviet products are as though branded with the gray label of indifference. Under a nationalized economy, quality demands a democracy of producers and consumers, freedom of criticism and initiative-conditions incompatible with a totalitarian regime of fear, lies and flattery."

Stalinist Bonapartism There are only two possible roads out of the current crisis in the Soviet Union and the other bureaucratized workers' states. One points backward toward capitalism, and the other forward to the socialist future. The latter solution, the democratic revitalization of the economic and political structure of the bureaucratized workers' states, is absolutely inconsistent with the continued existence of a privileged ruling caste.

The only road out of the current impasse, however, that is consistent with the perpetuation of privilege is by conversion of the bureaucratic caste into a possessing class, based on the traditional rights accorded to the holders of private property in the means of production.

Trotsky explained that from its birth, the Stalinist bureaucratic dictatorship has been a regime of crisis. It performs no special role in the socialized productive system, and therefore is without roots. A rootless parasitic formation, it cannot rule with the consent of the masses. Its power is based on military-police repressive force, which it exercises through its affinity and control over the privileged officer corps.

On the one hand, it bases its privileges on the conquests of the socialist revolution. But it must be on constant guard to defend these stolen privileges from the workers. Thus it must lean for support upon the neo-capitalist forces constantly being recreated in these societies-and upon world imperialism itself.

On the other hand, it must be on constant guard against the very same forces of capitalism, inside and outside the workers' state, upon which it leans for support. Those who would restore capitalism in the workers' states would much prefer to overturn the socialized property forms-and with that, sweep the bureaucracy from political power as well.

Trotsky reached into history to find a historic parallel for this phenomenon. Here he gives a brief description of the first Stalinist regime:

"Caesarism, or its bourgeois form, Bonapartism, enters the scene in those moments of history when the sharp struggle of two camps raises the state power, so to speak, above the nation, and guarantees it, in appearance, a complete independence of classes-in reality, only the freedom necessary for a defense of the privileged. The Stalin regime, rising above a politically atomized society, resting upon a police and officers' corps, and allowing of no control whatever, is obviously a variation of Bonapartism—-a Bonapartism of a new type not before seen in history."

The Stalinist bureaucratic dictatorships cannot much longer maintain the status quo-balancing themselves, ever more precariously, between antagonistic class forces. Historical necessity is irrepressible. Gorbachev, Deng Xiaoping, Jaruzelski, and their ilk play no progressive role. Incapable of leading the workers' states forward, they are increasingly attracted by the pull of world imperialism. Reaching the end of their rope, they are being irresistably drawn toward a fundamental restoration of capitalist property relations.

Stalinist bureaucracies everywhere have taken the road of ever-greater dependence on imperialism. In China, and to a lesser degree in the Soviet Union, they have already given the world's capitalists a big down payment on their promises of new openings for capitalist penetration.

Imperialism, however, never in doubt over where its class interests lie, is holding back. It has given barely more than a trickle of aid, and only dangles the promise of much more to come.

The imperialists are driving home the message to Gorbachev and Co. that real help will come only if more irreversible changes are made toward opening the Soviet state to capitalist penetration. Most important, they are demanding guarantees that future investments cannot be expropriated by an aroused working class.

What kind of guarantees? Imperialism requires, above all, a real economic foothold directly within the Soviet population. Parliamentary democracy is now opening the door to such a foothold in the political structure-opening a pathway to the middle classes and thus to leverage inside the Soviet political system. But imperialism requires, as well, direct economic and social agents inside the Soviet population.

The right of majority control over joint ventures, which Gorbachev and Co. has granted to foreign investors, is another lever required by imperialism. But this concession alone is not sufficient.

What if there is a failure to honor debts or other commitments? What if a change in circumstances leads a future Soviet government to confiscate foreign investments? Legal contracts and other pieces of paper are effective only if there is a dependable social force capable and willing to back them up. At the present time, such a (continued on next page)

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Workers and students in Warsaw commemorate the victims of a 1968 police crackdown. force doesn't exist inside the Soviet Union.

The promise to permit individual managers of nationalized enterprises to negotiate contracts with each other and with foreign capital, independently of the state monopoly of foreign trade, points toward creation of such a force. It opens the possibility of transforming portions of the bureaucracy into compradores-that is, into junior partners, and thus direct agents of imperialism. This is another guarantee being demanded by imperialism before launching any major investments into the Soviet Union.

But even that won't be enough to satisfy imperialism. They are demanding the convertibility of the ruble. A stable rubleideally a monetary unit that reflects real values-would be an enormous gain for the organizing of the planned economy. It would create the basis for determining the real costs of production, and thus provide an indispensable tool for steadily improving productive efficiency and far more effective planning But this is far from what imperialists are seeking in their demand for convertibility. What they really want is the abolition of the state monopoly of foreign tradeor at least a lowering of the barriers against the unrestricted export of cheap commodities into the Soviet economy. Such an unrestrained opening of the economy to goods produced by more advanced industrial societies with far lower costs of production would crowd domestic, nationalized, industry out of the Soviet economy.

A convertible ruble, under the conditions proposed by Gorbachev, would permit imperialist capital free rein inside the Soviet economy. The new class of entrepreneurs, including those who are presently a part of the ruling caste, could join the club of world imperialism's junior partners who keep at least a reserve portion of their wealth in imperialist bank accounts and invest it in foreign, as well as domestic, enterprises.

This little detail, too, will help cement the bond between this neo-capitalist layer to the world's intransigent opponents of socialism. Imperialism, thus, would be well on the road to establishing a dependable social agency for defending the sanctity of private property inside the Soviet Union.

The state sector would gradually come under the domination of forms of private ownership: first, perhaps, Chinese-style cooperatives with shareholding by the enterprise's employees and management, and later by the sale of shares outside the enterprise. Eventually, the Soviet economy would become entirely subjugated by imperialist capital.

A good example of what the imperialists have in mind is revealed in a guest column by Paul Craig Roberts in the July 20, 1989, Christian Science Monitor. Roberts had been invited to appear before "Mr. Gorbachev's reformers" at the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Asked to present his case for the restoration of capitalism, he argued that it is 16 SOCIALIST ACTION the only solution for the "collapsing" Soviet economy. He writes:

"Nothing can be done until private property rights are established. Peasants will have to be given the land and workers and managers will have to become the owners of the factories. Once property rights are assigned, prices can reflect true values, and the Soviet economy can begin its recovery from 70 years of socialism.

"All of this made sense to my sophisticated Moscow audience. Still the question arose, 'What do we do with the Communist Party?' 'Give them a disproportionate share of the new ownership rights,' I said, 'and make them the idle rich.' "Soviet reformers saw this as a commonsense proposition. Historically, ruling classes have had to be accommodated or overthrown. Golden parachutes for Communist Party members is an inexpensive way of obtaining an efficient private economy."

Of course, Gorbachev will not lightly launch such a definitive course toward capitalist restoration. He knows that the Soviet workers will have a thing or two to say about it. His initial economic cure already requires the workers to swallow some bitter medicine.

According to the bureaucracy, that merely would be a "temporary" decline in living standards. But already, the miners have not only rejected further cuts in living standards, they have forced real concessions from Gorbachev.

And how will the bureaucracy refuse similar demands from the rest of the Soviet working class? Gorbachev, unable to put his "restructuring" of the Soviet economy into effect so far, has been forced to retreat before he could begin to force his capitalist medicine down workers' throats.

Furthermore, the bureaucracy as a whole is not ready to leap into the unchartered and perilous waters of capitalist restoration. Their choices are increasingly being restricted by the proletarian Scylla pressing in on one flank and the imperialist Charybdis on the other.

But these choices are not symmetrical. As the Monitor columnist suggests, the latter option has the advantage of golden parachutes for the ruling bureaucratic caste, while the former denies them such a soft landing.

In the long run, it is an absolute certainty, the bureaucracy in its overwhelming majority will opt for the golden parachute, not socialist democracy. A bitter struggle between workers on one side, and bureaucrats and bosses on the other, is inevitable.

Revolutionary leadership required To win this unfolding struggle, the workers will have to create a revolutionary party to lead them through the complex tactical problems all revolutionary classes face. To win in the struggle for political power, the world's workers must build a leadership that understands history and its lessons.

As can be seen in Poland, this consciousness is developing; the differentiation between the reformists in Solidarity and the future cadres of the revolutionary party has already begun to take place.

The basic program for such parties everywhere-including in the so-called OCTOBER 1989 Wojek Marek Druseze socialist countries-already exists. It goes by the name of "The Transitional Program for Socialist Revolution." This document is, of course, buttressed by the wealth of theoretical and programmatic conquests of the revolutionary Marxist movement, which is continuously, and consistently, being updated as new events occur.

This is neither pretentiousness nor sectarian self-delusion. The test of any scientific thesis is its ability to predict. "The Transitional Program"—the basic programmatic foundation of the Fourth International (F.I.), written by Leon Trotsky and adopted by the founding convention of the F.I. in 1938—has already passed this test.

This document, together with Trotsky's fundamental analysis of the Soviet degeneration- "The Revolution Betrayed," which outlines the program for political revolution in the Soviet Union-should be read by everyone who wants to understand the current crisis of Stalinism and to find a way forward in the United States and other capitalist countries.

Let me cite only the most recent confirmation of the power of revolutionary Marxist political analysis contained in the "Transitional Program for Socialist Revolution." In 1938, the author of this basic document predicted:

"A fresh upsurge of the revolution in the U.S.S.R. will begin under the banner of the struggle against social inequality and political oppression....

"The struggle for the freedom of the trade unions and the factory committees, for the right of assembly and freedom of the press, will unfold in the struggle for the regeneration and development of Soviet democracy.

"The bureaucracy replaced the soviets as class organs with the fiction of universal electoral rights—in the style of HitlerGoebels. It is necessary to return to the soviets not only their free democratic form but also their class content. As once the bourgeoisie and kulaks [rich peasants] were not permitted to enter the soviets, so now it is necessary to drive the bureaucracy and the new aristocracy out of the soviets!"

The struggle has begun in Poland, China, and the Soviet Union, as we have seen, exactly as was then projected. Events pile on events bringing the programmatic view of the future to life. On July 21, The New York Times reported a strike leader in Rostov-onDon who declared he speaks for all the coal field workers in that southern Russian mining area. He called for an immediate national congress of coal workers with senior industrial managers to be excluded.

Every such event confirms the viability of our program. It is as if it were written just yesterday.

Revolutionary internationalism I will conclude by discussing the question of the perspective of world revolution today. The organic connection between the revolutionary workers' struggle in each country to every other is obvious. The world economy is dominated by the advanced capitalist countries. They exclude the workers' states from free access to the world division of labor.

This places an intolerable extra burden on these countries, which had been among the most undeveloped in the world before overturning capitalism.

They have all been struggling merely to catch up with the advanced capitalist countries and still have a long way to go. They cannot succeed in catching up without the help of one or more of the advanced industrial countries-not to mention surpassing them and entering the era of socialism.

Lenin and Trotsky and their Bolshevik Party never for an instant failed to recognize this fundamental materialist conception of the road to socialism. The Bolsheviks, from the outset, called for the formation of the Third or Communist International (Comintern) to extend the socialist revolution beyond Soviet borders and ultimately to the whole world. This, it was explained, was the only road to socialism anywhere.

The Comintern, the world party of socialist revolution, was founded in March 1919. Its goal was unequivocal: the defense of the first workers' state, which was seen as the advanced outpost of the world revolution, and to carry the banner of socialist revolution wherever objective conditions opened up the possibility of establishing workers' republics.

The leaders of the Third International— especially Lenin, Trotsky, and their Bolshevik Party-focused their attention on Germany, which was in revolutionary turmoil. Lenin and Trotsky never wavered from this fundamental outlook and the course of action it dictated.

It was Stalin, and the bureaucracy—whose caste interests he came to incarnate—who abandoned the revolutionary perspective of extending the revolution to the advanced countries and toward a world socialist society. Stalin's slogan, "Socialism in One Country!" became the euphemism for worldwide class collaboration, counterrevolution, and in reality, "Socialism in No Country!"

Revolutionary opportunities were at first missed, and by 1927—with Stalin's counterrevolutionary policy definitively put into effect in China-betrayed in one country after the other. This opened the door to World War II and further betrayals. Ultimately, this allowed world capitalism to become restabilized—at least in its imperialist strongholdsfor an unprecedented four decades.

The consequent decline in revolutionary mobilizations in the centers of imperialist power explains in great part why revolutionary movements, which have had much greater successes at the extremities of imperialist power, have tended to keep a blind eye toward the perspective of world revolution.

This same factor also explains the weakness of the Fourth International, Whose entire programmatic outlook is organically founded on the perspective of world revolution.

We are reaching the end of that period. The forces of history, blocked for so long by subjective factors-the absence of a mass revolutionary leadership-relentlessly builds up behind these barriers. Evidence accumulates that the historical logjam is about to break open. And with the collapse of world capitalist equilibrium will also come the revival of the perspective of world revolution.

When that time comes, the program for world revolution, summed up in outline form in "The Transitional Program," is certain to gain millions of new adherents. The working class in the strongholds of world capitalism is destined, once again, to take the center stage of history.

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