Leon
Trotsky: A Declaration of La
Vérité
August
1929
[Writings
of Leon Trotsky. Vol 1, 1929, New York 1975, p. 226-235]
Our
publication is meant for the vanguard workers. Our only task is the
liberation of the working class. To achieve this aim, we see no other
road than the revolutionary overthrow of the bourgeoisie and the
establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
The
contemporary democratic state is the instrument of bourgeois rule.
The democratic system aims to assure the rule of capital. The less
this domination is ensured by normal democratic means, the more it
requires the use of violence.
The
French socialists continue to repeat that they will reach socialism
by democratic means. But we have seen and we see the social democrats
in power. Last May Day in Germany they shot down twenty-seven workers
because the vanguard of the Berlin proletariat wanted to come out in
the streets on the date fixed by the founding convention of the
Second International as the day of great proletarian demonstrations.
In England the Labourites crawl not only before capital but before
the monarchy, and they begin the “democratization” of the
country, not by liquidating the House of Lords, but by elevating
among the farcical dignitaries that old Fabian, Webb.
The
Marxist position on democracy is completely vindicated by experience.
Social democracy in power does not even mean that reforms will be
achieved. When the bourgeoisie feels forced to agree to a social
reform, it carries it out itself, without handing over the honor to
the social democrats. When the bourgeoisie allows the socialists to
serve it, it deprives them even of the pocket money needed to cover
the cost of their reform activity.
The
difference between our epoch and the prewar epoch is reflected
politically in the sharpest way by the fate of the social democracy.
Up until the war, it was in opposition to the bourgeois state. But
now it is its firmest support. In England and in Germany, the
persistence of capitalist rule would not be possible without the
social democracy. If it is absurd to equate the social democracy with
fascism as the present leadership of the Communist International
often does, nevertheless it is indisputable that social democracy and
fascism represent instruments, distinct and in opposition on certain
points, which, in the final analysis, serve in different periods the
same end: the maintenance of the bourgeoisie in the imperialist
epoch.
The
revolutionary overthrow of bourgeois domination was accomplished by
the Bolshevik Party. The October Revolution is the grandest
achievement of the world working-class movement, and it will remain
one of the greatest events of human history in general. We stand
resolutely and without reservations on the basis of the October
Revolution: it is our revolution.
The
February revolution had shown that democracy which the revolution had
only just created, heaps pitiless reprisals on the workers as soon as
they start to threaten private property. On the other hand, the
October Revolution showed that, even in a backward country where the
peasant population is an overwhelming majority, the proletariat can
seize power by gathering around itself the oppressed masses. This
historic lesson was taught to the international proletariat by the
Bolshevik Party under Lenin’s leadership. The policy of the
Bolsheviks in the October Revolution is the supreme application of
the Marxist method. It marks the new starting point of the working
class in its march forward.
Postwar
Dreams and Reality
Step
by step, France comes out of the drunkenness of victory. The ghosts
flee. The fantastic hopes vanish. The harsh reality remains. The
haughty dream of French capital, domination
of Europe,
and, through Europe, the world, is crushed.
During
the early postwar years, the governments of England and America still
thought it necessary to flatter the national pride of the French
bourgeoisie in giving it, from time to time, an ornamental
satisfaction. But this time has passed. The American bourgeoisie has
since measured the depth of Europe’s downfall and has ceased
bothering itself about it. The British bourgeoisie which the
Americans treat bluntly passes off its anger onto the French. The
situation of the British bourgeoisie is characterized by the
contradiction between its traditions of world domination and the
decline in its place in the world economy. The French bourgeoisie
does not have such a tradition of power. The Versailles peace is
the delirious fantasy of an upstart petty bourgeois. France’s
material base is absolutely inadequate by contemporary (that is,
American) standards for it to have a world role.
The
serious growth of French industry is an incontestable fact, as is the
rationalization of industrial procedures. But it is precisely this
growth that faces the French bourgeoisie with the problem of the
world market in a more and more urgent way. It is no longer a
question of occupying the Saar or the Ruhr, but of the place of
French imperialism in the world. At the first important test, the
insufficiency of French imperialism will be clearly shown: too small
a population, too restricted a territory, too heavy a dependence on
her neighbors, too heavy a burden of debt, and an even heavier burden
of militarism. We will, not attempt to predict here the dates of the
future inevitable failures, retreats, and defeats of French
imperialism. But we foresee them and we do not doubt that they will
provoke internal crises and shakeups. In touching speeches one can
operate with fictitious quantities, but in the real political world
the sophisms of Poincaré, the pathos of Franklin-Bouillon, or the
eloquence of Briand rings like pitiful yelping. America says “Pay!”
England says “Pay!” Snowden, the Labour Party interpreter for the
City, finds in his vocabulary the most vulgar expressions about
France.
The
Communist International foresaw this outcome in the period when it
had a leadership able to comprehend the meaning of the development of
things and able to foresee their results. As far back as 1920, when
the hegemony of victorious France appeared to be indisputable, the
manifesto of the Second Congress of the Communist International
stated: “Intoxicated by chauvinist fumes of a victory which she won
for others, bourgeois France considers herself the commandress of
Europe. In reality, never before has France
and the very foundations of her existence been so slavishly dependent
upon the more powerful states — England and North America — as
she is today. For Belgium, France prescribes a specific economic and
military program, transforming her weaker ally into an enslaved
province, but in relation to England, France herself plays the role
of Belgium, only on a somewhat larger scale.”
The
postwar decade in France was more peaceful than in most of the other
countries in Europe. But that was only a moratorium based on
inflation. Inflation reigned everywhere: in the monetary exchanges,
in budgets, in military systems, in diplomatic plans, and in
imperialist appetites. The big monetary reform of Poincare only
revealed this secret: the wine of the French bourgeoisie contains
four-fifths water. The moratorium expires. The American stocks must
be paid for, the friendship of the world powers must be paid for, the
corpses of the French workers and peasants must be paid for. France
enters the age of settling of accounts. But the biggest bill will be
presented by the French proletariat.
The
Crisis of the Communist Party
The
crisis of the French bourgeoisie in facing the world, and, therefore,
its internal crisis that is now beginning, coincide with a profound
crisis in the French Communist Party. The first steps of the party
had been full of promise. At that time the leadership of the
Communist International combined revolutionary perspicacity and
audacity with the deepest attention to the concrete particularities
of each country. Only on that road was success possible in general.
The changes in leadership in the Soviet Union that occurred under the
pressure of class forces reverberated injuriously throughout the life
of the whole Communist International, including the French party. The
continuity of development and experience was automatically broken.
Those who led the French Communist Party and the Communist
International in Lenin’s era were not only pushed out of the
leadership, but expelled from the party. Only those who follow
quickly enough all the zigzags of the Moscow leaders are allowed to
lead the party.
The
ultraleft course of Zinoviev in 1924-25 meant replacing Marxist
analysis with the noisy phrase, the accumulation of mistakes, and the
transformation of democratic centralism into its police-like
caricature. After the failure of the ultraleft leadership, it was
replaced by docile employees without individuality. It was they who
oriented toward Chiang Kai-shek and Purcell, while they trailed after
the reformists in internal affairs. And when the Stalinist
leadership, under the pressure of both the growing danger of the
Right and the whip of the criticisms made by the Opposition, was
forced to carry out its left turn, there was no need even to change
the French leadership team: the men whose only actions had been to
follow the halfway social democratic policies of 1926-27
became adventurist politicians with the same facility. August 1
shows this strikingly. In China, in Germany, in other countries, the
adventurist policy has already led to bloody catastrophes. In France
to date, it has only been marked by grotesque fiascoes. But if
ridicule can kill anyone, it is above all a revolutionary party.
A
Great Danger
The
danger, as we have said, is that a new crisis of French capitalism
could catch the vanguard of the French proletariat unawares.
The danger is that favorable situations can be allowed to slip by,
one after another, as has been seen to occur in different countries
after the war. Our task is to prevent this danger by an urgent and
repeated appeal to the class consciousness and the revolutionary will
of the proletarian vanguard.
We
are not at all thinking of minimizing the fact that there is an
enormous distance between what the party should be and what it is.
There is even, on some points, a complete opposition. We have already
given a brief appraisal of the French Communist Party. The deplorable
results of its policy are striking: a drop in prestige, a decline in
membership, a reduction in activity. But we are still far from
erecting a cross over the party and going beyond it.
The
official party now contains some twenty or thirty thousand members.
It controls — in a sorry way — the CGTU, which has about three
hundred thousand members. In the last elections the party obtained
more than a million votes. These figures give a picture not of the
growth of the party but of its decline. At the same time they testify
to the fact that the party, formed in the eddies of the war, under
the influence of the October Revolution, still contains a commanding
part of the proletarian vanguard despite the unbelievable faults of
its leadership. We see in this fact above all an indisputable
expression of the imperious need felt by the proletariat for a
revolutionary leadership.
We
are neither hostile nor indifferent toward the Communist Party. Not
of course out of sympathy for its functionaries. But there are
courageous workers in the party, who are ready for any sacrifice:
they are the ones that we want to help develop a correct political
line and establish a healthy internal regime and a good communist
leadership. Furthermore, around the party are some tens of thousands
of communists or simply revolutionary workers who are ready to become
communists but who are blocked by this policy of impotence,
convulsions, somersaults, clique struggles, and palace revolutions.
One of the essential
tasks of the Communist Opposition is to stop the justified
indignation against a pernicious leadership from becoming a
disillusionment about communism and the revolution in general.
This can only be done by developing a Marxist understanding of the
facts and by determining the correct tactics according to the facts
of the situation itself.
Party
and Unions
It
is stupid and criminal to transform the unions into a slightly larger
second edition of the party, or to make them an appendage of the
party. It is completely legitimate for a revolutionary workers’
party to try to win influence in the unions. Otherwise, it would
condemn itself to vain, pseudo-revolutionary chattering. But it must
do this by methods that flow from the very nature of the unions and
that reinforce them: that attract new elements, increase the number
of members, and contribute to the development of correct means of
struggle against the bosses. Workers see in the unions first of all a
means of defending themselves against exploitation by the boss. In
order to bring them into the unions, to hold them, and then to take
them further, developing their class consciousness, it is first
necessary for the union leadership to show that it can defend them
well in immediate issues: wages, eight-hour day, harassment or
brutality by the bosses or their assistants, various forms of
capitalist rationalization. Trying" to sustain striking workers
by repeatedly giving them boring speeches on the “imminence” of
war can only have disastrous consequences in all domains and for all
workers, for the party and the CGTU, It shows an absolute
incomprehension of the work to be done and an illusion that one can
immediately reach a goal which can only be attained through long and
tenacious effort.
The
result is the picture that we see before us. To the degree that the
Communist Party extends its influence over organization, that
organization loses strength. The Communist Party took over the
ARAC.192
But by the time it had taken it over, the group was moribund. It is
the same with the CGTU. Certainly the latter is more resistant,
fortunately it is hard to kill; a bad policy is not enough to destroy
it. But it is possible to reduce its membership, demoralize the rank
and file, and make them wary of a leadership which is always making
mistakes and always starting over again. This is precisely what the
Communist Party has done in recent years.
The
consequences of all these zigzags is that the clearest and most
correct ideas are now obscured. There has been no advance toward the
solution of a single important question. Much ground has even been
lost. But the problem remains. To resolve it without recalling the
basic mistakes of the Commune and without taking into account the
immense experience of the Russian Revolution is to be deprived of the
surest data and to prepare new disasters.
Three
Tendencies in the International
Our
attitude to the Communist International is based on the same
principles as our attitude to the French Communist Party.
Since
the end of 1923, the Communist International has lived and lives
under the barrel of a revolver held successively by the apparatus of
Zinoviev and then of Stalin. Everyone was forced to think, speak,
and, above all, vote “monolithically.” This destruction of
ideological life takes severe vengeance now with the growth of
factions and groups. As for the fundamental tendencies, we believe
that they can be characterized as follows:
The
Communist Left expresses the historic interests of the proletariat.
Following defeats of the proletariat and the revolutionary ebb, the
stabilization of the bourgeoisie and the bureaucratic “victories,”
the Left is once again only a minority fighting against the current,
as it was during the war.
The
Right tendency within communism tends, consciously or not, to take
the place that the social democracy occupied before the war, that is,
the place of reformist opposition to capitalist society, while the
social democracy itself has become, not by accident, one of the
leading parties of the bourgeoisie. It is certain that the Right will
not be able to hold this position for long. In our imperialist epoch,
which poses all questions sharply, the Right will accomplish its
evolution toward the bourgeoisie incomparably more rapidly than the
social democracy did.
The
third current, centrism, holds an intermediate position and is
characterized by a policy of vacillation between the proletarian
revolutionary line and the national reformist petty-bourgeois line.
Centrism is now the leading tendency in official communism.
This
is explained by historical reasons such as the character of the
period in which we live. Centrism in the USSR represents the most
natural form of Bolshevism’s sliding toward national reformism. The
reign of centrism is a political symptom for, while Thermidor has
seriously cut into the dictatorship of the proletariat, it is far
from having destroyed it. Power in the USSR has not passed into the
hands of the bourgeoisie, and it cannot do so without violent class
battles. The ultralefts who write lightly that Thermidor is
consummated only aid the bourgeoisie to disarm the proletariat.
The
position that we hold on the October Revolution and the state that
came out of it flows clearly from all the above. We will not allow
the bureaucrats to deliver sermons to us on the need to defend the
USSR against imperialism. Communist defense of the Soviet Union also
implies above all defense of the dictatorship of the proletariat
against the radically false policies of the Stalinist leadership. To
the question of the defense of the Soviet Union, we reply, with our
Russian comrades: “For the Soviet republic? Yes! For the Soviet
bureaucracy? No!”
Socialism
in One Country
We
are internationalists. That is not for us a conventional phrase, it
is the very meaning of our convictions. The liberation of the
proletariat is possible only through the international revolution,
into which the national revolutions will enter like successive rings.
The organization of production and exchange already has an
international character. National socialism is economically and
politically impossible.
We
reject Stalin’s theory of socialism in one country as a reactionary
petty-bourgeois utopia which incontestably leads to petty-bourgeois
patriotism.
We
radically reject the program of the Communist International adopted
by the Sixth Congress. It is contradictory and eclectic. We reject it
mainly because it adopts the principle of socialism in one country
which is fundamentally opposed to internationalism.
From
now on the Communist Left is an international current. Our next goal
is to group ourselves together into an international faction on the
basis of a community of ideas, methods, and tactics.
We
consider the Russian Opposition to be the direct continuator of the
Bolshevik Party and the heir of the October Revolution. We are in
solidarity with the main ideas of the Russian Opposition as expressed
in its documents and its actions. We are tied by an indestructible
solidarity to the comrades of the Opposition who have been exiled,
deported, or jailed by the Stalinist bureaucracy.
However,
solidarity with the Russian Opposition does not mean copying
everything it does.
On French soil, in the context of a capitalist republic, we want to
serve the same cause that the Russian Opposition serves on Soviet
soil. Still, the method of bureaucratic command is neither tolerable
nor workable within the Opposition. We are for centralism, the
elementary condition for revolutionary action. But centralism has to
respond to the real situation of the movement. It must be based on
the real independence and full political responsibility of each
Communist organization, and, even more so, of each national section.
Appeal
to the Youth
The
work before us is not the work of a month or of a year. A new
revolutionary generation has to be educated and tempered. We will not
lack internal or external problems. In the eyes of many, the road
toward developing a real proletarian revolutionary cadre will seem
too long. There will be hesitations and desertions. To ensure
revolutionary continuity in advance, one must start by addressing the
youth. The weakening of the official organizations of the Communist
youth is the most dangerous sign for the future of the party. The
Communist Opposition will break its way through to the proletarian
youth, that is, to victory.
To
choose the correct path, it is not enough to have a compass.
Knowledge of the region or a good map are needed. Without them, even
with a compass, one can get caught in an impassable swamp. To put
forward a correct policy, it is not enough to have some general
principles. It is necessary to know the situation, that is, the
conditions, the facts, and the relations between them. They have to
be studied attentively and honestly, and their variations followed.
We cannot do it from day to day — we do not yet have a daily paper.
We will do it from week to week. Only cowards can shut their eyes to
the facts, whether or not they are pleasant. It is no accident that
we have called our weekly La
Vérité.
In
France the Communist Left is divided into different groups. This is
due to the fact — and we do not exclude ourselves from this
criticism — that the French Opposition has spent too much time on
the preparatory stage before beginning political action among the
workers. We must clearly state that should this situation persist,
the Opposition would be threatened with becoming a sect, or, more
precisely, several sects.
We
want to make our weekly the organ of the whole Left Opposition. The
orientation of the paper is sufficiently spelled out, we hope, by
this declaration. That will not stop the editors from opening the
columns of the paper to the expression of differing nuances of
thought within the Communist Left. Bias toward this or that group is
completely foreign to us. We want to ensure the possibility of a
collective effort on a wider basis than has been done up to now. We
are solidly counting on the support of the real proletarian
revolutionaries, whatever group they belonged to yesterday or belong
to today.
Our
basic hope is in the conscious workers who are directly linked to the
masses. It is for them that we produce this paper. We say to them:
“La
Vérité
is your organ.”