Leon Trotsky: The Present Situation in the Labor Movement and

the Tasks of the Bolshevik-Leninists

From a Propagandist Group to Mass Work

October 1934

[Writing of Leon Trotsky, Vol. 14, New York 1979, p. 530-536]

1. The last ten years have been characterized by the growing decay and ossification of the Communist International, which in the first five years of its existence had assembled under its banner the most revolutionary elements of the proletariat. The larger part of the present cadres of the International Communist League comes from the ranks of the Comintern. The majority in the groups and sections of the ICL had been expelled at various periods by the bureaucracy as a preventive measure, in order to avoid the possibility of introducing into the Communist Party a struggle for Leninist principles. Constituting themselves the “Left Opposition,” the Bolshevik-Leninists set as their first task the regeneration of the Comintern. In the course of a decade they have struggled indefatigably against fire centrist backsliding and adventurist zigzags of the Stalinist bureaucracy. There has been no major question, no major event, to which the Bolshevik-Leninists have not responded, either as an international organization or through the various sections. There has been no major question on which the analysis and prognosis of the Bolshevik-Leninists have not been confirmed by events. But the conservative power of the bureaucratic apparatus has prevailed. The events in Germany connected with the victory of fascism have made the internal degeneration of the Comintern apparent, and have once and for all buried the hopes of regeneration insofar as the revolutionary vanguard is concerned.

2. Abandoning its role as a “faction of the Comintern,” the Bolshevik-Leninists, on the basis of the old program enriched by new experience, have set up an independent organization, whose task is the struggle for new parties and a new international, the Fourth International. The new orientation of the ICL — which was strengthened at the outset by the adherence of the Dutch Revolutionary Socialist Party — made it necessary to examine anew the entire field of the international labor movement, to take stock of modifications which had taken place, to accurately estimate new groupings, and to find in each country the most favorable point at which to apply the Marxist lever.

3. The degeneration and compromises of the Comintern inevitably lead to the absolute or at least the relative bolstering of the Social Democratic parties. The preservation of these parties and, still more, their growth by the attraction of fresh elements have led and will lead inevitably in their turn to the formation of internal groupings, the sharpening of factional struggles and splits. Nothing more strikingly illustrates the total loss of the Comintern’s attractive power than the fact that in recent years left-centrist groupings, including those which broke with the Social Democracy or were expelled by it, did not enter the ranks of the Comintern but endeavored and still endeavor to lead an independent existence (ILP, OSP, SAP, AWP, etc.). In a number of countries the Social Democratic parties have undergone a certain evolution. After long years of adaptation by the Austrian Social Democracy to bourgeois governments, its proletarian wing entered into armed conflict with the bourgeoisie. The Spanish party, only yesterday collaborating in a bourgeois government and launching continuous repressions against so-called revolutionary excesses, today finds itself constrained to call the masses to armed insurrection for the defense of democratic liberties. On the other hand, the Belgian Labor Party puts the knife to its still quite moderate left wing. The Dutch Social Democracy is revising its program in a reactionary spirit. All these trends develop under the influence of the same factors: the crisis of capitalism and of the democratic state, counter-reforms in the place of reforms, the growing misery of the masses, the threatening danger of war in various countries. These basic factors have varying reflections and brings about multiple and even contradictory tendencies, groupings, and reciprocal relations.

4. Internal policy has lost every trace of stability and is now characterized by sudden maneuvers, finding a striking expression in the fact that Socialists who yesterday were the cabinet ministers of the bourgeoisie are today arrested by the police of the bourgeoisie. The objective situation of the Social Democracy within the bourgeois state undergoes, in a brief span of time, a turn of 180 degrees. As for consciousness, this changes much less rapidly and in a manner not only not uniform but even heterogeneous in the various groups: in certain levels of the apparatus towards corporative Bonapartism (“Neo-Socialists,” some Hollanders and others), on the other flank toward revolution. The consciousness of the Social Democracy lags so much behind its own objective situation in the bourgeois state that it finds itself plunged into armed insurrection without having had time to abandon its democratic and reformist prejudices.

5. In these conditions there could be nothing more dangerous or unfortunate than time-worn formulas. To satisfy oneself with abstractions — “reformism,” “Second International” — is to ignore or blur the difference between a Social Democracy which constitutes the power of the bourgeoisie and a Social Democracy which participates in a revolution against the bourgeoisie. Between these two extreme poles there are numerous transitional stages which must be carefully studied, measurements being taken of the extent of the swing and the rhythm of the development, in order always to apply the lever with the greatest effectiveness for the formation of genuinely revolutionary proletarian parties.

6. We repeat again: if the Comintern had not been crushed by the Soviet bureaucracy, but had continued and developed the policies of the first four congresses, it would long ago have guaranteed the victory of the revolution in a whole series of European and Asiatic countries. On/the other hand, if the degenerate apparatus of the Comintern, leaning on the authority of the USSR, did not stand in the way of the vanguard of the world proletariat, the ICL could have become, in the course of the past decade, the independent pivot of the revolutionary party. In either case the proletariat would have experienced victories rather than defeats and capitulations. In practical politics, however, we must make our point of departure not from imaginary but from real conditions, those in which the world labor movement finds itself today and whose basic traits we have characterized above.

The ICL is the only international organization which has a correct general conception of the world situation and of the tasks facing the world proletariat. It does not, however, possess sufficiently important forces to become a center of attraction for the masses who, under the Damocles sword of fascism and war, fear to cut themselves off from the big organizations. The ICL cannot act as an independent party of the proletariat, it is only the instrument for the creation of independent parties. This instrument must be employed in accordance with the situation in each country.

7. Psychology, ideas, and customs usually lag behind the developments of objective relations in society and in the class; even in the revolutionary organizations the dead lay their hands upon the living. The preparatory period of propaganda has given us the cadres without which we could not make one step forward, but the same period has, as a heritage, permitted the expression within the organization of extremely abstract concepts of the construction of a new party and a new International. In their chemically pure form these conceptions are expressed in the most complete manner by the dead sect of Bordigists, who hope that the proletarian vanguard will convince itself, by means of a hardly readable literature, of the correctness of their position and sooner or later will correctly gather around their sect. Often these sectarians add that revolutionary events inevitably push the working class towards us. This passive expectancy, under a cover of idealistic messianism, has nothing in common with Marxism. Revolutionary events always and inevitably pass over the heads of every sect. By means of propagandistic literature, if it is good, one can educate the first cadres, but one cannot rally the proletarian vanguard which lives neither in a circle nor in a schoolroom but in a class society, in a factory, in the organizations of the masses, a vanguard to whom one must know how to speak in the language of its experiences. The best prepared propagandist cadres must inevitably disintegrate if they do not find contact with the daily struggle of the masses. The expectation of the Bordigists that revolutionary events will of themselves push the masses to them as a reward for their “correct” ideas represents the crudest of illusions. During revolutionary events the masses do not inquire for the address of this or that sect, but leap over it. To grow more rapidly during the period of flux, during the preparatory period, one must know how to find points of contact in the consciousness of wide circles of workers. It is necessary to establish proper relations with the mass organizations. It is necessary to find the correct point of departure corresponding to the concrete conditions of the proletarian vanguard in the person of its various groupings. And for this it is necessary to see oneself not as a makeshift for the new party, but only as an instrument for its creation. In other words, while preserving in its totality an intransigence on principle, it is necessary to free oneself radically from sectarian hangovers which subsist as a heritage from a purely propagandist period.

8. Those of our comrades who have manifested sectarian tendencies to the highest degree allege that the centrists of the SAP and the OSP always accused us of sectarianism, and that consequently we are now recognizing the justice of their charges, as well as the injustice of our criticism of the NAP, Paul Louis, etc. With such arguments these comrades once again illustrate how easily sectarianism consorts with opportunism. The leaders of the SAP and of the OSP accused us of sectarianism not because of what was weak in us, but just because of our strong points: tenaciousness of theory, hostility to all programmatic confusion and to unprincipled conciliationism and sterile combinations. Opportunism accuses and always will accuse Marxists of “sectarianism,” of “talmudism,” of “a tendency to split hairs.” It is necessary to reply with the severest condemnation of the apologetic position taken by some comrades toward the leaders of the SAP and their clear tendency to revise our criticism of the centrist leadership in general. To free ourselves from the sectarian hangovers of the propagandist period does not mean to us the renunciation of Marxist criteria, but on the contrary to learn to carry them over into a wider field, that is to say, to wed them with the struggle of ever larger sections of the working class.

9. It is only in the light of the above considerations that one can correctly estimate the radical turn taken by our French section, which, after ample discussion, has entered the SFIO on the basis of the decision of its national conference. The opposition to this turn was dictated by considerations of two sorts. One sort, like those of Bauer and his supporters, saw in this entry an abandonment of Leninism, “a capitulation before reformism,” and “a going over to the position of the Second International.” Others fear, a fear altogether natural in itself, that our French section could not develop its position within the SFIO, that it would be forced to furl its banner and thus would compromise the ICL. Comrade Naville and his group took an eclectic position in this question, running back and forth from one of these arguments to the other. The purely passive “intransigence” of Comrades Naville and Lhuiller was but the complement of their opportunist policy in the preceding period, when they prevented systematic work within the SFIO, substituting for it with adaptation from the outside to the policy of the leadership. Finally, Comrade Bauer, under the influence of the fact that he was rebuffed, began to cover his basically purely sectarian Bordigist position with the purely empirical argument that the entrance of the League into the SFIO was “inopportune.” The last declaration of Bauer, Lehmann, and others (September 20, 1934) is a mechanical amalgam of sectarianism and opportunism covered here and there with a fig leaf of “concrete realistic” considerations.

10. As for the natural and entirely legitimate fears of other sections that the turn of our French section might tie it hand and foot, the answer to these fears, incomplete and not definitive but nevertheless extremely important, has already been given by the facts. The plenum notes that the position openly taken by the Bolshevik-Leninist Group within the SFIO (Program of Action, three numbers of Vérité, pamphlets on the militia, youth work) have nothing in common with capitulation but represent the application of the principles and methods of the ICL in its new orientation and under new conditions. In particular the plenum notes the indisputable progress of Vérité as compared with the preceding period. This alone settles the question as to whether the entrance was “opportune” or “inopportune.” The theoretical discussion on the character of the SFIO, its regime, etc., has received an empirical verification. The objective situation and the internal condition of the SFIO at the present stage are such as to give the Bolshevik-Leninists a serious possibility of participating in the internal life of the party and of pushing propaganda for their ideas on the basis of a real struggle of a sizable party of the proletarian vanguard.

In view of the fact that the discussion on the French turn has led to sharp factional struggle between those favoring and those opposing entry, in the course of which errors were made on both sides, the plenum, while condemning the fact that the Naville faction in its factional activity took external steps damaging to the political life of our organizations, reminds the League of the necessity of a healthy political and organic life, and invites all members of the minority who value their connection with the ICL to immediately join the Bolshevik-Leninist Group of the SFIO on the basis of a common discipline. Consequently, every member of the minority who permits himself insinuations against our French section with the object of compromising it in the eyes of Socialist workers, by this very act places himself outside the ranks of the ICL. The plenum orders the IS to regularly furnish materials to all sections illustrating the work of the French section in the new situation, in order that the ICL as a whole may utilize the experiences thus acquired.