.

July 2001   
Declaration of Fusion
between the 
League for the Fourth International
and the
Revolutsionnaya Kommunisticheskaya Organisatsiya
of Ukraine

Note: Following revelation of a bizarre financial and political fraud in Ukraine in August 2003, in which the same group of individuals presented itself as the Ukrainian section of ten or more international tendencies, including the League for the Fourth International, the LFI has declared the fusion with the “RKO” null and void. To read the LFI statement on this affiar go to A Band of Political Impostors and Swindlers in Ukraine.

The League for the Fourth International (LFI) and the Revolutsionnaya Kommunisticheskaya Organisatsiya (RKO – Revolutionary Communist Organization) of Ukraine announce the fusion of our two organizations to further the struggle to reforge an authentically Trotskyist Fourth International as the world party of socialist revolution. This fusion is preceded by more than a year of discussions and joint work on key questions facing the working class internationally and in the Ukraine. Together we take our stand on the 1998 founding statement of the LFI. 

In The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International (1938), Leon Trotsky wrote that “The historical crisis of mankind is reduced to the crisis of the revolutionary leadership.... the crisis of the proletarian leadership, having become the crisis in mankind’s culture, can be resolved only by the Fourth International.” The LFI and RKO affirm that the past six decades of class struggle only underscore the validity of this central thesis of the Transitional Program. 

Yet this key conclusion, which is the heart of the founding document of the Fourth International and was the very reason for its founding, is today denied by the vast majority of organizations, reformist and centrist alike, who falsely claim to represent Trotskyism. In different ways, they capitulate to or openly embrace the bourgeoisie’s lying propaganda about the supposed “death of communism.”

Thus the struggle to uphold Bolshevik-Leninism today includes the fight to unmask and politically defeat the host of opportunist currents who betray its revolutionary internationalist content. We affirm that communism lives, in the struggles of the workers and oppressed and in the Trotskyist program, the basis for the proletarian vanguard we fight to build.

I

The dramatic impoverishment of the population of Ukraine during the last decade is a direct consequence of the restoration of capitalism that accompanied the destruction of the Soviet Union. The living standards of the working people have been slashed by more than half. The health system is in ruins, hundreds of factories have closed, millions of workers have been thrown out of work, particularly women who have also seen their health care destroyed, while those who continue to toil in run-down plants are paid starvation-level wages, when they are paid at all. The general immiseration is accompanied by a growth of national-chauvinist attacks  by marauding Ukrainian and Russian fascist gangs. Those who proclaimed freedom and independence for Ukraine have produced misery and oppression for its people. 

The October Revolution was the key event of modern history, representing the first time that the working class was able to throw off the chains of capitalist exploitation and undertake the tasks of socialist revolution. The Bolshevik leadership under Lenin and Trotsky insisted that while the revolution had begun in the economically backward tsarist Russian Empire, it must spread to the advanced imperialist countries to survive and achieve socialism, a classless society based on abundance for all. 

The usurpation of power by a conservative nationalist bureaucracy headed by J.V. Stalin in 1923-24, coinciding with the illness and death of Lenin, was soon followed by the abandonment of the internationalist program of Red October. Stalin proclaimed the anti-Marxist dogma of building “socialism in one country,” seeking to coexist peacefully with imperialism. The Bolshevik Party was gutted, as careerists replaced veteran cadres. The Trotskyists were expelled, and then jailed and murdered in the bloody anti-Communist purge of the middle and late 1930s, as was the entire remaining Bolshevik leadership of 1917, including Stalin’s own supporters.

Trotsky analyzed the effects of this political counterrevolution in The Revolution Betrayed. When this book was published in the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, those class-conscious workers and intellectuals who were able to read it (including the comrades who came together to form the RKO) immediately recognized in his analysis the decaying Stalinist regime that remained in power at the expense of the workers. Miners, factory workers and university students first became acquainted with Trotsky’s Marxist analysis of the dual nature of the bureaucracy, seated atop the collectivized economy of a workers state and depending on it for their obscene privileges while constantly undermining it.

Trotsky insisted on the duty of proletarian militants and revolutionaries around the world to defend the USSR from counterrevolution, despite years of degeneration, while fighting for political revolution to drive out the parasitic bureaucracy. In 1939-40, a petty-bourgeois opposition led by M. Shachtman in the U.S. Trotskyist party broke with Trotskyism by abandoning Soviet defensism as the first shots of the second imperialist world war were being fired. Trotsky’s unflinching defense of the homeland of October together with James P. Cannon [leader of the American Trotskyists] represents a legacy that could not be wiped out by the vile assassination of the founder of the Fourth International by a Stalinist agent in 1940. The Trotskyists stood at their posts at the crucial hour. Today Trotskyists stand for military defense of the remaining deformed workers states (China, Cuba, Vietnam, North Korea) and fight for proletarian political revolution to oust the bureaucracies which endanger their gains and indeed their very existence.

Despite Stalin’s sabotage of the Red Army and his faith in his pact with Hitler, the Soviet working people and Red Army men and women threw back the German imperialists at a terrible cost of 27 million dead. The Stalinists promoted Russian nationalism, appealing to reactionary elements including the church. But Hitler’s invasion would not have been defeated without the collective energies only possible in conditions of a workers state. After WWII, with the onset of a Cold War by Stalin’s former “Allies” (the Western imperialists) against the USSR, a new group of renegades led by Tony Cliff in Britain broke from the Fourth International refusing to defend North Korea in the Korean War. This was the concrete expression of Cliff’s anti-Marxist line that the Soviet Union was “state capitalist.” During the Indochina War, culminating in the heroic Vietnamese victory in 1975, many on the left (like the Cliffites) tried to pretend this was simply a colonial war in order to hide that this was the front line of defense of the degenerated/deformed workers states against imperialism.

Soviet defensism came to the fore once again with the onset of the second Cold War in 1980 as the Soviet army intervened to prevent the toppling of a weak bourgeois government in Afghanistan by Islamic mujahedin (holy warriors) aided by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Most of the larger self-proclaimed Trotskyist currents (including E. Mandel’s United Secretariat and the current led by P. Lambert in France) joined Washington’s hue and cry in denouncing Moscow’s intervention; the Latin American-based current led by N. Moreno supported the mujahedin, calling for the extension of the Islamic reaction to Soviet Central Asia. In contrast to these frauds, genuine Trotskyists called to “Hail the Red Army in Afghanistan” while calling for extension of social gains of the October Revolution to the Afghan peoples. The Soviet intervention cut across the Stalinists’ line of seeking deals with Washington, and soon Moscow retreated, ultimately carrying out a shameful withdrawal in 1989, which was a key contributing factor to the demise of the Soviet bloc and the destruction of the USSR.

The rise of the anti-Soviet Polish nationalist Solidarnosc movement in 1980-81 produced a counterrevolutionary front extending from the CIA and the Vatican to the pseudo-Trotskyists, all calling for “solidarity with Solidarnosc.” Trotskyists called instead to “Stop Solidarnosc Counterrevolution” in late 1981, and for political revolution to oust Jaruzelski, pointing out that this phony “union” that included bourgeois and even fascist elements was an instrument financed and advised by Reagan and Thatcher, the biggest strikebreakers in the West. As U.S. imperialism stepped up its anti-Soviet military and economic offensive, the pipe dream of peaceful coexistence with imperialism went up in smoke. Decades of Stalinist sabotage in the name of “socialism in one country” (culminating in Mikhail Gorbachov’s “perestroika”) opened the door to counterrevolution. Under relentless imperialist pressure, the Soviet bloc Stalinist regimes collapsed one after another. The bureaucracies shattered, with large segments openly embracing capitalism: Boris Yeltsin became U.S. president George Bush’s man in Moscow, and Leonid Kravchuk followed suit in Kiev, proclaiming Ukrainian independence. The subsequent history of bourgeois restoration has demonstrated the bankruptcy of capitalism and the need for socialist revolution throughout the former Soviet bloc. 

II

The series of counterrevolutions in the Soviet bloc during 1989-92 led directly to the 1990-91 Persian Gulf War orchestrated by U.S. imperialism under the symbolic cover of the UN and NATO, and to the proclamation by American president George Bush I of a “New World Order.” Far from achieving even a few years of counterrevolutionary “stability” under the domination of the sole imperialist “superpower,” the last decade has been marked by a sharp escalation of national and ethnic wars, along with increasing inter-imperialist rivalries. For now the latter are mostly economic, but historical experience shows that trade wars lead to shooting wars. 

Now under the Bush II government, U.S. imperialism is rapidly escalating its military provocations, declaring its intentions to break “arms control” treaties with Moscow and launch a supposed missile defense shield that is a cover for achieving nuclear first strike capacity. Far from being directed against those Washington declares “rogue states” like Iraq and North Korea, who have no nuclear arms, this offensive weapons system is designed to shoot down Russian satellites and to obliterate smaller nuclear forces (like China’s). The new anti-Moscow hard line in the Pentagon aims at turning Ukraine into a spearhead against Russia; the so-called “partnership for peace” is actually a pact of imperialist subjugation for war. The RKO and LFI call for breaking all ties to the NATO imperialist alliance. 

The most important recent development of the “post-Cold War world” has been the appearance of the so-called “anti-globalization movement.” The imperialist bourgeoisies have responded to these demonstrations with massive police-state repression and now outright murder with the killing of a radical protestor in Genova in late July. At the same time, this “movement” has posed a test for the various left tendencies, most of whom have responded with shameless tailism. This disparate conglomeration stretches from ostensible communists to bourgeois nationalists, but everywhere the predominant element in these class-collaborationist coalitions is that of nationalism. In the imperialist countries this takes the form of support for protectionism: in the United States, while anarchist “black blocs” break windows of coffee houses and clash with police, the anti-Communist AFL-CIO labor bureaucrats push for restrictions on Brazilian steel and Mexican truckers while attacking “Red China” with “evil empire” rhetoric taken straight from Ronald Reagan. In France, left- and right-wing supporters of French imperialism unite to support protectionist European agricultural policies while denouncing American fast food chains. 

In semi-colonial countries as well, the “anti-globalization movement” encourages blocs with bourgeois reaction. The South American Common Market (Mercosur) is presented as a counterweight to a U.S.-dominated Free Trade Agreement of the Americas, while in fact this regional trade pact is rent by feuding between Brazil and Argentina and the tottering Argentine economy threatens to set off a new international crisis. In Mexico, protectionist cries are raised against Chinese imports. In the former degenerated/deformed workers states, as was seen in the demonstrations in Prague in September 2000, the “anti-globalization movement” is used by the forces which supported capitalist restoration and the 1999 war on Yugoslavia (including quite a few self-proclaimed socialists) to blame the current misery of the masses on “free trade” and to channel anger into empty protests against the international economic agencies when real power rests with the masters of Wall Street and Washington, and their lesser imperialist allies/rivals.

The “anti-globalizers” pretend that recent economic developments represent a fundamentally new phenomenon. On the contrary, Karl Marx noted already in the 1850s “The tendency to create the world market is directly given in the concept of capital itself” (Fundamentals of the Critique of Political Economy). In the midst of the first imperialist world war, Lenin published his work Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916), noting “Capitalism long ago created a world market.” He underlined that the appearance of giant monopolies (today inaccurately called “multinational companies”), the massive export of capital for production and the carving up of the world among the capitalist associations marked the beginning of capitalism’s period of decline. Even quantitatively, statistics refute the claim that this is a new phenomenon: on the eve of World War I, international investments by the main developed countries were equal to their combined gross national products, while in 1990 foreign investments represented only 12 percent of their GNPs. 

In fact, in response to the “threat of communism” the leading imperialist countries introduced “welfare state” measures that increased the share of national production. This is what the social-democratic “left” anti-globalizers want to bring back, ignoring that the bourgeoisie undertook these measures in large part as a tactic in the anti-Soviet Cold War. Following the destruction of the Soviet Union, the various bourgeoisies seek to increase their declining profit rates by eliminating such “drains” on profits. The answer to the sharp increase in the capitalists’ rate of exploitation that underlies talk of globalization is not the reformist utopia of expanding national welfare states, but international socialist revolution, including the semi-colonies in the throes of industrialization and the imperialist centers with their declining industrial base. 

The LFI and RKO do not join or politically support the “anti-globalization movement” with its backward-looking nationalist/protectionist program. But since many radical youth and others may be attracted by the “anti-capitalist” rhetoric of some components of this amorphous popular front, we seek to acquaint them with our revolutionary Trotskyist analysis and program. And we energetically protest the vicious repression by the armed guardians of capital. We note that in recent years, the armies and police of both the imperialist and “Third World” capitalist countries have changed their armament and strategic orientation to prepare for “urban warfare.” While loudly proclaiming the “death of communism,” their actions show they have far from banished the spectre of proletarian revolution.

III

Currently one of the most active flashpoints in the “New World Disorder” is the Near East, where provocations by the rulers of the Zionist state of Israel provoked a new intifada (uprising) by the Palestinian youth in the Occupied Territories. After months, in which well over 500 Arab protesters have been shot down in cold blood and dozens murdered by Israeli assassination squads, in addition to the many thousands seriously wounded by Israeli fire, the Zionist military is now poised for all-out war against the Palestinian Authority, the pseudo-government set up by the 1994 Oslo “peace” accords. Late last year, as courageous Arab youth armed with nothing but stones were being slaughtered in  the West Bank and Gaza, the LFI and RKO coordinated our participation in protest actions denouncing the Zionist murderers, including putting out posters calling to “Defend the Palestinian People” and “For Arab-Hebrew Workers Revolution! For a Socialist Federation of the Near East!”

The imperialist press (that part of it that isn’t blatantly pro-Israel) lyingly presents events in Palestine as if they reflect “disputes” between two peoples who can’t get along, whereas in fact the Arabs are subjugated by the Israeli occupation. More fundamentally, there is a contradiction involving two peoples with the right to national existence occupying the same tiny area with few resources. As well, the creation of the Zionist state of Israel was the product of the “democratic” imperialists’ barring of Jewish refugees from Hitler’s Holocaust, before, during and after World War II. While recognizing the right to self-determination of both the Palestinian Arabs and the Hebrew people who live there, and the right of return of the Palestinian refugees driven out by the Zionists in three wars, we point out that this democratic right cannot be equitably carried out under capitalism, which necessarily pits one nation against another in competition for scarce resources including land and water. Against the bourgeois ideology of nationalism, only proletarian revolutionary internationalism provides a program for emancipating the oppressed Palestinian people, breaking Hebrew-speaking workers from the Zionist rulers and uniting the toilers of the entire region in socialist revolution.

Numerous self-proclaimed Marxists and pseudo-Trotskyists have long tailed after Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization and more radical Arab nationalist groups in the PLO. In the 1990s, many supported the phony U.S.-sponsored Oslo “peace” process which only gave a “legal” cover to Israeli occupation. Both positions are a dead end for the oppressed Palestinians and offer no perspective to those Hebrew working people who do not want to live in a permanent garrison state. As Trotskyists we fight for an Arab-Hebrew workers republic led by a multinational Trotskyist party, as part of a socialist federation of the Near East, the only framework in which the myriad national conflicts can be resolved involving interpenetrated peoples in the region (in particular the Kurdish people, carved up among six capitalist countries and repressed by all of them). The Israel-Palestine question is made all the more urgent by the fact that Israeli rulers have the third-largest nuclear arsenal in the world, surpassing that of Britain and France, and are fully capable of using these weapons. 

The importance of adopting a clear working-class stance on the Near East was recognized and embraced by the RKO, which has proceeded to put these perspectives into practice. This can make a significant contribution to the fight for Trotskyism in Palestine and in fighting resurgent anti-Semitism in Ukraine, Russia and other countries of the former Soviet bloc. Events in Israel/Palestine will also be significantly affected by upheavals elsewhere in the region, including the current revolt in Algeria in which the LFI has intervened with Trotskyist propaganda.

IV

The restoration of capitalism and declaration of independence, far from resolving national questions in Ukraine has exacerbated them. The existence of a Ukrainian state with a clear (60 percent) majority of native Russian speakers is bound to produce tensions, with some areas in the west overwhelmingly Ukrainian-speaking and the east overwhelmingly Russian-speaking, and other mixed areas. As in various East European states, the new bourgeois rulers have whipped up nationalism, seeking to establish homogeneous capitalist states (initially without capital) on ethnically or linguistically heterogeneous populations. The imposition of Ukrainian in official documents and in schools is widely resented in Russian areas. Individuals have been beaten in the street by Ukrainian nationalist thugs for not knowing Ukrainian. We demand “absolutely no privileges for any one nation or any one language” (Lenin, “Critical Remarks on the National Question”). We demand equal rights for Ukrainian, Russian and other languages spoken by the population.

In addition, there is the case of Tatars unjustly expelled from the Crimean peninsula by Stalin in 1944 and exiled to Uzbekistan. Many of those now returning have been denied citizenship, the right to their homes or to work by Stalinist local authorities. In the south along the Danube there is a mixture of populations including Ukrainians, Russians, Romanians, Moldavans, Hungarians, Jews, Slovaks, Bulgarians, Albanians and others. The Soviet Union, despite Stalinist Great Russian chauvinism, was a multinational state and the numerous cases of interpenetrated peoples can only be resolved in the framework of a voluntary socialist federation resulting from workers revolution extending beyond the borders of the individual former Soviet states. An internationalist policy on the national question in Ukraine would immediately affect intractable conflicts such as in Trans-Dniestr. As the Soviet degenerated workers state was collapsing, the imperialists sought to use the nationalism of non-Russian peoples as a counterrevolutionary tool. Many pseudo-Trotskyists actively participated in this, calling for an independent Lithuania, Ukraine, etc. Authentic Trotskyists defended the right of Soviet peoples to form independent workers states but opposed the use of the right of self-determination as a cover for counterrevolution. The RKO and LFI consider that Trotsky’s call for an independent Soviet Ukraine in 1938-39, while principled, was inappropriate under the circumstances.

Subsequently, Ukraine has become the focal point of a drive by U.S. imperialism to encircle Russia. In recent years, the country became the third largest recipient of U.S. aid after Israel and Egypt. President Leonid Kuchma, head of the party of Ukrainian industrial “oligarchs” who was once seen as Washington’s man, came increasingly in the Russian orbit after Vladimir Putin took over from Yeltsin in 1999. This led to a drive to oust Kuchma that had tacit support, if not direct encouragement from the United States. The government of Bill Clinton indicated its preference for now former premier Viktor Yushenko, and in January 2001 anti-Kuchma demonstrators encircled parliament. Protest organizers talked openly of having “another Belgrade” in Kiev, i.e., toppling a government that had fallen out of favor with U.S. imperialism through a putsch disguised as “people power” and replacing it with a pliant client regime.

The protests were led by a Ukrainian nationalist coalition that took the form of a “sliding scale of popular frontism.” The main grouping was called “Ukraine without Kuchma” and was sponsored by the bourgeois Socialist Party of Ukraine (SPU) of Aleksandr Moroz, together with smaller “social-democratic” parties and Ukrainian fascists such as UNA/UNSO. After initially participating in this lash-up, the Russian chauvinist Communist Party of Ukraine (KPU) pulled out to form own coalition, “Ukraine without Kuchma and Yushenko,” that included CP satellite organizations and Russian fascistic outfits. A coterie of pseudo-Trotskyists formed its own bloc, “Ukraine without Bourgeoisie and Fascists,” initiated by the MRM (Young Revolutionary Marxists) which describes itself as fraternally related with the Stalinophobic International Bolshevik Tendency, and enthusiastically promoted by the RV (Workers Power), which is part of the LRCI led by the British Workers Power group. 

Despite its pretense of independence from the bourgeoisie, this lash-up was simply a fig-leaf to cover their “critical” participation as a component of the anti-Kuchma popular front. They were joined by Ukrainian supporters of the CWI (Committee for a Workers International led by Peter Taaffe), ITO (International Trotskyist Opposition), IWC (International Workers Committee), the British Workers Liberty group led by Sean Matgamna, the Argentine Partido Obrero of Jorge Altamira, the Argentine PTS and others of the more than 20 Ukrainian grouplets posturing to the left of the Communist Party.

In early February, the encampment of hundreds of anti-Kuchma protesters in Independence Square was attacked by hundreds of Ukrainian fascists of Trident, a group on Kuchma’s payroll, who clashed with the fascistic Russian National Bolshevik Party. As Kuchma sought to wait out the protests, SPU leader Moroz went to Washington to gain support. Eventually the “movement” dwindled from 10,000 to a few hundred and then disappeared as the U.S. lost interest. Instead, in June U.S. “defense” secretary Rumsfeld traveled to Kiev for six hours on his way to a NATO meeting, giving orders to Kuchma who since switched prime ministers. The pseudo-Trotskyist bloc fell apart as the MRM/IBT issued a self-criticism for launching a “bloc for propaganda,” which in reality was a popular-frontist coalition to facilitate their participation in the anti-Kuchma front. The RV/LRCI called for joining even closer with the bourgeois forces.

The Revolutsionnaya  Kommunisticheskaya Organisatsaya refused to join this circus of class collaboration, insisting on the Trotskyist principle of refusing to give political support to any popular front. The RKO points out that these tendencies that falsely claim to be Trotskyist in fact were swimming in the wake of U.S. imperialism; many of them did so a year earlier as well over the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. Against the incestuous “family” of pseudo-Trotskyism in Ukraine, the LFI and RKO call for the building of an independent Trotskyist vanguard party in the fight to reforge the Fourth International. We fight for revolutionary workers governments in Ukraine and throughout the former Soviet states, and in particular extending to the advanced industrial imperialist countries of West Europe, Japan and the U.S.

V

The acute crisis of revolutionary proletarian leadership, from the explosive Near East to the catastrophic economic and social conditions of the former Soviet bloc countries, requires the construction of Leninist-Trotskyist parties that return to the internationalist heritage of the Bolshevik Revolution. The Stalinist identification of Bolshevism with Great Russian chauvinism did incalculable harm to the Leninist cause, including by enabling the imperialists to whip up counterrevolutionary sentiment in the guise of opposition to national oppression by the bureaucracy. This harm continues after the destruction of the Soviet Union with the proliferation of various “national Bolshevik” Stalinist and fascistic groupings. The RKO of Ukraine seeks to build a Leninist vanguard party of the proletariat, a party of professional revolutionaries rather than a social-democratic talk shop, a party which acts as a “tribune of the people” mobilizing the power of the proletariat against all forms of social oppression, as Lenin elaborated in his 1902 work What Is to Be Done?

In addition to fighting for an internationalist policy on the national question in this multinational state, Trotskyists fight vigilantly against every act of discrimination and victimization of the Jewish population. Anti-Semitism has long been the cutting edge of counterrevolution in Ukraine. The tsarist Black Hundreds murdered thousands of Jews from Kishinev to Zhytomyr. During the 1918-20 Civil War, the White Armies and the Ukrainian bourgeois armies under Symon Petlyura carried out widespread pogroms against Jews with the same vengeance with which they slaughtered Bolsheviks. The Grigoryev forces then allied with the anarchist leader Nestor Makhno also carried out anti-Jewish pogroms. In World War II, the Hitlerite imperialist invaders whipped up popular anti-Semitism with their hate propaganda against “Jew communists,” and slaughtered more than 35,000 Jews among the 100,000 citizens of Kiev who were buried in the killing grounds of Babiy Yar. During the war and after, the fascist bands of Stepan Bandera staged pogroms. 

The Stalinists refused to recognize the specifically anti-Jewish nature of the Nazi genocide, as well as the extermination of Roma (Gypsies), homosexuals, ethnic minorities, Slavs and anyone else the fascist Aryanizers considered “subhuman.” Stalin made use of anti-Semitism in the struggle against Trotsky, and subsequently particularly in the period from 1948 to 1952 culminating in the infamous “doctors’ plot.” At the same time Jews made up a significant section of the Stalinist apparatus, including A. Vishinsky who presided over the Moscow trials. Discrimination against Jews continued up to the end of the Stalinist regime, particularly concerning positions in university education. The Zionists whipped up an international campaign to “save Soviet Jewry” which utterly distorted the Jewish question in the Soviet Union and made symbols of the likes of Nathan Shcharansky, who was guilty of passing defense secrets to Western journalists and others. 

Since the restoration of capitalism and Ukrainian independence there have been periodic fascist attacks on Jewish sites, including a number of incidents of desecration of Jewish cemeteries. Trotskyists call for united-front working-class defense against anti-Semitic fascist attacks. Although homosexuality was decriminalized in 1991, gay groups still face government harassment, there is considerable anti-homosexual prejudice, gays are subject to hostility from the Stalinists (who preach traditional “family values” Reagan-style), and homosexuals are targets of the hatred of fascists, such as the Ukrainian nationalist UNA/UNSO thugs who attack leftists in Lviv and elsewhere. Communists uncompromisingly defend full rights for homosexuals and resolutely fight against victimization of gays.

Particular attention must be paid to the woman question. Women have been among the hardest hit sections of the population by the consequences of capitalist restoration. Unemployment has disproportionately affected women, and many services such as day care are only available to those who can afford them, if they are available at all. A Leninist party must make particular efforts to recruit women comrades, who as history shows will be some of the most committed fighters in the coming class battles. Communists fight for free abortion on demand as part of a system of high quality free medical care for all; against the wholesale elimination of maternity benefits; for free, 24-hour day care; for equal pay for equal work and the opening of all occupations to women. For women’s liberation through socialist revolution!

VI

The decisive element in the fight to mobilize the proletariat against the ravages of counterrevolution and capitalist oppression is the construction of an international, genuinely Bolshevik-Leninist party. In particular it is necessary to defeat the liquidationist politics of Pabloism, named after Michel Pablo who responded to the post-WWII expansion of Stalinism by abandoning the struggle for an independent Trotskyist vanguard. Instead the Pabloists tailed after a host of non-proletarian, anti-revolutionary forces, first the Stalinists (of Moscow, Belgrade and Beijing), followed by Cuban Castroites, Algerian bourgeois nationalists, Latin American petty-bourgeois guerrillas, Portuguese military officers, Iranian mullahs, and then howling with the imperialist wolves over Afghanistan and Poland in the second anti-Soviet Cold War. By the time of the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the Pabloists had long since accustomed themselves to making common cause with counterrevolution.

General proclamations replete with quotes from Trotsky are the common currency of the two dozen grouplets who seek to occupy the political terrain to the left of the rightward-moving CPU. They and many of their mentors simultaneously engage in an endless dance of combinations and recombinations, of coordinating committees, liaison committees, parity committees to rebuild, reconstruct, or reconstitute the Fourth International. What this means in practice is gluing together bits and pieces left over from the implosion and crumbling of the various groupings claiming to be the continuity of the party founded by Leon Trotsky. The RKO and LFI, in contrast, insist that a necessary revolutionary regroupment through a process of splits and fusions must be based on the authentic Trotskyist program, not temporary diplomatic agreements.

General principles are tested in the class struggle, and a key event in the former Soviet states is August 1991 in Moscow, which marked the point at which open counterrevolution gained the ascendancy in the land of the October Revolution. Frustrated Gorbachev lieutenants in the “State Emergency Committee” (GKChP) staged a half-hearted coup in the name of maintaining the USSR (but not stopping the restoration of capitalism), only to be ousted in Yeltsin’s countercoup backed by imperialism. At this decisive moment, the potpourri of pseudo-Trotskyists sided with counterrevolution in the name of “anti-Stalinism.” Some, like the USec Mandelites proclaimed Yeltsin progressive compared to the GKChP in the name of supposedly classless (bourgeois) democracy. They and the LRCI current led by British Workers Power literally climbed onto the Yeltsin barricades. 

The British “Militant” group, out of which Taaffe’s CWI emerged, headlined in its paper (Militant, 30 August 1991) “Coup Smashed”; an editorial wrote of “elements of the political revolution” in the “struggle to stop the hard-line bureaucrats.”* Morenoites joined with Cliffites in hailing Yeltsin’s counterrevolutionary countercoup as a new “Russian Revolution.” The latter-day Shachtmanites of the LRP directed their fire against “Stalinist hard-liners” in Moscow, while criticizing Yeltsin for having “pseudo-democratic policies” – presumably the LRP is for “real” (bourgeois) democracy. The Argentine PTS crowed, “The revolution began in the Soviet Union in August 1991,” praising the “vanguard sector of the mass movement, which joined the struggle against the [GKChP] coup.” Other groups were more circumspect in putting forward a similar line. In Argentina, J. Altamira’s Partido Obrero declared that the “imperialists supported the [GKChP] coup” in the USSR and hailed the “people’s victory against the coup” as being of “revolutionary dimensions”. These currents are present in Ukraine today, and their present opportunist politics are utterly predictable from their stance in 1991. What is supporting Yushenko against Kuchma in the inter-bourgeois squabbling, for example, for people who joined the bourgeoisie in knifing the Soviet Union?

A superficially different case, which actually comes down to the same thing, is that of the IBT, which tried to hide its Stalinophobia by adopting the phony posture of calling for “military support” to the GKChP. But “military support” to a force which undertook no military action against Yeltsin is not resistance to counterrevolution at all. In fact, the IBT used the August 1991 events to declare the Soviet degenerated workers state dead and gone, and to wash their hands of any further pretense of Soviet defensism. For genuine Trotskyists, however, it was crucial to look for openings for proletarian resistance as the Yeltsin gang proceeded to dismantle the Stalinist regime and cohere the central elements of a new bourgeois state. 

The International Communist League (ICL) led by the Spartacist League of the U.S. correctly called in August 1991 to mobilize Soviet workers to smash Yeltsin/Bush counterrevolution. The ICL, which for three decades represented the continuity of revolutionary Trotskyism internationally, had forthrightly fought for revolutionary Soviet defensism in Afghanistan, Poland and elsewhere, and mobilized internationally to intervene in East Germany (DDR) against capitalist reunification and for political revolution against the Stalinist heirs of the Ulbricht/Honecker regime, who following Gorbachev’s lead capitulated to the West German imperialists, handing over the DDR to them on a platter. In Moscow in August 1991, while giving no support to the half-hearted coup attempt the ICL correctly held open the possibility of a military bloc with “recalcitrant elements of the bureaucracy” should they have used their arms against Yeltsin’s putsch, but the GKChP “gang of eight” parked their tanks and didn’t even cut the phone wires leading from the White House in Moscow to the White House in Washington. 

Today, however, the ICL declares in polemics against the League for the Fourth International that the Stalinists “led” the counterrevolution in the DDR and USSR. This claim is directly counterposed to Trotsky’s analysis of the dual nature of the bureaucracy, is contrary to actual events (Yeltsin broke from the bureaucracy, the entire DDR Politburo ended up in the jails of the Fourth Reich), and contradicts what the ICL wrote at the time it was fighting against counterrevolution. Simultaneously, the ICL denounces the LFI for upholding Trotsky’s statement that the historical crisis of humanity is reduced to the crisis of revolutionary leadership of the proletariat. The ICL writes in its reformulated 1998 Declaration of Principles that this key thesis of the Fourth International “predates the present deep regression of proletarian consciousness,” which they also point to as the key element leading to the collapse of the degenerated/deformed workers states. 

Thus rather than emphasizing the crisis of leadership and fighting to resolve it, they blame the working masses for this world-historic defeat. With the line it has today on the Stalinist bureaucracy, the ICL could never have done what it did ten years ago in fighting against counterrevolution. Likewise, it has abandoned Trotsky’s position on popular fronts (claiming they are impossible in countries without mass workers parties) and renounced the basic Comintern position of demanding independence for all colonies. As it sinks further into left centrism and abstentionism, the ICL is incapable of leading new revolutionary struggles tomorrow.

VII

The League for the Fourth International was formed in 1998 by former members expelled from the International Communist League in the United States, Mexico and France together with the Liga Quarta-Internacionalista do Brasil, with which the ICL broke fraternal relations in the course of fleeing from a key class battle in the fight to oust the police from the unions in that country. In its founding declaration, the LFI stated that it is “a tendency in formation. It will draw to its ranks those who seek to defend and extend the program of authentic Trotskyism, and to apply it in the struggle of the working class and the oppressed.” The declaration continued:

“The reforging of the Fourth International requires defeating Pabloism and all other currents which betray the revolutionary Trotskyist program. An important component of this fight, and of the struggle to overcome the disparity between the tasks we face and our limited forces, will be the tactic of revolutionary regroupment on the program of Leninist internationalism. We foresee a series of splits from revisionist organizations and fusions with those genuinely seeking to be communists, in building the vanguard party.”
This fusion between the LFI and the RKO of Ukraine is a first realization of this perspective.

In the short time of its existence, and despite its extremely limited forces, the LFI has already achieved some modest successes. In Brazil the LQB sparked the first work stoppage (in April 1999) demanding freedom for American death-row political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal, renewing the tradition of international labor defense. In Mexico, the Grupo Internacionalista made an exemplary intervention in the ten-month National University (UNAM) strike in 1999-2000 which was instrumental in the formation of workers defense guards of hundreds of electrical and university workers that arrived at a crucial moment to block army/police occupation of the struck campus. In the U.S., the Internationalist Group has uniquely fought to bring the communist program to immigrant workers who represent an infusion of combative new forces into the bureaucratized labor movement. The LFI now has publications in five languages.

The RKO of Ukraine was formed by comrades who as early as 1989 publicly announced their intention to establish the Fourth International section in Ukraine. It first came together as a circle oriented to Trotskyist politics in 1992. Bringing together former students and workers who had eagerly read the first of Trotsky’s works published in Russian since he was exiled in 1929, the RKO sought international contact including with the ICL during the period that the latter had a Moscow station. But the ICL’s refusal to debate programmatic questions led RKO comrades to see a gap between the ICL’s words and its deeds. By 1997 the RKO began the construction of a party organization seeking to carry out Leninist norms, recruiting to its ranks young miners who had come to political life in the 1989 coal miners strike. Taking up contact early in 2000, the LFI and RKO have arrived at common agreement on issues discussed above. In the course of these discussions, the RKO organization has grown significantly, integrating new militants of diverse backgrounds.

As a section of the League for the Fourth International, the RKO will participate in a democratic-centralist international tendency, enabling the fused organization to increase the impact of our interventions. The RKO adopts the perspective of the early publication of a modest newspaper in both the Ukrainian and Russian languages reflecting struggles on the national terrain and key international questions in the press of the LFI. A second project is to publish a select series of Trotsky’s texts in pamphlet format to make them accessible to worker and student contacts with limited resources. It will seek to undertake sales at key factory and other locations in Kiev and lay the basis for extension of its propaganda to other key districts in eastern and western Ukraine. The RKO and LFI also recognize their responsibility to propagate the program of authentic Trotskyism elsewhere in the former Soviet states and East Europe. 

In the wake of capitalist restoration in the Soviet Union, the first workers state in history, and East Europe after decades of Stalinist sabotage and under the hammer blows of imperialism, many reformists and centrists have adopted a program of open defeatism, whether in the form of increasing opportunism or through abandonment of the struggle for revolutionary leadership of the class struggle, or both. In contrast, for revolutionaries it is necessary to draw the revolutionary lessons of these historic defeats for the workers’ cause. 

Any militant worker who has been through a tough strike knows this process, and that many fall by the wayside. But those who remain and those who are drawn into the struggle are not thrown back to the period before 1914, i.e. before the Russian Revolutions of 1917, as the revisionists now claim. On the contrary, we stand on the shoulders of those who fought before us, including the Trotskyist analysis of Stalinism, which is a key element to future victories. We continue the work of the tens of thousands of Bolshevik-Leninists who fell under Stalinist, fascist and bourgeois-”democratic” repression. It is the genuine Trotskyists alone who have a program to lead the workers and oppressed in the former Soviet states to revolutionary victory that will extend across the face of the planet and offer a future of socialism to mankind instead of the barbarism we can already see before our eyes.

Kiev, 26 July 2001

*Quotation retranslated  

To contact the Internationalist Group and the League for the Fourth International, send e-mail to: internationalistgroup@msn.com

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