January 1941 - Marxists Internet Archive

Page 8 FOURTH INTERNATIONAL January 1941
fortunately, life is not a fairy tale, despite its fantastic features.
The war of 1940 ha~ already given ample proof that
bourgeois democracy caml0t merely play at being dead.
Where its form remains, as in the United States, its substance
is steadily being drained away. No Prince Charming known
to man can boast· ~nough potency in his kiss to bring it to
life again.
The struggle of the British and American working class
to defend its democratic rights-its organizations, its strike
weapon, its press, etc.-prevents a speedier development of
totalitarianism in Britain and the United States. This process
leads liberals to identify the labor movement with bourgeois
democracy and to say that the stronger the labor movement
is, the more virile is bourgeois democracy. In reality, however,
the observation of the liberals is only a partial truth
-true for the moment but false to the unfolding character
of this process. A qualitative change must take place tomorrow.
I f today it still appears that the workers are merely demanding
certain rights within the confines of bourgeois
democracy, tomorrow the sharpening of the struggle for those
rights will transform it into a struggle for power. The resurgence
of the labor movement wiII result, not in increased
virility of bourgeois democracy, but in nakedly posing as the
only alternatives either the dictatorship of the proletariat or
the totalitarian dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. The revolutionist
naturally supports every limited demand of a workers'
organization but while doing so he knows where the logiC
of the struggle is carrying the organized proletariat: to power
or to fascist dismemberment.
The Soviet Union and the Imperialists
Together with the old "liberal" capitalist institutions,
the old world structure of mUltiple national states is also being
hammered into a new shape on the anvil of totalitarianism.
Fascism represents the ultimate concentration of capital on
a national scale. The total imperialist war it engenders likewise
implies an effort to concentrate imperialist strength on
a continental and a world-wide scale. Totalitarian capitalism
is trying by its own methods and in its own interests to . level
the national barriers which impede the operations of the profit
system. I n the war at its present stage it is possible to discern
the outlines of three· emerging imperialist blocs between and
among whom the still greater collisions of tomorrow are destined
to take place.
Germany has already established an uncertain mastery
over Western Europe. U. S. imperialism seeks a firm war bloc
of the Americas and .is prepared to absorb into its camp the
surviving sections of the British Empire, regardless of the fate
of insular England. Finally Japan, weakest of the imperialist
antagonists, is straining madly to spread its wings over the
vast spaces of Asia.
Between two of these blocs and standing in uncertain
relations to all of them is the Soviet Union . ., Isolated in a
hostile capitalist world, the Russian Workers' State extruded
the reactionary dictatorship of Stalin, which substituted the
narrowing interests of the Soviet bureaucracy for the international
basis of the proletarian revolution. I t replaced the
strategy of world revolution by the Utopian and reactionary
doctrine of socialism.in one country. It substituted over-cunning
maneuvers among imperialist groupings for reliance
upon the world working class. At home it deformed and crippled
Soviet economy and by ruthless terror exterminated the
Bolshevik party. Its mass purges reflected its instability, its
total cynicism, its utter bankruptcy. It became apostle-inchief
of the status quo.
Nothing is more unsettling to the status quo than revolution
and through the domesticated Comintem and the dread
apparatus of the GPU, Stalin broke the back of the proletarian
revolution in China, in Germany, Austria, France, and
Spain. Having helped bring Hitler to power, Stalin sought
help against him in other bourgeois chancelleries. H is courtship
of Britain and France produced the People's Fronts of
1935-39. Then, as war approached, Stalin abruptly switched
his bets. With characteristic contempt for the world proletariat,
he entered upon his compact with Hitler, shared in the
enslavement of the Polish people. He greedily snatched slops
from Hitler's tables, acquiring by his permission extended
outposts in the Baltic, in Finland, and Rumania.
Hitler knew as well as Stalin that the Kremlin regarded
these as essential for defense against eventual and inevitable
German attack. But Hitler also acquired a common frontier
with the U.S.S.R. from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Moreover,
in his Finnish adventure, Stalin exposed the fatal weakness
of his army and his regime. As the war year of 1940 draws
to a close, the Kremlin oligarchy pursues a policy of fearful
waiting, more isolated than ever before, and more than ever
before deprived of the support and sympathy of the world
working class. Stalinist "realism"-the glory of the pettybourgeois
"friends" of yesteryear-has led the Soviet Union
to the edge of the precipice where today it still hovers.
Nevertheless the Soviet Union-despite its Stalinist deformation-remains
an unconquered bastion of the world proletarian
revolution. As such it is to be defended by class conscious
workers-against and despite Stalin-against imperialist
attack. This defense rests solely in the effective preparation
of the world workers' revolution which can alone save the
Workers' State from extinction and rescue it from the Stalinist
bureaucracy.
Can There Be a Capitalist Peace?
Can there be a capitalist "peace"? Few, even amo~g
capitalist spokesmen, dare answer this question affirmatively.
Instead we are treated to the spectacle of the ChurchilIs, the
Mussolinis, and the Hitlers competing in presenting to their
peoples the mirage of a new kind of world to follow the war,
a world in which present inequalities and miseries would be
forever abolished. Churchill recently promised the people of
Britain that after the war "the advantages and privileges
which hitherto have been enjoyed only by the few shall be
far more widely shared." The Rome radio quickly retorted:
"Italy has been preaching the same thing for years. (Churchill)
is beginning to agree with us and adhere to our fascist
ideas." (N. Y. Times, Dec. 21) Hitler represents himself as
the savior of the proletariat from the plutocratic capitalists
and speaks of his war as a "war against the capitalist nations."
These rulers know that the peoples they have driven into
war are filled with hatred-hatred not so much of the alien
enemy as of the whole order of things which has condemned
them to this holocaust. These rulers know that -this hatred,
today dull and passive, will tomorrow grow angry and active.
A radio reporter back from England tells us that the British
people he has been observing at close quarters for a year
"have two obsessions: to fight on until Hitler is smashed and
their wives and children are safe again; and to end England's
f3tal rule by a privileged class." (Look, Dec. 31) .
The official propaganda of all the powers is compelled
to speak in terms of a socialist future in order to make the
barbaric present more palatable. They speak of the future, to
be sure, as though it were a vaguely imagined .gleam on a distant,
unseen horizon. Still the necessity lies hard upon them
to depict it in equalitarian terms, in socialist terms. But the