August 20th 1940 is the day that Ramón Mercader, a Stalinist agent, struck the death blow that killed Leon Trotsky, the Russian revolutionary and founder of the Fourth International. This article, originally to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of his death, is written by Dave Stockton Read more...

Resolution adopted by the International Secretariat of the LRCI, 29 December 1989

Eastern Europe’s most repressive regime has fallen. Its most hated Stalinist dictator is dead. But the Romanian revolution is not over, as the bourgeois rulers of the west would like to believe. Only its first phase is at an end. The most important tasks lie ahead. Read more...

Resolution adopted by the International Executive Committee of the LRCI, 4 March 1990

The release of Nelson Mandela has focused the attention of the world upon South Africa in a way not seen since the revolutionary situation of 1984-86. But this time we are not faced with workers’ strikes or uprisings in the townships. Rather, we have the spectacle of the ANC preparing to sell a “negotiated settlement” to the black masses. This is nothing short of a betrayal of the South African workers and should be branded as such. The current stage of the struggle in South Africa is dominated by the ANC’s perspective that apartheid can be abolished peacefully through negotiations with the white supremacist South African government. This policy holds grave dangers for the black masses of South Africa. Read more...

Passed at the MRCI delegate conference, September 1988

1. For Marxists the goal of communism entails the fullest development of the productive forces so that the material necessities of life are automatically available to all and not only to a tiny minority: the characteristic feature of all class societies.

Capitalism, as the highest and most progressive form of class society based on private property, has witnessed the greatest quantitive and qualitative development of the productive forces, based on the application of science and technology. This development has not been an even and continuous process due to capitalism’s contradictory laws of motion. Its development is motivated, not by planned satisfaction of human need, but by the capitalist class’ competitive compulsion to increase the rate of exploitation and offset the tendential fall in the profit rate. Read more...

We reprint here a 1949 article from Quatrième Internationale, the French language journal of the Fourth International (FI) on the 1948 French miners’ strike. During the strike the miners were subjected to murderous repression organised by Jules Moch, the Socialist Party Minister of the Interior. But responsibility for the strike’s defeat lay with the French Communist Party (PCF) led trade union, the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), which consistently refused to spread the action throughout the French working class. Read more...

Fifty million people died in World War Two. Now anniversary events are taking place across the world to mark the beginning of the slaughter. This article, originally published in the British socialist paper Workers Power in 1989 explores some of the myths that we are taught about the war. Read more...

What were the real causes of the destruction of 1939-1945? The Second World War explained from a Marxist analysis Read more...

During the First World War the German revolutionary, Karl Liebknecht declared "the main enemy is at home”. Lenin, elaborated the policy or revolutionary defeatism. By this he meant that the defeat or an imperialist power at war was preferable to a victory won at the cost of the class truce at home. Read more...

The Second World War was supposedly the "finest hour" of the British Communist Party (CP). It grew to 56,000 members, controlled many workplace organisations and had great influence in the unions. But throughout the war the CP acted as the puppet of Kremlin foreign policy. Read more...

The imperialist epoch can celebrate approximately its ninetieth anniversary.1 Lenin and the other great Marxists of the early twentieth century certainly did not anticipate such longevity. Like Marx before them they envisaged that the crises and contradictions of the capitalist system would provide the objective conditions for the working class to despatch it to the museum of social history. Read more...

The year 1988 opened with an eloquent rebuttal of the arguments from all those who have bid farewell to the working class. The strikes in Ford, on the ferry services, in the mines, in the NHS and in the civil service all demonstrate not merely the physical existence of the working class, but also its continuing capacity for class struggle. Read more...

Half a century has passed since the Transitional Programme (TP)1 of Leon Trotsky was written. In those fifty years much has occurred that Trotsky’s programme neither foresaw nor prepared for. Trotsky’s perspectives were based on the premise that ‘Mankind’s productive forces stagnate’.2 Yet, in the metropolitan countries the second imperialist war was followed by an unprecedented economic boom for almost twenty years. In turn this boom created the conditions for the resurgence of social-democratic reformism, a force Trotsky believed would be decisively destroyed in the war. Stalinism too not merely survived but gained a new lease of life through its expansion into eastern Europe and eventually parts of Asia. The condition for these unforeseen developments was the defeat of the revolutionary upsurge that occurred during the war in Europe. The defeat of that upsurge was achieved by counter-revolutionary force in the areas occupied by the Soviet Armed Forces and Allied imperialism. It fell victim to the no less fatal snares of democratic counter-revolution in much of western Europe. Read more...

Proceedings and documents of the First Congress March 1919. Edited by Riddell, Pathfinder 1987, Reviewed by Peter Mason Read more...

We reprint here an English translation of ‘Draft theses on the Jewish Question today’, first published in Fourth International in the January/February 1948 issue. They are dated January 1947 and the available evidence suggests that they were drafted by Ernest Mandel (‘Walter’) and first discussed by the International Secretariat in Paris at its 16 December 1946 meeting. Read more...

‘The war is no longer just a conflict between two ruling classes fighting for domination of the region . . . The war now is one in which Iran faces the world’s mightiest imperial power (the USA—WP) and its European and Arab allies. Under these circumstances socialists are not neutral... We are with the Iranians—for the defeat of the whole coalition of forces, including Iraq, that is ranged against them.’
(Socialist Worker Review December 1987). Read more...

1. The India Sri Lanka Accord of July 1987 represents the latest attempt at imposing a reactionary settlement on the national struggle of the Tamil people. The accord proposed autonomy which demanded the disarming of the only force enjoying the support of the Tamil people and reliance on Indian troops responsible for the repression of national groups inside India. It proposed a referendum in the Eastern Province in late 1988 to decide whether to continue links with the Northern Province. Read more...

Mikhail Gorbachev, and those politically close to him, face a most daunting political prospect. He has staked his political future on reversing the tendency to stagnation and decline in the growth of the Soviet economy. But he has gone further than this. The means to that end promise a major attack on the economic privileges and political authority of a significant section of the state bureauracy. In order to deliver that blow Gorbachev is courting limited mobilisations of rank and file workers and party members against those who resist pressure for change. Read more...

Dave Stocking reviews Karl Kautsky by Dick Geary (Manchester University Press 1987, 146pp, £4.95) Read more...

Paul Mason reviews The Meaning Of The Second World War by Ernest Mandel (Verso 1986 pbk £6.95)

Except for the Russian Revolution no event has shaped the modern class struggle more than the Second World War. The basic outlines of every contemporary war and revolutionary struggle were drawn during World War II. Yet despite its importance, the war remains a virtual closed book for the British labour movement. Read more...

We print below an exchange on the question of the anti imperialist united front between the Gruppo OperaioRivoluzionario (GOR) of Italy and Stuart King from Workers Power Read more...

For the past six months in Sri Lanka political attention has been fixed on the fate of discussions between the various Tamil guerrilla groups and the United National Party (UNP) government. Also involved in these talks was Rajin Ghandi’s government in India. Neither the ‘ceasefire’ that accompanied the discussions, nor the discussions themselves were a success from the Tamils’ point of view. Read more...

Leon Trotsky’s article The Programme for Peace , written during 1915-16 is a landmark in the develop­ment of Trotsky’s political method. Read more...

What Is a Peace Program?

What is a peace program? From the viewpoint of the ruling classes or of the parties subservient to them, it is the totality of the demands, the ultimate realization of which must be ensured by the power of militarism. Hence, for the realization of Miliukov’s 1 “peace program” Constantinople must be conquered by force of arms. Vandervelde’s “peace program” requires the expulsion of the Germans from Belgium as an antecedent condition? Bethmanll-Holweg’s plan were founded on the geographical war map. From this stand point the peace clauses reflect but the advantages achieved by force of arms. In other words, the peace program is the war program. Read more...

Throughout the 1984 miners' strike, Workers Power has fought for the TUC to call a general strike. We have argued that it is necessary in order to secure a victory for the miners and to smash the entire Tory offensive that the MacGregor closure plan is merely one part of. We have been justified by events. Read more...

July’s carnage on the streets of the capital Colombo was neither a new nor an unexpected event. Attacks on the 2.8 million minority Tamil population have been regularly aided and abetted by Sri Lanka’s 30,000 strong police force and army 98% of whom are drawn from the 11 million strong Sinhalese majority population. Read more...

“We Marxists differ from both pacifists and anarchists in that we deem it necessary to study each war historically (from the standpoint of Marx’s dialectical materialism) and separately.” (Lenin-Socia Read more...

From Workers Power issue 3 Read more...

In the 1970s, Dave Hughes, a founder member of Workers Power and the Movement for a Revolutionary Communist International, wrote a series of articles on party and programme to explain the importance of programme in Marx, Engels and Lenin. Part one deals with the debate in Germany during Marx's lifetime Read more...