To get socialism you need a revolutionary Marxist Party!
The dying beast of western imperialism lashes out in all directions to hold on to world power which is rapidly slipping through its tentacles. The masses of workers, small farmers and oppressed are driven to resist. Protest action against the genocide in Gaza continues across Europe. Confrontations against Trump’s fascist ICE goonsquads are daily fare in the USA. Workers reach out for arms to defend themselves from Palestine to the Sahel to Venezuela. The most pressing task for vanguard workers internationally is the formation of a democratic centralist international that builds Bolshevik type parties in every nation. Doing so requires critique, exposure and defeat of legacy currents remaining from previous attempts which have collapsed via revisionism into Kautskyism, economism, reformism and centrism.
The class struggle resistance has not yet found its way from spontaneity to organized drives for workers’ power. In no small part the workers’ path to power and socialism eludes them because of the reformist currents holding our class back. The economic collapse, the unfolding inter-imperialist conflict, the genocides and authoritarian states drive the workers into action. Yet the political consciousness lags behind the objective necessity of the epoch–socialist revolution. Workers’ Assemblies, inter- and multi-union and unorganized wage labor forces need to meet today and form struggle bodies – workers’ councils that challenge Capital for power. These workers’ councils are everywhere a missing revolutionary ingredient, just like the missing Bolshevik-type party rooted in them!
In the imperialist centers and across the semi-colonial world the workers’ consciousness lags, in no small part because the vanguard of the working class has not overcome the legacy of social democracy, Stalinism, anarchism, short sighted syndicalism and the leadership of the Fourth International’s repeated betrayals. In short, the limits of the popular front — working class leaders’ adaptation to bourgeois leadership of social movements still stymies workers’ ability to think and act as a class for itself! The treacherous leaders of our social class have permitted Capital a continued life way beyond any conceivable progressive role.
Everywhere workers must build their own politically independent party in the struggle on the shop floor and communities, beholden only to our class and each other. Yet everywhere self-identified socialists look for shortcuts around the masses. The old leaderships have failed and like dogs in search of a new master they run with leashes in their mouths from one bourgeois faker to the next, hoping after hope a new leadership will fall from above. In the UK this manifests as “Your Party” where the out bureaucrats Corbyn and Sultana wave a not so red flag to cement their future at your expense, offering a new social democratic party without democracy at the base. The DSA in the USA plays a similar role claiming a complete break with the capitalist Democrats is not necessary–just a push against the billionaires; more taxes against the rich (Mitt Romney’s plan, wasn’t it?!) and the American dream can be restored. In Venezuela Maduro, and his Venezuelan Socialist Unity Party, the PSUV rolled out all the trappings to keep workers under the thumb of the “progressive, anti-imperialist” wing of the national bourgeoisie. This scenario plays out in Brazil with the PT, in Argentina with the Peronists and Mexico under Sheinbaum’s Morena party. Across the global south the national bourgeoisie navigate the “Great Game”–the unfolding conflict between the U.S. and China–and weigh their options for survival hedging bets on the rising BRICS bloc with obsequious dealings with the west, the IMF, the World Bank and Trump. Indeed, short of workers socialist revolution it could not be otherwise.
In the imperialist centers both historic Trotskyism and Stalinism adapted to a racist national exceptionalism, fostered a national chauvinism that has buried the revolutionary program for decades. In the semi-colonies a national Trotskyism emerged alongside Stalinism and Peronist Bonapartism, robbing workers of their transitional program and the politics of the Permanent Revolution and orienting the workers movement toward the petty bourgeois “socialists,” the anti-imperialist poseurs. In the former worker’s states, in particular China and Russia, State Monopoly Capital invested in real production of use values, to challenge the dying imperialist empires as new imperialist powers. Tankies bow down to Putin and Xi building the international Popular Front alongside BRICS leaders administering capitalism across the global south. All the while the Social Democrats of Europe, Labor in the UK and commonwealth nations, and Democrats in the USA are integrated into administration of the western imperialist world order. Unions have become stateized to put an end to class struggle battles for real workers’ power!
The accelerating class conflict can be won only by workers if we build our new revolutionary leadership party and international based on actual workers in struggle. Fawning over electoral campaigns like Mamdani’s and proven sellouts like Corbyn, Maduro and Lula is a dead end that reifies all the worst electoral illusions in capitalism. Electoralist activism is interpreted as a working class offensive against Capital. While there is a significant increase in strikes with over 200 so far this year the labor bureaucracy and leadership remains firmly tied to the Democrats. A fact readily observed with the ease of slide from Cuomo to Mamdani among the delegates to the NYC Central Labor Council.
In the USA some “socialists” (Lambertists in their Labor and Community for an Independent Party) bury the struggle for class independent political action in building the popular fronts with so-called independent candidates. Radicalized independents who take pot shots at billionaires and corporations and even break with the Democrats but do not fight for a workers party and a workers government. Blocking with the Green Party “eco-socialists” draws opportunists an audience only to be swallowed by the popular front tossing aside socialism and the transitional program. There is no lack of history of Green activists who after gaining office as Greens return to the fold (Democratic Blue that is.) San Francisco’s Matt Gonzalez, Ross Mirkarimi and others like Dean Preston, a DSA member endorsed by the Greens, hold (or held) office as Democrats.
All the tendencies whose concept of the United Front don’t insist on workers’ class independence are in actuality building the death trap of the Popular Front. The Popular Front insists on suppressing the transitional program, substituting bourgeois parliamentarism for the formation of workers councils. The Popular Front rejects expropriation of the capitalist means of production and instead promises the state will tax the rich and sometimes take a stake in capitalist enterprises or nationalizing industries with indemnification! The Popular Front does not fight for workers’ central planning of the economy to oppose the capitalist anarchy of production and the manipulation of financial markets by capital. And the Popular Front blocks the independent arming of workers militia to defend our class, instead reforming the capitalist state’s armed bodies. This has proven fatal. To win, workers need our class independent United Front to defeat the Popular Front, build workers councils, workers militias and prepare the general strike for power. In this class struggle the revolutionary party must be built from among the most uncompromising worker militants, representatives of the youth, the women and oppressed populations.
For the International Workers’ United Front Against Imperialism!
The failure to build a Bolshevik-Leninist party in this period grants imperialist powers more time to survive by destroying the forces of production. Workers of the world face a worse crisis than the eve of World War 2 for a combination of objective reasons: interimperialist rivalry threatens wars and even world nuclear war for redivision of the world’s resources and markets; climate catastrophe is here now, with annual “century storms” attacking the shores globally, the revolutionary leadership of the 4th International founded in 1938 as world war approached, betrayed the rank and file members of its sections, turning the revolutionary war against the imperialist ruling classes into a chauvinist war against fascism, succumbing to the Stalinised 3rd international and to the national bourgeoisies. So while objectively workers are ready and willing to fight capitalism creating a pre-revolutionary situation globally, the subjective element, the revolutionary party, is lacking. To resolve this crisis of leadership the vanguard of the working class must refound the 4th International – the new party of socialist revolution – and lead workers and oppressed to make the revolutionary insurrection to overthrow the capitalist state and replace it with a workers’ state!.
What is that necessary leadership?
“Objective laws of motion of capitalism necessitate the democratic centralist proletarian vanguard party as the ‘subjective’ agent of revolutionary change.” Draft Program ILTT
Experiences old and new demonstrate we need education, agitation and organization. We also need to resolutely avoid repeating past mistakes that are prescriptions for failures.These mistakes, when they are mistakes, are generally the result of adaptations to alien class forces. These make revolutionary opportunities slip away, where great social force is mobilized behind misestimations of what is possible. The results can be anything from wasting the planet’s remaining time to bloody massacres of the productive forces. We need our own world party of socialist revolution with national sections to coordinate and carry out the struggles for the program transitional to the conquest of state power, the reorganization of society to produce for need, and world socialism. Such is the definition of a democratic-centralist, Leninist-Trotskyist Bolshevik Party.
“The Communist Party Marx describes then becomes the ‘collective scientist’ applying the scientific method, not by aping bourgeois ‘science’, but of dialectical materialism. The party applies ‘Marxism’ by the method of testing theory in practice, drawing from Marx’s laws of motion conclusions that guide the proletariat in its concrete class struggle.” (ibid)
Why do we need it?
“The program (and so the underlying theory) can only be tested in practice by the class struggle, drawing on the experience of the vanguard united in action, a process which Lenin later referred to as “democratic centralism”. The leadership is the Leninist party which tests theory by practice. Summed up as ‘democent’. Democracy in theory, centralism in practice. Internally, the rule is great freedom of political debate, but externally there can only be the united party, a unitary “general line.”
“The anarchist doctrine that democracy is incompatible with centralism. This is a petty bourgeois theory that democracy means individual freedom from party discipline or state authority. The material base of the petty bourgeois is freedom from wage labour, to escape the working class into the capitalist class.“ (ibid)
Here we have the 21st century example of OCCUPY, which has left the working people with neither institutions for struggle nor theoretical conquests.
Democratic Centralism (Democent) is the only scientific basis for applying and advancing the program as the guide to struggle. Without the program and the testing of theory in practice there can be no development of class consciousness capable of transforming objective reality by means of subjective class struggle.
History has shown that the Leninist party alone has succeeded in leading a successful workers revolution. The successful Russian revolution led by the Bolsheviks vs the defeated German revolution, 1918-23 led by an immature Communist party, provides us the ultimate test, the lesson par excellence.
“The success of the democratic centralist party in Russia in 1917, and the aborted revolution in Germany in 1919, saw the bourgeoisie panic and immediately declare the ‘Leninist’ Party the evil enemy of humanity and the heavens.” …. “The bourgeois attack on the Leninist Party as a ‘dictatorship’ against the ‘democracy’ of the Provisional Government, was disproved by the facts. First, the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionary peasant party walked out of the soviets and gave the Bolsheviks a ‘bourgeois democratic’ majority rather than suffer inevitable defeat. Second, workers, soldiers and peasants formed a clear majority in support of the insurrection.”(ibid)
The USSR, surrounded by Capital’s Cordon Sanitaire and isolated by the failure of the German revolution, survived the death of Lenin only to abandon the proletarian membership majority for the “Lenin Levy.” The Lenin levy, purportedly implemented to counterbalance the intellectuals of the party with hundreds of thousands of new worker recruits, was chiefly a stuffing of the party ranks with bureaucrats of the state. These recruits, not hardened by years of Bolshevik activism, were easily moulded by the new General Secretary Stalin in his bid for power, instantly becoming a claque at meetings and his personal base.. The workers’ democracy of democratic centralism was overturned by the dictatorship of Stalin and his bureaucratic base, and abandonment of the world revolution for the construction of “socialism in one country,” altogether resulting in the triumph of Menshevik, petty-bourgeois politics at the top of the workers’ state and subsequently the 3rd International.
“The imperialist countries invaded soviet Russia to smash a socialist revolution in the name of ‘democracy’ and against the majority will of workers in their own countries. It is clear that thereafter we can talk only of workers’ dictatorship and workers’ democracy!”(Ibid)
Under the combined onslaught of imperialist intervention and isolation combined with the bureaucratic degeneration of the revolution, the demise of workers’ democracy, purges, show trials and gulags, socialists of all stripes distanced themselves refusing unconditional defense of the gains of October-creating multiple excuses mostly reducible to versions of the state capitalism theory.
The crisis of leadership haunts the workers movement:
“Since Trotsky’s death we have been subjected to ‘improvers’ who reject the method of Trotsky’s Transitional Program. Some, like the ‘new left’, consciously reject the method of the Communist Manifesto and the first four Congresses of the Communist International. Others (LIT, USec., CWI, LO, ICL, IBT), who claim to adhere to the method, never apply or teach it. This abandonment of the Marxist method reproduces the political confusion sown in the working class by the labour lieutenants of Capital and their exclusive preoccupation with exchange relations, signifying their complete surrender to the wage system.” (ibid)
The legacy of the major tendencies spun out of the post-Trotsky degeneration of the Fourth International is a multi-origined set of centrist revisions that back away from Lenin’s April Theses into Menshevism. Objectivism presents as the sum intellectual product of these empiricists. Via parallel byways they re-interpreted Trotsky’s observations from the Theory of Permanent Revolution. The Permanent Revolution argued that the tasks of the democratic revolution, unfulfilled in the epoch of imperialism, could only be fulfilled by the socialist revolution. These epigones wove numerous adaptations to climb aboard the treadmill of radical democratic and national democratic revolutions, presenting them as objectively the ‘socialism in our time!’
On the domestic front the methodologically equivalent adaptations were varieties of sectoralism, identity politics and “peaceful, legal single issue mass action” strategies. Some leaderships tortured logic to sell compartmentalized reformist work as dialectics. Some found ways not to bother. The workers are the revolutionary social class the objectivists tell you. No dispute there. They’ll make the revolution when they do (not before.) So where Pabloism forecast centuries of deformed workers’ states, later geniuses like Zizek give us great man theory (Lenin as an exceptional freak of history, not a social product of the masses or the revolutionary generations.)
The caudillos spun out of the ‘Fourth’ adapted to the national democratic revolutions against fascism and imperialism across the continents, inverting the permanent revolution. Those events included the Maoist bloc of four classes, the structural assimilation of Eastern Europe into the Soviet economy, Tito’s mixed economy, Algeria and Vietnam’s anti-colonial revolutions. Even while flourishing their red banners (some hid them and still do) they eventually adapted to Euro-Communism and the rise of the New Left’s mass vanguard of declassed youth. The overthrow of capitalism (Eastern Europe, China, Korea, Cuba, Vietnam) without the leadership of bolshevik Leninists (Trotskyists) confirmed, for objectivists, that the historic trajectory of the epoch negated the leadership necessity! A “blunt instrument” would do.
Novack’s socialism as ‘a linear extension of democracy’ gave room for Barnes’ “Their Trotsky and Ours” made every sort of opportunist adaptation to anti-worker leaderships permissible. Barnes’s trajectory thereafter was not so different from Moreno’s adaptation to Peronism, then Fidelismo then to Maoism.Then Pablo and then Mandel’s adaptations to Stalinism and then to the Cuban and Sandinista states, followed by the Woodites bowing to the Bolivarian 5th International!
Trotsky’s class independence gave way to sects building a popular front with the emergent Chinese imperialist bloc today. This is the sad legacy upon which the overwhelming majority of today’s “Trotskyist Tendencies” have built their modern practice. Dozens of Fourth and even Fifth Internationalists beat a path towards the very centrism and Menshevism Lenin and Trotsky fought against for decades!
But ours is not a historical tract; comrades can read the “great ones” on their own time in the Marxist Archives, check our assertions and come to their own conclusions. Today we pick up the shillelagh not to bludgeon Cannon, Mandel, Moreno, Petroni, Lambert, Shachtman, Cliff, Robertson or Wohlforth; they are already dead yet their legacy organizations stagger onwards misleading generations of youth and workers around the world deeper into the popular front. These traitorous organizations excuse cross class politics infused with illusions in electoralism and petty bourgeois socialism as great leaps forward in the consciousness of the masses. Many do so while touting an air of class independence and refusing to assert class independent demands in their “united front” and coalition work at the same time! Proudly they adhere to a distorted reading of the Transitional Program which transforms some individual transitional demands into a laundry list minimum program abandoning the method of the 1938 program. The transitional method explodes the contradictions of each struggle to arrive at the need for workers self organization and the workers government. The degenerated Trotskyists’ tendencies line up to admonish proponents of Trotsky’s method. In every struggle they cover their retreat to the minimum demands with both the prescription that the workers must not only be “met where they are” but also justify their practice of adapting to the backwardnesses workers are trapped in.
Today, in the USA renegades fawn over Mamdani’s mass support, getting out the vote (where between 50 and 100 thousand Democrats campaigned) as if it represents a new stage in the class struggle. Despite the massive uptick among youth for socialism in the polls, this movement is more about electoralism and a promise of reforms long since proven to be within the parameters of exploitative capitalism. These are unlikely given the trajectory of Capitalism’s terminal crisis and the structural bankrupting of the real economy of goods and use values.
This Epoch Requires the Transitional Program As the Essence of the Marxist Method
As in 1938, the contradiction of the ripeness of forces of production finds missing the expression of the self organization of the interests of the working class in a mass vanguard party. The knowledge that the objective situation requires urgent revolutionary action is confounded by the backwardness of the leaderships that bury the workers’ historical program, claiming that the program is just for the party, or just for the vanguard (the party alone for some) or only for those who understand it! And in all present day cases, NOT FOR United Front political organizing! Some of this is the conscious rehabilitation of Karl Kautsky, with no principled organizational division between reformism and revolutionary Marxism.
But in the U.S.A. there is the history of the Jack Barnes model (SWP-US) of “single issue, peaceful mass action” pressure politics, with the ostensible workers’ party growing by linear recruitment of the sectoral mass movements’ “best builders.” While Barnes has departed politically from the membership who made that program their “strategy for revolution,” a host of those members championed that 1971 program and logical extensions of it in identity politics and latter day “Trotskyist” sects. They do so, doggedly, and even now. For some it is their meal ticket.
Today capitalism’s death throes threaten the survival of humanity and many other species. Capitalism’s terminal crisis has fused the consequences of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall as an accelerator pedal welded to the jalopy floor, driving forward the metabolic rift as nature revolts, collapsing the web of life. Humanity’s hope is embodied in the realization by youth and workers that for our class to survive capitalism must die! Yes, its death is coming and the transition from one mode of production to another is never clean, bloodless or predetermined. Humanity can descend into barbarism quite easily if the workers do not break from leaders whose entire method is a path through the popular front, the confidence man politics of continued subordination to capitalist class rule! And that includes living peaceably in deep-entry in the PSUV or in the DSA, the fake socialist organization in the U.S.
The reformist layers of the U.S. “left” like Bernie, AOC and Mamdani appear whenever there is thirst among the masses for socialism. All gussied up in red and charming the masses with anti-oligarchy talk, they rally the masses’ hatred of the system into acceptable liberal parameters. Acceptance of the role of the imperialist state, acceptance of the normalcy of bi-partisan neo-Keyensianism and neo-liberalism and a longing for the normalcy of a long lost age of liberalism which never was more than the dictatorship of capital with a smile and a stab in the back. Longing for an FDR redux has plagued the American left as generations mis-interpreted the rise of new technological marvels (from atomic energy to AI) as advances in the forces of production which could counter the falling rate of profits and deliver an increasing real purchasing power, i.e. “standard of living.”
This mystification, which plagued the global north fed nativism and chauvinism which would not leave the left in the U.S. and Europe unscathed. The U.S. national chauvinism was evident in the closure of the international center by Cannon right after Trotsky was assassinated. He sincerely believed the U.S. working class would lead the world revolution and not in any distant future. In turn this belief resulted in a national Trotskyism in semi colonies as a direct response to chauvinism in the northern hemisphere. The SWP sent Sherry Mangan to visit Argentina and Chile during the war with the consequence that a unity of dubious programmatic agreement was urged on the Argentinian comrades, resulting rapidly in a split that was as inopportune as could be when a military coup developed. Another dubious role is suggested with the visit by Pierre Frank in that period, resulting, we are told, in the first adaptation to Peronism as it ran roughshod over the CGT unions. Peronism remains in control of the CGT bureaucracy to this day.
The contradictions of the structural condition of capitalism versus class-political consciousness leadership are nowadays blowing up in the north and should blow up in the south as well! Fertile ground for a resurgence of genuine Trotskyism must be prepared by rejecting the electoralism of the FITU and the adaptation to the DSA and Bernieism among the ranks of self-identified communists/Trotskyists. It is past time to learn and reaffirm and or adopt the method and system of the 1938 Transitional Program for all those who seek world socialism!
More Trouble To Overcome!
The Proletarian Military Policy of Trotsky was misunderstood by Cannon and abandoned in practice. Revolutions might erupt in the colonial world during the war and Cannon put his money on India and the Congress party pacifists. At home he called for support for the “war against fascism.” Functionally, the abandonment of the Proletarian Military Policy was a large-scale adaptation to Stalinism, and Cannon’s adaptation to bourgeois rule on the witness stand became “Socialism On Trial.” It did not keep the Party and Union defendants out of jail. It put the Transitional Program in jail just in time for the U.S. joining the interimperialist war. Later the trial record booklet was the basis of bad education and recruitment in the sixties and seventies.
We see the adaptation to Stalinism in WW2 as the main cause of the degeneration of the 4th International. The anti-imperialist United Front (AIF) was in reality a popular front that disarmed the workers (as in Indo China and Greece). We argue that in relation to the US, the SWP as a whole became anti-fascist, an anti-fascism of defensive formulations and acquiescing in both a conscription without class opposition to imperialist interests and to the bourgeois military leadership, in short, acquiescing under pressure from U.S. national chauvinism. Both Stalinophiles and the petty bourgeois Stalinophobes, i.e Shachtmanites functionally ended up in the U.S. imperialist camp. We see national Trotskyism as a consequence in the Semi-colonial world. In the U.S. the SWP was actively responsible for encouraging the Stalinist anti-imperialist front with the bourgeoisie and Stalinists against fascism. Subsequently, the AIF was used to support the bourgeois parties and contain and defeat the workers United Front in Bolivia in 1952. This method has been employed by the United Secretariat and its successor right down to this day. That is why we push hard for the Workers United Front against the Anti Imperialist Front to build unity and the new international.
Not the Capitalist Dictatorship but “Billionaires?”! The Useless Popular Fronts and the Betrayals on the Horizon!
The essence of the popular front is the socialists making their slogans, demands and actions not only acceptable to the liberal Democrats and petty bourgeois but by erasing vestiges of the socialist program so as to effect the multiclass “democratic” coalition. A safe place for small time wanna be capitalist politicians building street cred and radical sounding trade union leaders to corral the members in the confines of bourgeois parliamentarism. Get out your cell phones and text your legislature comrades! This requires calling security on revolution and its champions! We recognize this game because it has been played on us since the 19th century!
Some are defenders of the Popular Front, while others pretend not to be, even as they “play in the shadow” or the “sandbox” with just as limited and minimal programs.
Even while the youth are leaning towards socialism the wizened leaders of the last generation water down the objective truth that our enemy is the capitalist system by concentrating fire on a small select layer of power brokers–the billionaires.This is the new, post-2024 electoralism of fake socialism and the Union bureaucracy. As if the class structure of capitalism is limited to the billionaires at the top (and of course the blueblood economic royalty gets neither blame nor mention) and the working folk at the bottom without referring to an entire layer of millions of multi millionaires whose daily employment keeps the masses exploited and/or oppressed!
We have to make this point because almost NONE of the 535 Representatives and Senators, the political superstructural excrescence of the Capitalist dictatorship, are billionaires. They are just millionaire or multi-millionaire pikers who have to beg the DONOR class for the campaign contributions that govern “representation.”
Reformism and the Union Bureaucracy will not go into collision with the “civics” one is taught in Public Schools, a civics that is bourgeois ideology and history exclusively. This arrangement sets up the masses for belief in the possibilities of successful reform campaigns without regard for the factual and operating historical materialism, sets up faith in DSA and similar formations such as a decidedly-Bourgeois former Workers Party, a bourgeois party like the UK Labor Party has become.
Meanwhile a swelling layer of capitalists large and small prepare to use this latter day popular front era to prepare for fascism. They have the means to abide the distasteful present while they prepare, looting the treasury here, running a capital flight there, and preparing a total assault on the workers’ organizations and all the social conquests that have made wage slave life bearable for the planet’s proletarians.
We need a new international of workers’ revolutionary parties! There is time, though scant time, to form this World Party, as nature reminds us almost daily. The confused and/or craven leaders of our social class have permitted Capital a continued life beyond any conceivable progressive role. Our call is for a Workers United Front to tackle and knock down the fascism plans in the present, while we fight reformism’s wrong and defeatist politics and popularize the historic transitional program. We fight today for a Fighting Workers Labor Party!
Communist Workers Group, 01/04/2026
