I
welcome this opportunity to speak to you from Detroit, and allow me to
express my gratitude to the Social Democratic Club for extending this
invitation.
This meeting is being held under conditions of immense
crisis. There is an imminent danger of a US and Israeli attack on Iran.
According to a report published several hours ago in the New York Times:
The
rapid buildup of U.S. forces in the Middle East has progressed to the
point that President Trump has the option to take military action
against Iran as soon as this weekend, administration and Pentagon
officials said, leaving the White House with high-stakes choices
pursuing diplomacy or war. …
Israeli forces, which have been on
heightened alert for weeks, have been making preparations for a possible
war, and a meeting of Israel’s security cabinet was moved from Sunday
to Thursday [today], according to two Israeli defense officials.
The
International Committee of the Fourth International, the Socialist
Equality Party in the United States, and the International Editorial
Board of the World Socialist Web Site denounce the planned war
on Iran. It is an open violation of international law. It falls under
the category of a “crime against peace,” which was the principal charge
brought against the Nazi leaders in the 1945–46 trials in Nuremberg.
The fascistic Trump government is capable of any crime. It conducts foreign policy in the manner of Hitler’s Third Reich.
In
just the last six weeks, Trump’s regime has attacked Venezuela and
kidnapped its president. It has imposed a blockade of Cuba, aimed at
depriving it of oil and starving its population. It is supporting the
ongoing Israeli genocide of the people of Gaza.
Whether or not the
war begins within the next few days, or within several weeks or even
months, there will be war. Even if there is a sudden announcement of a
diplomatic breakthrough, it will do no more than change the timetable of
an attack. The objectives of US imperialism—the domination of the
planet—cannot be achieved peacefully. War against Iran is, for the
United States, an essential stage in its preparation for the coming
conflict with China.
War will not be stopped by appeals to
imperialist and bourgeois governments. The international working class
confronts a situation comparable to that which existed on the eve of
World War II. But the comparison is inadequate, because the consequences
of war today would be infinitely more terrible than they were 87 years
ago. Humanity faces the imminent danger of a nuclear catastrophe that
could result in the destruction of all human life.
This is the
situation that imparts to the words of Leon Trotsky, written in 1938, an
overwhelming urgency: “Without a socialist revolution, in the next
historical period at that, a catastrophe threatens the whole culture of
mankind.”
This is why today’s meeting is so important. One cannot
speak seriously about socialist revolution without turning to a careful
study of the life and work of Leon Trotsky.
Among the most
important years of Trotsky’s life were spent in Turkey, most of that
time on the island of Büyükada. Between 1929 and 1933 Trotsky wrote his
autobiography, My Life, and his incomparable History of the Russian Revolution. He
also wrote the great political documents that analyzed the political
situation in Germany and warned that the disastrous policies of the
German Communist Party were clearing the path for the coming to power of
Hitler’s Nazi Party. Finally, on the eve of his departure from
Büyükada, in July 1933, Trotsky issued the call for the building of the
Fourth International.
What were the events that led to Trotsky’s exile?
In
January 1929, Leon Trotsky was expelled from the Soviet Union by the
bureaucratic regime led by Stalin. During the previous five years he had
led the struggle of the Left Opposition, founded in October 1923,
against the bureaucratic degeneration of the workers state created by
the 1917 October Revolution. Notwithstanding the lies of the Stalinist
regime, it is a historical fact that Trotsky’s role in the Bolshevik
Party’s conquest of power and the survival of the Soviet regime in the
struggle against imperialist intervention between 1918 and 1921 was
comparable to that played by Lenin.
This assessment of Trotsky’s role is based on the following:
The
perspective that culminated in the Bolshevik seizure of power was based
on Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution, which he had developed in
the aftermath of the revolution of 1905. Trotsky foresaw that the
bourgeois democratic revolution in Russia would assume the form of a
socialist revolution, in which the working class would overthrow the
capitalist class and take power in its own hands. Moreover, the workers
revolution in Russia would be not only a national event; its fate would
be inextricably linked to the development of the world socialist
revolution.
This was the perspective that Lenin adopted in April
1917 upon his return to Russia. As a consequence of the outbreak of the
first imperialist world war in 1914, Lenin altered his appraisal of the
class dynamic of revolution in Russia. He abandoned the Bolshevik
Party’s longstanding program of the democratic dictatorship of the
proletariat and peasantry and argued that the task arising from the
overthrow of the tsarist regime was the conquest of power by the working
class.
In
the course of the world war, which exposed the reactionary role of the
Second International and its Menshevik adherents in Russia, Trotsky came
to recognize the correctness of the struggle that Lenin had waged since
1903 against opportunist and centrist tendencies.
Thus, the
change in the Bolshevik Party program, and Trotsky’s acceptance of
Lenin’s farsighted principles of party organization, brought to a
conclusion the earlier pre-1917 factional conflicts between these two
historic figures. Trotsky and many of his co-thinkers entered the
Bolshevik Party. As Lenin was to write in September 1917, there was no
better Bolshevik than Trotsky.
In September–October 1917,
Trotsky—as chairman of the Military-Revolutionary Committee of the
Soviet—was the principal tactician and organizer of the seizure of
power.
In the spring of 1918, Trotsky was appointed Commissar of
War and Supreme Commander of the newly created Red Army. During the next
three years, Trotsky played the most critical role in its victory over
the counterrevolutionary forces backed by all the major imperialist
powers.
Lenin and Trotsky played the decisive role in the founding
of the Third International, and were the most influential figures in
the first four congresses of the Comintern held annually between 1919
and 1922. Trotsky wrote the historic Manifesto of the Second Congress,
and delivered many of the most important speeches at these critical
congresses. Stalin, by contrast, did not deliver a single speech at any
of the first four congresses.
The political strategy which
underlay the founding of the Communist International (Comintern) and
guided its first four congresses was that the victory of the October
Revolution marked the beginning of the World Socialist Revolution. In
fact, the strategic calculations that guided the policies pursued by the
Bolsheviks after Lenin’s return to Russia in April 1917 were based,
first and foremost, on an appraisal of international, rather than
national, conditions.
The
issues that initially led to the formation of the Left Opposition were
related to economic policies, the bureaucratization of the Russian
Communist Party (RCP) and the suppression of inner-party democracy. But
the even more significant division within the RCP emerged in 1924. In
the aftermath of Lenin’s death, the factional attacks on Trotsky
intensified. The anti-Marxist essence of the campaign against Trotsky
was revealed in December 1924 in an essay written by Stalin, where for
the first time he advanced, in opposition to the internationalist
strategy of the October Revolution, the national-chauvinist program of
“socialism in one country.”
Crudely falsifying the history of the
October Revolution and the writings of Lenin, Stalin denounced the
program of permanent revolution and declared that the survival of the
USSR and the building of socialism did not require the victory of
socialism in the advanced capitalist countries of Western Europe and
North America, that there existed within Russia sufficient national
resources for the development of a socialist society.
He attacked
Trotsky’s insistence that, in Stalin’s own words, “the victory of
socialism in one country is impossible, that that victory of socialism
is possible only as the victory of several of the principal countries of
Europe (Britain, Russia, Germany), which combine into a United States
of Europe; otherwise it is not possible at all.”
Stalin attacked with particular vehemence the following statement by Trotsky:
As
long as the bourgeoisie remains in power in the other European
countries we shall be compelled, in our struggle against economic
isolation, to strive for agreements with the capitalist world; at the
same time it may be said with certainty that these agreements may at
best help us to mitigate some of our economic ills, to take one or
another step forward, but real progress of a socialist economy in Russia
will become possible only after the victory of the proletariat in the
major capitalist countries.
These words, declared
Stalin with his characteristic dishonesty, cynicism and pragmatic
short-sightedness, amounted to the “final shipwreck” of the theory of
permanent revolution.
More than a century has passed since the
Stalinist bureaucracy launched its assault on Trotsky and the program of
permanent revolution. The repudiation of the program of world socialist
revolution culminated 35 years ago in the “final shipwreck” of the
Soviet Union. Notwithstanding the genuine achievements of the Soviet
Union and the extraordinary sacrifices of the Soviet working class,
especially during World War II, socialism was never built. The program
of “socialism in one country” led to innumerable political disasters,
culminating in the dissolution of the USSR in 1991.
Even in the
aftermath of the voluntarily dissolution of the USSR by the Soviet
bureaucracy, the reactionary remnants of the old Communist parties, as
well as groups of pseudo-left petty-bourgeois radicals and nationalists,
proclaim Stalin as their hero. They declare their solidarity with the
man who not only ordered the murder of Lenin’s closest comrades in the
leadership of the Bolshevik Party but also instigated the bloody terror
that exterminated hundreds of thousands of Marxist workers,
intellectuals and artists between 1936 and 1940. Among Stalin’s victims
were socialist leaders beyond the borders of the USSR, including the
leader of the Spanish POUM, Andreu Nin, and, finally, Trotsky himself.
The
strategic conceptions of Trotsky have been vindicated by the entire
course of history. Indeed, Trotsky’s analysis of the global crisis of
the capitalist system retain an extraordinary level of political
relevance.
In 1928, exiled to Alma Ata in Kazakhstan, Trotsky
wrote a detailed critique of the Draft Program of the Comintern. It was a
withering analysis of the theoretical and strategic bankruptcy of the
program of socialism in one country. In one of its most critical
passages, Trotsky advanced this evaluation of the historical epoch:
In
our epoch, which is the epoch of imperialism, i.e., of world economy
and world politics under the hegemony of finance capital, not a single
communist party can establish its program by proceeding solely or mainly
from conditions and tendencies of developments in its own country. This
also holds entirely for the party that wields the state power within
the boundaries of the USSR. On August 4, 1914, the death knell sounded
for national programs for all time. The revolutionary party of the
proletariat can base itself only upon an international program
corresponding to the character of the present epoch, the epoch of the
highest development and collapse of capitalism. An international
communist program is in no case the sum total of national programs or an
amalgam of their common features. The international program must
proceed directly from an analysis of the conditions and tendencies of
world economy and of the world political system taken as a whole in all
its connections and contradictions, that is, with the mutually
antagonistic interdependence of its separate parts. In the present
epoch, to a much larger extent than in the past, the national
orientation of the proletariat must and can flow only from a world
orientation and not vice versa. Herein lies the basic and primary
difference between communist internationalism and all varieties of
national socialism.
As
a result of its nationalist orientation, the draft program drafted by
Bukharin, with Stalin’s approval, failed to understand the
contradictions of the imperialist world system, and, especially, the
explosive implications of the rise of American imperialism. Trotsky
insisted that without a precise analysis of the role of the United
States, the prospects for world socialist revolution could not be
correctly formulated. Trotsky stressed the dominant role of the United
States. However, he did not draw from this analysis the conclusion that
the United States was invincible. Instead, with astonishing
perspicacity, Trotsky wrote that:
it is precisely the
international strength of the United States and her irresistible
expansion arising from it, that compels her to include the powder
magazines of the whole world into the foundations of her structure,
i.e., all the antagonisms between the East and the West, the class
struggle in Old Europe, the uprisings of the colonial masses, and all
wars and revolutions. On the one hand, this transforms North American
capitalism into the basic counter-revolutionary force of the modern
epoch, constantly more interested in the maintenance of “order” in every
corner of the terrestrial globe; and on the other hand, this prepares
the ground for a gigantic revolutionary explosion in this already
dominant and still expanding world imperialist power.
Trotsky continued:
In
the period of crisis the hegemony of the United States will operate
more completely, more openly, and more ruthlessly than in the period of
boom. The United States will seek to overcome and extricate herself from
her difficulties and maladies primarily at the expense of Europe,
regardless of whether this occurs in Asia, Canada, South America,
Australia, or Europe itself, or whether this takes place peacefully or
through war.
These words, written 98 years ago,
describe with astonishing exactitude the present policy of the Trump
administration. If I may be permitted to quote from an essay that I wrote last week:
Trotsky
did not only predict a general tendency toward imperialist conflict. He
identified, with extraordinary specificity, the geographic scope of
American imperialism’s predatory ambitions and the ruthlessness with
which they would be pursued. Nearly a century later, Trump threatens the
sovereignty of Canada, threaten to seize control of the Panama Canal,
invades Venezuela, demands the cession of Greenland from Denmark and
menaces Iran with military destruction.
In 1934, with
the rise of German fascism and the approach of a second world war,
Trotsky further developed his analysis of US imperialism: “The world is
divided? It must be redivided. For Germany it was a question of
‘organizing Europe.’ The United States must ‘organize’ the world.
History is bringing humanity face to face with the volcanic eruption of
American imperialism.”
That phrase—the volcanic eruption of
American imperialism—is not a metaphor that has aged. It is a scientific
prognosis that is being fulfilled.
Eighty years after the end of
the Second World War, the United States bluntly proclaims that it seeks
to reorganize the world under its control on the basis of a reactionary
program that Hitler would applaud.
On February 14, Secretary of
State Marco Rubio delivered a speech at the Munich Security Conference
that is an overtly fascist justification of imperialist militarism,
national and racial chauvinism, and the repudiation of international
law.
That
the speech was delivered in Munich imparts to it an irony that its
authors were either too ignorant or too cynical to acknowledge. Munich
is not only the city where the postwar security conference has been held
since 1963. It is the city where Adolf Hitler launched his political
career, made his first attempt to overthrow the Weimar Republic in
November 1923, where the Nazi Party held its earliest mass rallies, and
where, in September 1938, the governments of Britain and France
dismembered Czechoslovakia and handed it to Hitler. The British and
French ruling classes were prepared to sacrifice an ostensibly
democratic republic to a fascist dictator in the hope that the Nazi war
machine would continue to focus on the east, toward the Soviet Union,
and leave their empires intact. The consequences of this connivance with
Hitler are well known: the most catastrophic war in human history, the
Holocaust, and the deaths of tens of millions.
Rubio does not
mention the crimes of fascism. Rather, for the American secretary of
state, the downfall of the Third Reich was a tragic historical turning
point:
For five centuries, before the end of the
Second World War, the West had been expanding—its missionaries, its
pilgrims, its soldiers, its explorers pouring out from its shores to
cross oceans, settle new continents, build vast empires extending out
across the globe.
But in 1945, for the first time since the age of
Columbus, it was contracting. Europe was in ruins. Half of it lived
behind an Iron Curtain and the rest looked like it would soon follow.
The great Western empires had entered into terminal decline, accelerated
by godless communist revolutions, and by anti-colonial uprisings that
would transform the world and drape the red hammer and sickle across
vast swaths of the map in the years to come.
The
scaffolding of Rubio’s speech is the concept of “Western civilization”
as a singular, organic entity stretching back millennia. “Thousands of
years of Western civilization hung in the balance,” Rubio declares of
the Cold War. He invokes “the lessons of over 5,000 years of recorded
human history.” He speaks of “the greatest civilization in human
history.”
This is not history. It is mythology. The Secretary of
State can’t even count. Five thousand years reaches back to Sumer and
dynastic Egypt—civilizations that were geographically Middle Eastern and
North African and that belong to the heritage of all humanity. The
ancient Greeks did not consider themselves “Western.” The concept of
“Western Civilization” is a dubious and relatively modern intellectual
construct forged largely in the service of European colonial expansion.
After
the fall of Rome, most of Greek philosophy was lost to Latin
Christendom for centuries. Its recovery depended on Arab and Persian
scholars who preserved, translated, and extended Greek thought while
Europe remained an intellectual backwater. The mathematical foundations
of modern science are no less indebted to the East: algebra originated
in ninth-century Baghdad; the decimal numeral system came from India;
paper, printing, the compass and gunpowder came from China. None of this
is acknowledged in Rubio’s speech. “The West” is presented as a
civilizational miracle owing nothing to anyone.
Rubio, who is as
ignorant as he is reactionary, is unaware of the fact that the American
Revolution was proclaimed by its leaders as a new development in the
evolution of humanity, not a continuation of a timeless and eternal
civilization, backward traditions and obsolete forms of government. As
the revolutionary thinker Tom Paine wrote in his famous pamphlet Common Sense, “We have it in our power to begin the world anew.”
What
Rubio’s speech leaves out is as revealing as what it contains. The
words “democracy,” “equality,” and “human rights” do not appear anywhere
in the text. Neither does the American Revolution, the French
Revolution, the Bill of Rights, or the Emancipation Proclamation.
These
omissions are deliberate. The democratic revolutions were founded on
universalist principles irreconcilable with the politics Rubio
articulates. The Declaration of Independence asserts that “all men are
created equal.” The Declaration of the Rights of Man proclaims that “men
are born and remain free and equal in rights.” The Bill of Rights
protects the individual against the power of the state. The speech
cannot mention these documents because their logic leads to
conclusions—the equality of all human beings, the universality of
rights, the subordination of power to law—that the speech repudiates.
Rubio’s
hatred of the Enlightenment replicates that of the Nazis. On April 1,
1933, Goebbels declared: “The year 1789—the beginning of the French
Revolution—is hereby erased from history.”
Rubio’s speech is
based on an anti-Enlightenment and fascistic ideology deeply rooted in
bourgeois thought. Though undermined and driven into the background by
the defeat of the regimes of Hitler and Mussolini in 1945, fascist
ideology has resurged since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Rubio’s
Munich speech represents the legitimization of fascism. The
institutions of liberal modernity—international law, multilateral
cooperation, the restraint of state power by legal norms—are obstacles
to be swept aside. What must replace them is a hierarchical order rooted
in ethnic and racial identity and upheld through authoritarian
dictatorship and war. There is nothing in this speech that Goebbels
would not have endorsed enthusiastically.
The Secretary of State’s
glorification of “Christian civilization” is shot through with deceit
and hypocrisy. He fails to mention the Inquisition and its centuries of
systematic torture, forced conversion and the burning alive of heretics,
Jews and accused witches.
The “vast empires” the speech
romanticizes were built on countless atrocities, which included the
Atlantic slave trade and the systematic plunder of India by the British
East India Company, which transformed one of the world’s wealthiest
regions into a colonized hinterland and produced famines that killed
tens of millions. King Leopold’s empire in the Belgian Congo was based
on the extraction of rubber through forced labor, mutilation, and mass
killing that reduced the population by an estimated 10 million.
Countless other examples could be given.
A critical clarification
must be made here—one that distinguishes the Marxist analysis of these
historical crimes from Rubio’s framework and from the liberal critiques
that merely invert his civilizational mythology.
The slave trade,
the destruction of Indigenous peoples, the plunder of India, the horrors
of the Congo—these were not the products of an abstraction called
“Western civilization.” They were not the emanations of a cultural
essence or a racial inheritance. They were the products of a
historically specific mode of production: capitalism, which, as Marx
wrote, “comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood
and dirt.”
The so-called primitive accumulation of capital—the
violent expropriation of the peasantry, the slave trade, colonial
plunder—was not an incidental feature of capitalist development. It was
its precondition. As Marx wrote in Das Kapital:
The
discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement
and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of
the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a
warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalized the rosy
dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are
the chief momenta of primitive accumulation.
Rubio’s
speech obscures this sordid history by attributing the power of the
capitalist epoch to a timeless “Western civilization”—a mystification
that serves several purposes.
First, it naturalizes capitalist
domination by presenting it as the flowering of an eternal racial,
ethnic and religious essence. Second, it provides a justification for
oppression and the most heinous of crimes. Third, it provides a
substitute for a scientific analysis of the socioeconomic foundations of
society and, above all, the class struggle. Trotsky’s description of
the reactionary and irrational fantasies of the Nazi ideologists can be
applied without modification to Rubio’s racial-ethnic-religious theory
of history. In his 1934 essay, “What Is National Socialism?” Trotsky
wrote:
In order to raise it above history, the nation
is given the support of race. History is viewed as the emanation of the
race. The qualities of the race are construed without relation to
changing social conditions. Rejecting “economic thought” as base,
National Socialism descends a stage lower: from economic materialism it
appeals to zoologic materialism.
Though Rubio does
not recognize the class struggle, he is obsessed by it. Rubio’s
narrative of the 20th century is preoccupied with the struggle against
Marxism and socialist revolution. This aligns the administration with
the most reactionary tradition in American foreign policy. It is the
tradition that justified every Cold War atrocity, from the overthrow of
Mossadegh in Iran and Arbenz in Guatemala to the Vietnam War and the
support of military dictatorships across Latin America, Africa and Asia,
as a defense of “Western civilization” against “godless communism.” By
invoking this tradition without qualification, the speech signals that
the same justification will be used to legitimate whatever military and
covert actions the administration undertakes.
The speech’s most
ominous passages celebrate the administration’s use of unilateral
military force and explicitly dismiss international law. Rubio recites a
catalogue of violence with evident pride: the bombing of Iran, the
seizure of a head of state in Venezuela. He declares that “those who
blatantly and openly threaten our citizens” cannot be allowed to “shield
themselves behind abstractions of international law.” He calls for an
alliance “that does not allow its power to be outsourced, constrained,
or subordinated to systems beyond its control” and “that asks for
permission before it acts.”
In another passage, Rubio states:
“Armies do not fight for abstractions. Armies fight for a people; armies
fight for a nation. Armies fight for a way of life.” Rubio’s statement
amounts to the reduction of countries, including the United States, into
ethnic and racial tribes. As for his claim that armies “do not fight
for abstractions,” how does Rubio explain the revolutionary war of
independence waged by the Americans between 1775 and 1783? The
population was mobilized on the basis of the “self-evident” and abstract
“truths” defined by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of
Independence. In 1863, at the battlefield of Gettysburg, Lincoln
declared that the Union soldiers had fought and died in defense of the “proposition that all men are created equal.”
A
renowned historian and biographer of Lincoln wrote to me earlier this
week, in response to Rubio’s speech: “Half a million Union soldiers lost
their lives in a civil war that was all about an idea.”
The
“truths” invoked by Jefferson and the “proposition” defended by Lincoln
were “abstractions” that had a profound historical, social and
democratic content, rooted in the materialist philosophy of the
Enlightenment, and which prepared the foundations for the revolutionary
movements of the late 18th and 19th centuries.
Rubio, denouncing
the “abstractions” of democratic thought, glorifies the irrational
abstractions of fascism: “People,” “nation,” and “way of life,” which
are of a mystical character and contribute nothing to a scientific
understanding of the history and socioeconomic structure of society. The
fact that Rubio’s fascistic idiocies received a standing ovation at the
conclusion of his address demonstrates that the Trump administration’s
repudiation of democratic principles is shared by the European
bourgeoisie.
The speech did not fall from the sky. The Trump
administration is the product of interrelated economic and social
processes: 1) the protracted decline in the global industrial supremacy
of the United States. 2) the malignant growth of financialization, which
is characterized by the overwhelming dominance of financial markets,
instruments and institutions over the real economy, production and
labor. Profits are generated not through productive investment, but
through speculative activities such as leveraging, asset inflation,
credit expansion and mergers. 3) the emergence of a new aristocracy—it
can also be described as an oligarchy of mega-millionaires and
billionaires—whose fortunes derive not from production, but from the
management and manipulation of financial assets. The basis of their
wealth is a massive expansion of fictitious capital. 4) The growth of
staggering levels of social inequality. In the United States, the wealth
of the richest 0.1 percent of the population is five times greater than
the total wealth of the bottom 50 percent of the population.
These
objective economic and social conditions underlie the breakdown of
bourgeois democracy, the turn to fascism and the eruption of militarism.
The domestic and foreign policies of the Trump administration are a
manifestation of crisis. It is seeking to reverse the drastic
deterioration of its global economic position through war. It is
attempting to impose the burdens of the massive national
indebtedness—now over $38 trillion—through the intensified exploitation
and impoverishment of the working class.
It is instructive to
measure the distance the American political order has traveled. Franklin
Roosevelt, in his 1941 State of the Union address, defined American war
aims in terms of four universal freedoms (i.e., “abstractions”)—freedom
of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from
fear—“everywhere in the world.” These were not the privileges of Western
civilization or Christian peoples. They were declared the birthright of
“every person in the world.” Roosevelt understood that war could only
be justified as a struggle against fascism.
Roosevelt could not
have delivered Rubio’s speech. He believed that he was compelled to
legitimate American power in democratic and universalist terms. That
compulsion was maintained, in no small measure, by the pressure exerted
by the existence of the Soviet Union and the threat of socialist
revolution. Rubio’s speech marks the point at which the ruling class has
dispensed with this obligation altogether. The revolutionary democratic
tradition is repudiated, and what replaces it is the
counterrevolutionary ideology of blood, faith and civilizational destiny
against which the democratic revolutions were fought.
The
speech’s visceral anti-communism expresses a class hatred that is, if
anything, more intense today than during the Cold War, precisely because
the crisis of the capitalist system that produced the revolutionary
upheavals of the 20th century has returned.
What Rubio, Trump and
the European ruling elites assembled at Munich are seeking to resurrect
is the world that was shattered on October 25, 1917, when the Russian
working class, led by the Bolshevik Party under Lenin and Trotsky,
seized state power and established the first workers state in history.
The October Revolution was not merely a Russian event. It was a
world-historical earthquake. It demonstrated, in practice, that the
capitalist system was not eternal, that the ruling class was not
invincible, that the working class could take power and begin the
construction of a new social order. It set into motion a wave of
revolutionary struggles—in Britain, Germany, Hungary, Italy, China and
throughout the colonial world. It raised the political consciousness of
hundreds of millions who had been told, for centuries, that their
subjugation was the natural order of things.
The
October Revolution contributed significantly to the victory of the
progressive national movement in Turkey over imperialist-backed forces.
Starting
in 1920–1921, Soviet Russia provided significant aid to the Ankara
government, including gold, arms, and ammunition. This was critically
important because the Turkish nationalists were fighting on multiple
fronts. Without the critical support of the Soviet government, the
independence of the Turkish state would not have been secured.
Of
course, this did not prevent Ataturk’s bourgeois nationalist regime from
brutally suppressing the communist movement within Turkey.
As a
consequence of the October Revolution, the ideological framework within
which the imperialist powers had justified their domination—the
mythology of civilizational superiority, the divine right of “advanced”
nations to rule “backward” peoples—was dealt a blow from which it has
never recovered.
This is what Rubio’s speech is attempting to
undo. When he mourns the “contraction” of Western civilization after
1945, he is mourning the consequences of October. Rubio demands that the
West stop “atoning for the purported sins of past generations,” that
they stop apologizing for the gas chambers of Auschwitz and Treblinka.
Rubio
is demanding that the ruling class free itself from the moral and
political constraints that the threat of socialist revolution imposed
upon it. The welfare state, the concessions to democratic rights, the
formal commitment to international law—all were, in substantial measure,
products of the bourgeoisie’s fear of revolution. With the dissolution
of the Soviet Union in 1991, the ruling class concluded this threat had
passed and the concessions could be withdrawn. The Munich speech is the
ideological expression of that withdrawal, carried to its logical
conclusion in the open embrace of imperialist militarism and the
repudiation of democratic norms.
The vehemence of the
anti-communist rhetoric—in 2026, more than three decades after the
dissolution of the USSR—betrays a deep anxiety about the stability of
capitalism. Leon Trotsky once wrote that the American bourgeoisie is the
most frightened of all ruling classes. What terrifies the ruling class
is the prospect that the working class will again find its way to a
genuinely Marxist revolutionary program—that the objective crisis of the
capitalist system, which is producing levels of inequality, instability
and geopolitical conflict not seen since the 1930s, will generate the
same revolutionary impulses that produced October.
And no
historical figure frightens the imperialists more than Leon Trotsky. His
significance extends far beyond 1917, immense as that was. It was
Trotsky who, in the theory of permanent revolution, provided the
strategic conception that guided October and that retains its validity
today: the understanding that in the epoch of imperialism, the
democratic tasks in the oppressed countries, and in the most advanced
imperialist countries as well, can be completed only through the
conquest of power by the working class as part of the world socialist
revolution. It was Trotsky who defended the program of international
socialism against the Stalinist perversion of “socialism in one
country.” And it was Trotsky who, in founding the Fourth International
in 1938, established the programmatic continuity of genuine Marxism
through the darkest period of the 20th century.
It
is well-known that Hitler as well as his imperialist adversaries,
including Churchill, would respond with rage to the mere mention of
Trotsky’s name. Noting this fact, Trotsky wrote in 1939: “These
gentlemen like to give a personal name to the specter of revolution.”
The hatred that was directed against him personally, Trotsky explained,
reflects their fear “that their barbarism will be conquered by socialist
revolution.”
The ruling class has devoted enormous resources to
the suppression of Trotsky’s legacy. Stalin’s assassination of Trotsky
in 1940 was the culmination of a campaign of political genocide—the
Moscow Trials, the extermination of an entire generation of Bolshevik
leaders—that served the interests not only of the Soviet bureaucracy but
of the world bourgeoisie. The falsification of the history of the
Russian Revolution and the suppression of Trotsky’s legacy have been
central to the ideological armory of the ruling class. The “death of
communism” narrative that followed the Soviet dissolution depended on
the identification of socialism with Stalinism—the deliberate conflation
of the revolutionary program of October with the bureaucratic
counterrevolution that betrayed it.
Rubio’s speech conflates
Stalinism with socialism and treats the bureaucratic regimes of the
postwar period as though they were the realization, rather than the
negation, of the October Revolution’s program.
The identification
of Stalinism with socialism by imperialist propagandists is a political
necessity. If the distinction between the revolutionary program of Lenin
and Trotsky and the bureaucratic tyranny of Stalin is acknowledged,
then the collapse of the Soviet Union proves nothing about the viability
of socialism. It proves only what Trotsky predicted: that the Stalinist
bureaucracy, by strangling workers’ democracy and subordinating the
world revolution to its own national interests, would ultimately destroy
the workers state and restore capitalism—which is precisely what
happened. The “triumph of Western civilization” that Rubio celebrates
was the triumph of the Stalinist counterrevolution—the final act in the
bureaucracy’s long betrayal of October, carried out with the
enthusiastic collaboration of the imperialist powers.
The
implications are profound. If the crisis of socialism in the 20th
century is understood not as the failure of the revolutionary program
but as the consequence of its betrayal, then the program itself—the
program of international socialist revolution, of workers power, of the
planned reorganization of the world economy on the basis of social need
rather than private profit—retains its full historical validity.
The
working class must recognize Rubio’s speech for what it is: a
celebration of unilateral military violence, the dismissal of
international law, the identification of migration as civilizational
threat, the mourning of lost empires, the demand for historical
innocence, the erasure of the democratic revolutions and the fascist
catastrophe from the historical record.
But the ruling class
confronts a problem no amount of civilizational mythology can resolve.
The objective crisis of the capitalist system—staggering inequality, the
eruption of imperialist war, the breakdown of democratic institutions,
the destruction of the environment—is driving the working class into
struggle. The strike waves sweeping every major capitalist country, the
mass protests, the growing radicalization of youth, the collapse of
confidence in the established parties—these are the initial expressions
of a revolutionary process that arises from the irresolvable
contradictions of capitalism itself.
It is in this context that
the legacy of October and the theoretical heritage of Leon Trotsky
acquire their most immediate contemporary significance. The World Socialist Web Site,
published by the International Committee of the Fourth International,
has, for more than a quarter century, provided the consistent Marxist
analysis of the crisis of world capitalism and the political orientation
for the struggles of the working class. It has insisted, against every
form of demoralization and revisionism, on the central lesson of the
20th century: that the crisis of the working class is a crisis of
revolutionary leadership, and that its resolution requires the building
of a mass revolutionary party of the international working class, guided
by the program of permanent revolution and organized for the conquest
of political power.
Rubio’s Munich speech is the voice of a doomed
social order. The “Western civilization” it celebrates is not a
timeless essence but capitalist imperialism—a system that has exhausted
its progressive potential and now threatens humanity with barbarism. The
alternative is not a reformed capitalism, nor a more enlightened
imperialism. The alternative is socialism—the reorganization of economic
life on the basis of social ownership, democratic planning and
international cooperation, carried out by the only class with both the
interest and the power to accomplish it.
The imperialists are
right to be afraid. The specter of October has not been laid to rest
because the contradictions that produced it have intensified. The
international working class is larger, more interconnected and more
powerful today than at any point in history. What it lacks is the
conscious political leadership that can transform the growing resistance
of working people into a unified movement for socialist transformation.
The building of that leadership—the construction of sections of the
International Committee of the Fourth International in every country—is
the decisive political task of our epoch.
Permit me to conclude this lecture by citing words written by Trotsky in 1930 on the island of Büyükada:
The
completion of the socialist revolution within national limits is
unthinkable. One of the basic reasons for the crisis in bourgeois
society is the fact that the productive forces created by it can no
longer be reconciled with the framework of the nation state. From this
follows on the one hand, imperialist wars, on the other, the utopia of
the bourgeois United States of Europe. The socialist revolution begins
on the national arena, it unfolds on the international arena, and is
completed on the world arena. Thus, the socialist revolution becomes a
permanent revolution in a newer and broader sense of the word; it
attains completion only in the final victory of the new society on our
entire planet.
It is the responsibility and privilege
of your generation to fight for and achieve “the final victory” of
socialism envisioned by Leon Trotsky.
