The dispatch of a large naval task force by British imperialism to the South Atlantic for war with Argentina in 1982, the US and French full-scale naval and military involvement in the Middle East, the manoeuvres in Honduras, and the US invasion of Grenada, all indicate that the period of enforced reticence which followed the US defeat in Vietnam has definitively ended. The failure of the Geneva talks, the dramatic expansion of the military budgets of the principal imperialist powers and the renewal of Cold War propaganda—unmatched in its asperity since the Cuban missile crisis—clearly indicate a turn by the leading circles of the Anglo-American bourgeoisies in particular towards a policy of direct attacks on anti-imperialist struggles, and of nuclear threats and blackmail aimed at the Soviet bureaucracy and its closest allies. The depth of the world capitalist crisis, especially the social effects of a mass unemployment not seen since the thirties, create all the internal conditions for bellicose adventures. These adventures have as part of their rationale the justification of arms expenditure and the imposition of sacrifices on the working class. External and internal factors create increasingly sharp international crises and war scares. In response to this the radical petty bourgeoisie and the organised labour movement have become, once again, deeply alarmed. Peace movements have grown to mass proportions in the USA, Germany and Britain. The pacifist slogans of disarmament have once again become widespread.
Communism on war
The predominance within the international workers’ movement of social democracy and of Stalinism results in the promotion of popular front type cross-class peace movements. The predominance within the oppositional elements in the workers’ movement of centrist formations results in the blunting of the edge of Marxist criticism with regard to these movements. It is therefore necessary to restate the classic criticisms of Lenin and Trotsky, to defend the revolutionary communist position on war and to apply it creatively to changes in world politics and the military situations which have occurred since the Second World War.
The roots of war today
1. Between imperialist powers
Two major tendencies propel mankind towards war in the imperialist epoch. Firstly there are the conflicts between the major imperialist powers as they divide and subsequently redivide the globe in their search for super-profits. The first phase of the imperialist epoch, from the late 1890s onwards, saw a series of clashes between the major powers which increased in severity and frequency, culminating in the first general imperialist war. It was fought by Germany to secure a redivision of the colonial and semi-colonial world in its favour. It was fought by Britain and France to preserve their huge colonial empires. It was entered by Italy and the United States to seize a portion of the spoils either from the defeated powers or from the exhausted victors. The imposition of the robbers’ peace of Versailles made inevitable a second round of the conflict between the older imperialisms and dynamic German capitalism—inevitable, that is, given the failure of the German proletariat to seize power in 1918–19, in 1923 and during the world crisis of 1929–33.
The second imperialist war again broke Germany’s (and its Italian and Japanese allies’) attempt to seize the colonies and spheres of influence of Britain and France. Yet, so near to destruction did the old powers come, so desperate was their situation, that they were obliged to make concessions to their American saviours during and after the war. Effectively the winner of the war in terms of the re-division of the world was US imperialism, which gained hegemony in the former British and French spheres of influence and achieved the dismantling of their colonial empires. The result was an unparalleled world hegemony, unchallenged by any serious imperialist rivals, throughout the post-war period. It was based upon a semi-colonial system of North American client regimes backed by the US international monopolies, by US dominated economic and financial institutions and underpinned by US military forces around the globe.
2. Imperialist war against the oppressed
Secondly there are the armed conflicts between imperialism and the struggles of the oppressed and exploited. Ever since the Russian Revolution of 1917, imperialism’s military arsenals have been strengthened to resist all challenges to its system from proletarian revolution and national liberation struggles. Imperialism failed to overthrow history’s first workers’ state because of the heroism of the Russian working class and the solidarity of the international proletariat. Instead, it organised the military encirclement of the USSR preparatory to a renewed military offensive to open the USSR to imperialist exploitation. In 1941 German imperialism attacked the USSR in a bid to reintroduce capitalism in the USSR.
The Second World War, therefore, was BOTH a conflict among imperialisms and a war between imperialism and the only established workers’ state. The unresolved struggle for hegemony between the imperialist powers meant that Anglo-American imperialism was prepared to ally with the workers’ state in order to prevent the victory of their major imperialist rivals, Germany and Japan. Violent divisions among the imperialists, and the consolidated military and economic strength of the USSR, made it impossible for Anglo-American imperialism to launch a war to re-establish capitalism in the USSR.
Once Germany and Japan were defeated, however, hegemonic US imperialism was able to construct a unified imperialist offensive against the USSR in general, and the concessions made to it at Yalta and Potsdam in particular. This was the origin of the Cold War that followed the second imperialist war. With Japan and Germany defeated and economically devastated, and British imperialism in decline, the US was able to ensure the creation of a unified imperialist camp against the USSR and the new degenerate workers’ states. While differences of interests clearly existed between the imperialist powers, they were subordinated by the unchallengeable hegemony of US imperialism.
US hegemony could not, however, last for ever. It faced the challenge of anti-imperialist struggles and proletarian revolution. World War One showed vividly that capitalism had ceased to play a historically progressive role and had entered the epoch of its decay—the epoch of wars and revolution. The decay of capitalism and the decline of imperialism has accelerated since the Second World War. This is evidenced by the creation of new workers’ states, albeit degenerate from birth, in East Europe, China, Indo-China and Cuba, and by subsequent defeats suffered by imperialism at the hands of national liberation struggles, for example in Angola, Mozambique, Iran and Nicaragua. US imperialism was unable to withstand these victories against it. From the late 1960s to the late 1970s it suffered a series of major defeats, and the tactics designed to reverse this process—détente, the human rights campaign, etc.—all failed to hold the line for US imperialism. The hegemonic imperialism of the post-war period has itself now suffered a series of major defeats and successful challenges to its world supremacy.
Decline of the United States
US imperialism’s decline is also evident in economic terms. Its economy has suffered comparative decline at the expense of other imperialist powers, most importantly the BRD (West Germany) and Japan. Defeat at the hands of national liberation struggles together with US imperialism’s economic decline has made it increasingly difficult for US imperialism to maintain a unified imperialist bloc under its hegemony. Not only were the defeated imperialisms bearing an insignificant part of the burden of imperialism’s military expenditure, they were even able to assert their own relative autonomy from US imperialism in relation to the Soviet bureaucracy (i.e. the Ostpolitik of the BRD), and the semi-colonial world. Reagan’s failure to delay the oil pipeline from the USSR, and independent ‘European’ initiatives on Nicaragua and the Middle East all show that US imperialism in decline has become ever less able to dictate the policies of its imperialist rivals.
At present the undoubted and deepening differences between the US and the principal European powers remain subordinate to their continued, in the last analysis united, military stance against the USSR. Even their differences over the tactics to adopt towards the anti-imperialist struggles or towards trade relations with the degenerate workers’ states have not, as yet, led to splits. Thus in the next period it is not inter-imperialist splits that pose the principal danger of starting an imperialist war but revanchist attempts to overthrow the results of successful anti-imperialist struggles, to redress the balance tipped by them towards the USSR or other degenerate workers’ states. However, US imperialism’s declining economic and political fortunes lead, necessarily, to a sharpening of tactical divisions between imperialists, and the inability of US imperialism to dictate the victory of its tactical line. Over a protracted period it makes increasingly probable a division within the imperialist camp in a pre-war situation.
The Reagan administration
Reaganism marks a bid by the US bourgeoisie to claw back the defeats it has suffered at the hands of the oppressed and exploited. It does so at a time when its imperialist rivals have succeeded in asserting a degree of materially-based political independence from the US, and after the USSR in the mid-1970s was able to strengthen its economic base, its military arsenals and its military aid to key regimes, at the expense of imperialism. Reagan’s war drive has to be understood against a background of US defeat and decline. This is in no way a cause for complacency or ridicule. Reagan is not a crazed ex-actor, as clever chauvinist Labour and social democratic politicians would have us believe. He is the voice of US imperialism in decline seeking to use its remaining military and economic pre-eminence to reverse that decline. The decline is inevitable, hence the very real and immediate threat of world war that is posed by US imperialism. Only by a war against the oppressed and exploited (and necessarily with the USSR to the extent that it aids them) can Reagan hope to reverse US imperialism’s decline at the hands of the exploited and oppressed of the semi-colonial world and the proletariat, AND America’s own imperialist rivals. That is why Reagan is locked on a war course in the semi-colonial world (Grenada and Nicaragua), a rearmament drive to cow or decimate the Soviet bureaucracy into submission and an attempt to re-unify the imperialist powers under US hegemony by deliberately sharpening the conflict between the US and the USSR. Of course tactical divisions within the US bourgeoisie, reflected in changes of administration, could slow down, or even partially offset the drive towards war. However, they cannot decisively halt it. The logic of imperialism is towards war and temporary shifts in bourgeois policy will always be superseded by this logic.
The accelerating nuclear arms drive of the US can only be understood in this context. The US pioneered the production and deployment of atomic weapons as a means of asserting its already achieved hegemony over its imperialist rivals, and as a threat to the USSR. Whilst nuclear weapons were developed as a means of destruction on a generalised scale that had only been achieved in exceptional instances in previous wars by conventional means (Dresden bombing, bombing in Vietnam and Kampuchea), this does not and cannot alter the causes of war or the means whereby it can be eradicated. Whilst the scale of destruction in nuclear war is indeed potentially QUALITATIVELY different (threatening either the extinction of humanity or the reversion of the survivors to the most primitive stages of social life), its roots remain imperialist class society and the solution remains the overthrow of the bourgeoisie by the proletariat.
The Soviet bomb
The bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in order to prevent the USSR playing any role in the construction of a post-war order in the Pacific. That it was not later used in Korea, Cuba, Vietnam and Kampuchea, was the direct result of the Soviet bomb, which has to date prevented US imperialism from waging counter-revolutionary wars. If it did it would face the potential threat of Soviet nuclear backing for anti-imperialist forces and for degenerate workers’ states.
The imperialists’ bomb has a character defined not by its technology but by the system of production it serves. This is also the case for the weapon systems of the Soviet bureaucracy. The Soviet arsenal serves to defend a system of property relations that does not depend on the export of capital and the repatriation of super-profits. But like the bureaucracy and its state, it has a contradictory political character. It is not only a necessary instrument of self-defence but it is also a tool for strengthening the bureaucracy’s position in bargaining with imperialism. The USSR uses its weaponry to achieve ‘peaceful co-existence’ with imperialism. To this extent it is prepared to arm and defend anti-imperialist struggles and degenerate workers’ states.
Unconditional defence of the USSR
We consider it necessary to maintain, and therefore we defend, the existence of nuclear arsenals in the degenerate workers’ states, and, of course, in future healthy workers’ states. In armed conflicts between imperialism and the USSR we place no conditions on our defence of the USSR. We defend the USSR against imperialism whether or not the political revolution has taken place, or whether the forces exist to openly wage political revolutionary struggle. We do so while at all times making it clear that our programme is a programme for proletarian political revolution against the bureaucracy and at all times developing tactics to deploy the forces mobilised to defeat imperialism to destroy also the privileges and political power of the Stalinist bureaucracy.
False answers
It follows therefore that we completely reject:
A. The theories of E. P. Thompson and others who see nuclear weapons systems and their controllers as having an autonomous form and dominance within the productive system of the society within which they are established. We completely reject the claim that the dictatorship of the military-industrial complex has replaced the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie in the imperialist countries, or the political dictatorship of the bureaucratic caste in the degenerate workers’ states. The military in the imperialist countries remains the armed wing of the bourgeoisie and possesses the technology that the bourgeoisie sees fit to use to defend its system.
B. Feminist explanations of the arms race that see it as an expression of male dominance and male values.
It also follows that we necessarily reject the slogans and tactics that flow from these positions.
The slogan of disarmament
There will be no ‘peace’ until the class struggle has eliminated the roots of war. That can only take place as a result of the successful armed struggle of the exploited and oppressed against capitalism. We are for the disarming of the bourgeoisie by the proletariat. That is the only road to peace.
The slogan of neutrality
We are not neutral in the struggles between the semi-colonies and imperialism. Neither are we neutral in conflicts between imperialism and the USSR. Similarly, we reject as utopian, and therefore reactionary, the slogan of ‘peaceful co-existence’ between imperialism and the degenerate workers’ states.
The slogan of Unilateral Nuclear Disarmament (UND)
UND cannot be our slogan. As a recipe for avoiding war it is no less fraudulent than other disarmament slogans. The non-possession of nuclear arms will not exempt any country from involvement in an imperialist war—nuclear or conventional—any more than Belgium’s neutrality exempted it in two world wars. The military-strategic needs of the major combatants will prove decisive.
Renunciation of nuclear weapons will not set a moral example leading to a universal renunciation. Were this to be done by a non-imperialist or non-capitalist power it would immediately open it to blackmail if not attack by imperialist powers. Even were all the states to renounce nuclear weapons and dismantle them, as soon as a general conventional war began, they would quickly re-develop or re-assemble their nuclear weapons. By centring exclusively on nuclear weapons and their use the call for UND diverts attention from the possibility of imperialist war commencing as a conventional war. Further, it invests the weapons rather than the imperialist bourgeoisie with the responsibility for war and the war threat. It identifies the wrong enemy and therefore prescribes the wrong methods for fighting it.
It is a reactionary utopia to spread the illusion that it is possible to peacefully disarm the imperialist bourgeoisie of its nuclear weapons and thus save humanity from destruction. Only the disarmament of the bourgeoisie by means of its revolutionary overthrow can achieve this.
Only by seizing state power in the imperialist countries can the bourgeoisie be disarmed and the threat of nuclear annihilation be lifted. This task can only be carried out by the popular masses led by the proletariat and its revolutionary vanguard. The threat of nuclear holocaust should indeed give an urgency hitherto unexampled to the struggle against war. But for us this is all the more reason for stressing that this fight must be based on proletarian anti-militarism, on the class struggle, rather than on despairing petit-bourgeois pacifism.
Against US missiles in Europe!
However, while UND is not our slogan we can, and do, give critical support to the struggles and demands of its supporters to the extent that these hit at imperialism. Thus we support Social Democrats and Stalinists voting in parliament against the stationing of US missiles in Europe. In Britain we demand of the opposition Labour Party that it votes in line with its conference policy against all funds for Britain’s ‘independent deterrent’. We demand that any future Labour government honours its pledge to dismantle these weapons. We further demand that governments of the Socialist and Stalinist parties, or future governments of the Social Democratic parties or British Labour Party, withdraw from the counter-revolutionary NATO alliance and all other such alliances. We seek united action with all willing to espouse and fight for these demands in order to enforce them. But we participate under our own slogans, making them clear at all times.
Whilst the bourgeoisie still has the state power, and this remains the case under any ‘normal’ parliamentary Social Democratic government, we raise the demands:
- Not a penny, not a soldier for the bourgeois government!
- Not an armaments programme but a programme of useful public works under workers’ control!
- Workers’ control of the war industries—including those that are nationalised!
Cross-class pacifist alliances
The CND and the European peace movements are ostensibly non-class mass-membership campaigns. In reality they are cross-class alliances between petit-bourgeois pacifists, the liberal lower clergy, the social pacifist leaders of the Social Democrats and Stalinists. The latter bring into the peace movements a conscious popular-frontist ideology.
The French Communist Party (PCF) provides a clear example of such popular frontism. Over the last two years it has encouraged the Mouvement de la Paix (Peace Movement), in which it is the dominant political force, to organise two big demonstrations under the literally all-embracing slogan of ‘I love Peace’. Such vague, catch-all slogans are in part due to the lack of a ‘spontaneous’ French peace movement (in turn largely due to the fact that none of the new European missiles were to be installed in France); partly due to the PCF’s fear of stimulating criticism of French nuclear arms (which the PCF supports); and partly to make it easier to construct a cross-class alliance.
These demonstrations have attracted currents ranging from radical petit-bourgeois to Admiral Sanguinetti and ‘left’ Gaullists, relying on the mobilising capacity of Stalinist youth, petit-bourgeois ecologists, ‘left’ christian movements and sections of the extreme left. They have been used by the PCF as a stage army, brought out to put pressure on Mitterrand’s pro-Atlantic Socialist Party-dominated government.
France also illustrates the bankruptcy of the political content of such popular-frontism. The Moscow bureaucracy’s strategy of ‘peaceful coexistence’ with imperialism, based on the reactionary theory of ‘socialism in one country’, leads it to strike alliances with certain imperialist powers. The French bourgeoisie has traditionally been singled out as a privileged partner, facilitated by the historic anti-American tendencies of its Gaullist wing. This encouraged the USSR bureaucracy and the PCF to support the setting up of a French nuclear ‘force de frappe’ that would supposedly be independent from NATO, ignoring France’s continued membership of the Atlantic Alliance and the fact that its missiles cannot be operated without NATO’s guidance system. Such a policy is utopian and is in no way a means of defending the USSR.
Equally utopian and suicidal is the idea, disseminated by the PCF and social-democracy, that the army is impartial—’the Republic in arms’. The 1973 Chilean coup d’état proved yet again that the bourgeois armies are not impartial, disinterested by-standers and that they cannot be reformed. Popular-frontism, and the Stalinist and social-democratic forces which support it, politically disarm French workers.
Tactics towards pacifist campaigns
The peace movements have no ‘objectively anti-capitalist dynamic’ as Ernest Mandel of the USFI would have us believe.
We recognise with Trotsky that: ‘it is necessary to differentiate strictly between the pacifism of the diplomat, professor, journalist and the pacifism of the carpenter, agricultural workers and char-woman. In one case pacifism is a screen for imperialism, in the other it is the confused expression of distrust in imperialism. When the small farmer or worker speaks about the defence of the fatherland, he means defence of his home, his family and other similar families from invasions, bombs and poisonous gas.’
We draw from this the need to intervene in the peace movements’ activities and meetings, such as those of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) in Britain and Ireland, wherever significant forces exist that can and must be won to a proletarian anti-militarist policy.
We attempt to mobilise the best elements to fight imperialism’s particular wars—Malvinas and Grenada—so as to win them from the deathly embrace of those who only protest against war in general.
We reject the chauvinist lies of Tony Benn and E. P. Thompson in Britain, and of their counterparts throughout Europe, that the siting of nuclear arms on the West European mainland and in Britain is a symptom of the loss of national sovereignty and an indication of national oppression at the hands of the US. The British bourgeoisie, for example, is entirely a sovereign—albeit declining—imperialist bourgeoisie. However, faced with the legitimate distrust that workers have of imperialism’s secret pacts and arrangements for nuclear weapons, we demand not the dual key—not British or German imperialism’s hand on the trigger—but the abolition of all secret diplomacy, that all treaties between the imperialists be made accessible to the workers, AND that the Labour Party, the SPD etc. guarantee to do so if they are returned to government.
Against pacifism, we fight for military training for all, under workers’ control, for the abolition of the standing army and its replacement by a workers’ militia. We fight for a series of measures which aim at the breaking up of the bourgeois army and the winning of rank and file conscripted workers in uniform to the side of the working class.
However, the majority of the proletariat is not involved in and will not be won to direct involvement in CND or in pacifist organisations of this ilk. Therefore CND and other similar European movements cannot be the central arena for anti-militarist war activity. The organs of the labour movement, the unions, the Labour, Socialist, Social Democratic and ‘Communist’ parties etc., the organisations of women, youth, the unemployed, the black organisations, immigrant organisations, soldiers’ committees, remain our prime focus and here we fight for our revolutionary tactics, not for a strategic orientation or political subordination to the peace movements. It is in this light in Britain and Ireland, for example, we oppose labour movement bodies affiliating to CND, counterposing to this a working class anti-war movement.
The peace movements have inevitably failed to prevent the siting of Cruise and Pershing. This was a consequence of their bankrupt politics. That fact will tend to sharpen the contradictions within the coming period.
Britain
In Britain, the CND leadership has already turned its attention towards a campaign for a ‘freeze’. The continuing threat of war will mean that CND will not disappear as a consequence of the siting of the new missiles. Demonstrations, peace conferences and petitions will continue. The CND leadership—along with Labour leader Kinnock and co.—is in headlong flight from unilateralism.
The purge of Youth CND in Britain flows from this. The CND leaders were prepared to destroy YCND de facto rather than allow it to become a potential obstacle to its plans. The centrist leaders of YCND who accommodated all along to the ‘objectively anti-imperialist logic’ of CND and refused to politically organise or defend their ‘revolutionary victories’ were incapable of resisting this.
The tactic of Non-Violent Direct Action (NVDA) threatens to squander the energies of an entire generation of youth. As expressed by the Greenham Common women, it gives rise to an extremely passive ‘Ghandi-istic’ protest that can appeal to sections of youth who want more action than CND’s rallies and conferences can offer. As the contradictions involved in NVDA become clearer—not least at the hands of the Violent Direct Action of the state—confrontation will strengthen the petit-bourgeois moralists, opening the movement increasingly to christian and other mystical influences.
On the other hand, sections of youth will experience a militant disenchantment with the NVDA tactic. This will take the form not only of a return to the safer pastures of traditional parliamentary reformism, but also a search for meaningful action to stop war. With the best youth who turn to action, we must be ready to struggle for a proletarian anti-militarist youth movement mobilised to oppose all imperialism’s wars and war preparations. Failure to do so will see the majority of the best youth demoralised by the pacifists and could see a minority drawn towards terroristic actions.
Nuclear defence of the workers’ states
We recognise the legitimate right, indeed necessity, for any workers’ state, degenerate or not, to possess nuclear weapons for self-defence against imperialism. We place no condition on our defence of these workers’ states or their right to possess nuclear weapons.
However, the Soviet bureaucracy represents a counter-revolutionary force standing against the world social revolution and the advance to socialism within the workers’ states. From this it flows that, in pursuit of class-collaborationist deals with imperialism, it may and does adopt counter-revolutionary policies with regard to other workers’ states and anti-imperialist struggles. It sites and utilises its weapons within other degenerate workers’ states by means of pressure upon their bureaucracies, thus violating the democratic rights of the proletariats of these countries and inflaming their sense of national oppression. It deprives certain workers’ states of the weapons—including nuclear ones—necessary for their defence against imperialism (Cuba and Vietnam in the 1960s). It is quite conceivable that the Soviet bureaucracy under threat from imperialism would disarm these states or leave them defenceless.
Therefore, we demand the no-strings offer of nuclear as well as conventional weapons to the other workers’ states threatened by imperialism, with control over these weapons in the hands of their own governments. We demand the dissolution of the oppressive Warsaw Pact and its replacement with an equal mutual defence treaty between the workers’ states. We fight for political revolution which alone can, on the basis of proletarian democracy and internationalism, on a historic scale, defend the existing gains by extending them. The overthrow of the parasitic bureaucracies would immeasurably strengthen the workers’ states and at the same time increase the aid that the proletarian revolution and the anti-imperialist struggles could throw into the balance against imperialism’s war threats.
The Soviet bureaucracy’s decision to site new missiles in East Germany (GDR) and Czechoslovakia (CSSR) will doubtless strengthen neutralist and also anti-communist positions in the Peace Movement. ‘European Nuclear Disarmament’ (END) exists to give voice to such sentiments.
We defend the right of the USSR and the workers’ states to have nuclear defence capability against imperialism. For that reason we defend the right of the workers’ states to deploy the new weapon systems and, despite the bureaucracy’s motives and methods of deploying them, oppose campaigns against their siting. We oppose all attempts to link disarmament demands in the West to equivalent demands on the Stalinist bureaucracies. To do so is to destroy the progressive element within the unilateralist slogan leaving only a hypocritical bourgeois call for peace negotiations. In essence this is what the demand for a nuclear-free zone in Europe represents.
Pacifism in Eastern Europe
What is our attitude to the unofficial peace movements that have emerged in certain East European countries?
We cannot support a slogan of Unilateral Nuclear Disarmament for the workers’ states for the reasons stated above. We oppose all neutralist demands such as those of the GDR unofficial peace movement.
We give no support to the pro-imperialist elements leading such movements in the USSR or Eastern Europe (the churches, pro-Western dissidents like Sakharov etc.). We can give no political support to the existing unofficial peace movements. However, there is a proletarian anti-war policy for the degenerate workers’ states, one which fights the bureaucracy’s counter-revolutionary policies which threaten these states with destruction at the hands of imperialism. As long as ‘defence’ is exclusively in the hands of a standing army which is also the instrument of bureaucratic privilege and of political and national oppression, then the best means of defence is denied to the post-capitalist social relations. The best means is the conscious and enthusiastic support of the masses and their ever ready availability to defend them arms in hand. Imperialism’s hopes for restoration rest not only upon a military coercion of the bureaucracy but on internal confusion and counter-revolution stemming from the masses’ own hatred of bureaucratic oppression. Thus we demand, as part of the slogans of political revolution, the arming of the working class and collective farmers (or small peasants)—a real democratic militia. We demand the abrogation of unequal treaties and military pacts in favour of mutual defence of all workers’ states.
We demand the withdrawal of the Soviet armed forces from the East European workers’ states wherever the insurrectionary or victorious proletarian political revolution demands it—distinguishing this call from imperialist or pro-imperialist calls for withdrawal aimed at facilitating a social counter-revolution.
In the degenerate workers’ states today we demand the application of the norms of workers’ democracy within the context of the defence of the proletariat’s dictatorship. This includes the free expression of confused pacifist views, correcting by arguments those sincerely held and voiced by the masses, unmasking those hypocritically advanced by the agents of imperialism. The suppression of pro-imperialist reactionary propaganda is a question of expediency in every concrete circumstance. We espouse neither an absolute (i.e. bourgeois) democratic demand for universal free speech, nor do we surrender to the counter-revolutionary bureaucracy the judgement and execution of what is or is not counter-revolutionary. We demand that the decision be taken by the workers themselves in their class organisations.
The foreign policy of the victorious political revolution, based on support for the class struggle in all the capitalist powers and for all anti-imperialist struggles, would decisively tip the balance against imperialism, tying its hands internally in its heartlands, freeing the semi-colonial peoples. Such a policy would not of course banish the threat of war until the last major imperialist power succumbed to revolution. But it offers in the final analysis the only possible perspective for the defence of the existing social conquests of the proletariat.
The fate of humanity in the hands of the proletariat
The imperialists now have a first-strike capacity against the Soviet missile-silos as well as the ability to destroy the Soviet population several times over. This increases the possibility of nuclear war not only as a result of proxy conflicts in the semi-colonial world—which has been an ever-present possibility—but also as the form of a strike against the USSR as a warning to all forces struggling against imperialism. The declining fortunes of US imperialism make this an ever greater danger for the workers of the world. The workers’ movement internationally must be rallied to the banner of revolution if the deadly logic of declining imperialism is to be stopped from reducing the planet to a nuclear ruin.
