From 1989 on, Yalta’s Trotskyism derails completely.
From revisionism to liquidationism in the Fourth International

When in 1989 the Berlin Wall and the statues of Lenin fell in Berlin and Moscow respectively, all the Trotskyite renegade groups blew up country by country. In the dizziness caused by the rubble raining on the renegades’ heads from the fall of the Berlin Wall, a new, worse revisionism emerged from the sewers of the decaying capitalist system. The Trotskyite renegades’ going over to the ranks of the Fifth International was prepared by a reckless revisionism that was the fire baking a new batch of Menshevism came from the ranks of the fourth International.
In the ’89 materialized, in a negative way, the exact prognosis of the Fourth International: either a political revolution succeeds that throws down the bureaucracy or the latter will become in a propertied class, handing over the biggest proletarian conquest -the worker state- to the world capitalist system. In that moment, Trotskyism was the only place from which one could speak to the working class movement without feeling ashamed. The counterrevolutionary Stalinist bureaucracy, turned into a restorationist force, declared de convertibility of the rouble while fleeing with their suitcases full of dollars to deposit them in a rush to the Citibank and began to act as direct agents of that finance group and of the IMF, devoting themselves to privatize savagely everything at sight in the USSR.
The productive forces of those worker states were decaying. There were no more gains to defend. The Stalinist bureaucrats had already given them up, burying the world revolution. The Trotskyite renegades, who had followed Stalinism as the shadow follows the body, blew up in a big bang… In the midst of a generalized crisis, who was it easiest to blame? Trotsky!!
Rivers of ink were wasted by some sectors among the Trotskyite renegades to convince themselves that we were in front of a “peaceful capitalist restoration”… while the statues of Lenin were falling, people were massacred in Tiananmen Square, NATO warplanes bombed the Balkans, the White Russian armies perpetrated a genocide in Chechnya and 23 armies commanded by Bush Sr., invaded in ’91… a cynical lie that only asked for a “democratic” US flag to wrap themselves to crown it all.
That outcome of the previous opportunism –the birth of a definitive revisionism that razed the Fourth International to the ground- was completely consistent. For the opportunists, the root of evil was in the matrix, namely, the theory and the program that were the bases of the foundation of the Fourth international. For the revisionists of ’89 and early ‘90s, Trotsky and Trotskyism were to blame because of their “sectarianism”. Trotsky “hadn’t seen that in Spain there was a war of regimes”, he “applied a wrong anti-defensist policy during the war”. We are here in front of a revisionism that not only justified the adaptations and capitulations that had led to the ruin the Fourth International, but it also abjured of its own former politics of decades past in order to go over completely to reformism.
Now they could not blame “the persistence of the war regime” for their capitulations, so they invented that there existed a new world regime -the regime post1989-, one “of capitalist strength”; now for them it was necessary to recognize the superiority of that regime and prepare for “50 years of capitalist expansion, struggling to get reforms”.
As a conclusion of their rejection of Trotsky’s alleged “sectarianism”, the revisionists could not act otherwise than become servants of imperialism: some of them bent before Renault, Citroen and the French 5th Republic as the LCR that broke openly with the fight for the proletarian dictatorship. They mimicked Spain’s Felipe Gonzalez who ten years earlier had declared very pompously to be “abandoning Marxism” and prepared to be commander in chief of the imperialist Spanish army alongside the Bourbon King Juan Carlos.
However, it would be more exact to say that both the Spanish “Felipillos” and the French Alain Krivine, Mandel and Co., had long ago renounced Marxism and the seizing of power of the proletariat; but it was necessary for them to tell that openly just in those times in order to poison more conveniently the consciousness of millions of workers worldwide. They had to tell the workers that the proletarian dictatorship was no more a possibility, and it was especially important that the declaration came from the lips of the most conspicuous and well-known leaders of the Fourth International.
Other revisionists, without going as far as to say that they were breaking with the theory and the program of revolutionary Marxism, announced happily that “Trotsky and the Fourth International were wrong because they had devoted themselves to defend an indefensible “worker state”, which had ceased to be such from the ‘30s-‘40s. They formulated stupid pseudo-theories now echoed by the Argentinean MAS or varied European “socialists”, calling the USSR “a bureaucratic state”, a fairy tale long ago refuted by Trotsky in his “In Defence of Marxism”, “The Revolution Betrayed”, and a whole manual formed by his articles on how to struggle for the political revolution. For if someone had a doubt that History alone was a complete proof by itself, Trotskyism demonstrated that the class character of the states has to be with what class rules with the property of the means of production and exchange. And though lakes of ink could be wasted to demonstrate the opposite notion, nobody can say that there sometime existed a “neither worker nor bourgeois” -bureaucratic state.
The disintegration of bureaucracy under the blows of the international revolution and the political revolution in their own country pushed that bureaucracy to become a propertied class. But it had to previously smash the world proletariat, as it did first of all selling off the victory of the socialist revolution in the aftermath of the 2WW, disarming the European proletariat and submitting it as much as it could to help rebuild the imperialist powers of the “democratic” imperialists. Secondly the Stalinist bureaucracy was a fundamental factor in collaborating with the defeat of the generalized revolutionary uprising of ‘68/’74, by smashing the processes of political revolutions in Eastern Europe. This is exactly what was foretold in the manual of political revolution called “The Revolution Betrayed”, that masterpiece by Trotsky and the Fourth International.
All those that announced Trotsky’s “sectarianism” and the “imprecision” of the theoretical and programmatic legacy of the Fourth International broke their teeth against the facts of History, but it was the world proletariat who suffered in their lives the harsh defeats.
Jack Barnes, the destructor of the US SWP, announced that “revolution is so strong, so imminent”, that it was possible “to seize the power with no matter what leadership”. Thus he liquidated the central premise of the Trotskyist program, that said explicitly that the decisive factor in the advance or retreat of the proletarian revolution has to be with the character –revolutionary or not-revolutionary- of the leadership of the proletariat.
“His” leadership was eventually… the bureaucratic gang of the Cuban Castros, to whose feet he put the US SWP -transforming it into an appendix of the Castroite bureaucracy, after expelling from that formerly Trotskyist party all the old militants.
As about the rest of the revisionists, Morenoites had nothing to envy from the Pabloites and the liquidators of the US SWP. It was necessary to reform the theory. It was necessary to invent the democratic revolution as “the first step toward the socialist revolution”. “Everybody against the bureaucracy!” said the Morenoites in Russia, in Poland, in China, etc. And in a second stage, or “step” of the political revolution, it would come “the socialist revolution complete with everything and soviets”.
This brutal revision of the program and theory of the political revolution to the interior of the worker organizations and the worker states amounted to saying “Everybody, including the ‘democratic’ bourgeoisie, against the totalitarian bureaucracy to kick it of the unions”, that is, from the worker state. This story had a logical end: the “democratic” bourgeoisie destroyed the “unions”, that is, the worker states. And the second step of their political revolutions showed that what followed were the Deng Xiao Pings, the Yeltsins, the Hu Jintao, the Lech Walesas as the major servants to the Citibank and the JPMorgan and the rest of US finance corporations that had dedicated successfully from long before to undermine the worker states’ gains. In Argentina where the pseudo-theory of the democratic revolution had been developed and voted in the old MAS, this democratic “revolution” gave way to the notorious regime of the 1853 constitution in the aftermath of the military dictatorship.
It’s easy to see what the result was for the MAS, the SWP, the French LCR, the Lambertites, the Healyites… they who had razed to the ground the theoretical and programmatic continuity of the Fourth International and its legacy.
More and more the Trotskyist theory and program showed their historical validity in the ’89, albeit in its negative form, more and more the opportunists and renegades to Marxism went the farther from Trotskyism and broke openly with it. Then was the time to create “Post-modern Marxist” pseudo theories that mushroomed under the blessing of “adept” petty bourgeois pseudo-Marxist scholars of the European and US universities. Petras was their great theoretician and adviser, rendering good services to the Stalinist Castroite bureaucracy and attending all the national and international meetings of the self-claimed (i.e. fake) “Trotskyists”.
No doubt all these “intellectuals” and variegated charlatans were rapidly and opportunistically reacting to the fact that a couple of statues were falling; they reneged Leninism and erected in their place and in next to no time some statues to Capital. As an example you can consider their change from Bolshevism to a so called “Libertarian Socialism”. Thus, in the same way that had Stalinism they put their dirty paws on Rosa Luxembourg to counterpoise her (with a previous make-up that made her look as a liberal democrat) to Bolshevism; these rascals “forgot” that the internationalists had long ago settled their differences in Zimmerwald and Kienthal, in the Third International and in the bloody German Revolution and its lessons which left a tremendous legacy to the world proletariat.
Others went far beyond. As alchemists and quacks they wanted to get together Trotsky and Gramsci. This contraption was developed by the liquidationists of Argentinean PTS. They saw starting in 1989 a “blossoming capitalism”, imperialism that in order to become sustainable and dominate the World “turned to expand democracy all over the globe”. Of course these people did not walk near Iraq or the massacres in Mazar-i-Sharif in the early days of the invasion of Afghanistan, much less near Gaza, bleeding Africa, scorched Chechnya or the Balkans… Moreover, they happened to discover, in the middle of the first decade of the twenty first century, that a “Third Way” was emerging between socialism and Capitalism, one that in the fashion of UK’s Tony Blair’s policies was to flood Latin America and Asia. A standardized Third Way of the “democratic imperialists” was going to flood the semi colonial world, they said. But what flooded the semicolonial world were Bonapartism, genocides, popular fronts, counterrevolutionary coups, many jails administered overtly or covertly by the CIA, “renditions” and more than a thousand military bases, so the Third Way disappeared from everybody’s sight.
Like cheap magicians they hid the rabbit drawn from their top hat so another different rabbit could be shown. In what moment nobody knows yet; perhaps in 2007, 2009… (2010?) PTS stopped chatting about “not being in the USSR a capitalist restoration in course because there we can’t see a capitalism functioning ‘normally’”, that is a “serious, orderly” capitalism; that there were only mafias, proto-bourgeoisies that robbed and devastated everything”. Incredible! They were unable to recognize that robbing, pilfering, enslaving, devastating… is the NORMAL way of modern capitalism: imperialism.
Today these pseudo-theoreticians and real charlatans should say that capitalism has never existed, when the 2007 crisis is ravaging Wall Street and the entire world and the capitalist putrescence and the criminal gangs of imperialism are exposed before everyone’s eyes.
Of course for these people it was a question of applying the Gramscian theory for the times of bourgeois stability of “accumulating peoples’ power”. It meant applying only minimum programs customized sector by sector by forming by-way caucuses, i.e., a women’s caucus, a workers’ caucus, a students’ caucus, a lawyers’ caucus, and so on… with the “socialist” chiefs “enlightening” their own militants… And they tried to conciliate this with the Transitional Program, that of course only serves (from their view) for moments of crisis and open revolution! That means saying “every day we struggle for reforms and sometimes we remember to speak about revolution; and when the latter appears… we have cadres that only know about reforms and the reformist language, so during the revolution they are good for adapting themselves to the treacherous leaderships! Again, any similitude with Stalinism of middle and late ’20 is not a coincidence. Gramsci, the Italian Stalinist militant that called from Mussolini’s jails to smash physically the Left Opposition and to erase Trotsky from the surface of Earth, was considered by PTS in the same level of an outstanding revolutionary personality as Petras, Perry Anderson, Hobsbawn and… Trotsky. A very bad practical joke, indeed!
There hasn’t been a more cynical generation of the Trotskyite movement and in the post-war period than that we are depicting: in the ‘90s it ended putting the blame on the Fourth International and its program of their own failures and the shameless misdeeds committed by them against the world proletariat. And then again, they were who crossed the Rubicon to settle their rears in the riverside of reformism.
These revisionists have done all this in order to hide the only truth: the program of the Fourth International passed the test of History, the Trotskyites didn’t.
That was the price paid by the Fourth International for the dissolution of its international centre and its transformation into a federation and a centrist loose movement during and after the war. The responsibility for this cannot be put on Stalinism or Trotsky’s murder. It must be put on the adaptations, as we have said above, to the “democratic” imperialists during the war and to Stalinism in the post-war.
The consequences are there for everybody to see. The world working class has lost, and today hasn’t yet recovered, an internationalist general staff, though this internationalist general staff becomes each minute more and more necessary in History for the whole mankind not to fall into Barbarism, and for the victory of the socialist revolution.
In 1989 they got angry with Trotsky and with the entire legacy of the Fourth International and its founders. Today, after destroying that legacy, they pay an hypocritical homage giving Trotsky “a halo of glory” in order to cover themselves with a bit of it and better deceive the masses. But to revisionists and Trotskyite renegades we may repeat the saying of Trotsky’s in front of Stalinism in France in the’30s: “Lenin sowed dragons, but thanks to you only fleas are harvested”.