This text is part of a long interview by Moreno published as a book under the title “Conversaciones con Moreno”. This piece of work is regarded as his political testament. The fact that he dedicated an entire chapter to explaining the need for an International shows how important he considered the construction of a world revolutionary organisation.
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Throughout all your political life you have spared no effort to the construction of a world revolutionary organisation…
I should rather say that most of my political militancy has been and still is devoted to the world party, to the building of the Fourth International.
The world party is the top priority for the workers’ movement because there is a world economy and a world policy to which all national realities yield. By means of IMF, imperialism applies only one policy to all indebted countries, whether developed or underdeveloped. And this, which we have said about the foreign debt, holds true in all the spheres of politics and economy.
The existence of a world policy is a feature of capitalism and, since it is all about overthrowing it, we need an instrument in accordance with this reality and this task. World mass movement needs different tools for each one of the different problems that class struggle poses. To fight within the economic milieu, we need trade unions; it is no coincidence that the first unions were born in England the birthplace of the industrial revolution.
But the need for a world organisation does not necessarily stem from the need to work out a world policy.
I want to prove precisely the contrary. Let us stick to the previous example. Workers need trade unions to fight for salaries, stability at work, and so on, against their national exploiters. They need political parties to defend their class interest. At an international level, they need a cohesive trade union movement. Unfortunately, such organisations are lost due to the division in the international workers’ movement into pro-western unions and pro-soviet unions. The world economy demands the development of great international trade unions. The lack of these means great hindrance. Why was the great coal strike lost in Great Britain? Precisely due to a lack of international solidarity. A great revolutionary world trade union would have created a movement of solidarity with the miners that would have been unstoppable.
From what you have just said, I infer that these trade union organisations existed some time ago.
That is right, and they were very strong. There was a yellow Trade Union Central and parallel to that there was a Red Trade Union International[1], created by the III International, very strong and very well organised. Just imagine an organisation of that type, strong and centralised, that will decide, for example, that not a single plane, not a single boat goes to Chile, and not a single Chilean ship is unloaded until Pinochet goes. How long would that dictatorship last? Not much, I should think. The same goes for the coal strike: had there been an organisation capable of preventing the shipping of oil to England, the strike would have won very quickly.
I have had the opportunity to talk to leaders of the Galician Nationalist Party. They agree with the need for international analyses and that solidarity is absolutely necessary, but they assert that parties can only be national due to the weight of national specificities.
And who would organise the solidarity or work out the international analyses? Each task requires a specific organisation. I do not believe in spontaneity in these things. What organism drove world workers to act in solidarity with the English miners? None. And that is why there was no such solidarity.
What would you say of Spain and the International Brigades that went to fight for the Republic against Franco?
Precisely, at that time the Third International existed and it gave the impulse to solidarity with the Republic and the formation of the Brigades. Also, Trotskyism drove in that direction and so did the anarchists. Otherwise, there would not have been any Brigades in Spain.
Was not the lack of solidarity with England more due to the low level of awareness among the international workers than to their lack of organisation?
Both factors come very close together. If we take Hegel’s categories,[2] of the objective spirit and the subjective spirit, we can say that the subjective spirit, the level of awareness, must be objectified. How? In an organisation. They are two sides of the same coin. If a worker is aware of the fact that he is being exploited, he will create an organisation to fight against exploitation. It is the transformation of the subjective spirit into an object: from thought into action and then into an organisation.
Coming back to the position of the Galician nationalists – and they are not the only ones who think this way – they say that the weight of national specificities forces national parties to maintain the independence of political criteria, not to submit to an international organisation.
I do not deny the importance of national specificities or that parties should keep the independence of criteria. Now, it is all about determining what is decisive. If the world is a sum of specificities where Argentina is diametrically opposed to Uruguay, Uruguay to Brazil, Brazil to Mexico and so on, that is that there are no common features and the countries do not form part of a world total, then the international cannot and should not exist.
What is the reality? Exaggerating a little, we can compare the world and the countries to a country and the provinces. When we analyse the reality of Argentina, we regard it as a whole, not as a sum of provincial situations. Argentina is dominated by a national state and not by provincial states.
The world situation is not exactly the same, for national states do exist and they often have deep differences from each other. But what is characteristic of capitalist domination is the existence of a world system. For example, when capitalism was in need of great sugar production, the countries of the Caribbean, as well as the north of Brazil, got busy producing sugar and great sugar mills appeared. The 1848 European revolution was a sole process engulfing the entire continent. Another example: before capitalism, there have been no world wars.
For Marxists, the first and decisive scientific fact is the existence of the world economic, social and political system to which national specificities are subordinate. To put it in another way: the national thing is a specific expression of the world system.
Proletarian internationalism emerged as a response to an objective problem; it is not something Marx invented behind his desk. The Communist Manifesto, published in 1848, is a document of emigrant labour, and workers’ European leagues, who were in the midst of revolutionary upheaval. They were German, French, Belgian, English, Italian…
In 1863 the First International emerges, founded by trade union leaders from different countries who call Marx for help. There were many immigrant workers in England, among them Germans who perceived very low salaries. This created problems for the English workers who were left out of jobs because of that cheap labour. Workers’ leaders from these countries got together and discovered that they had many problems in common that cried for an international organisation. That is to say: the problem of England would not be solved with confrontations between English and German workers but with unity of both proletariats and those of the rest of the world again a common class enemy.
We consider that the dissolution of the Third International, demanded by Roosevelt and Churchill, was the worst crime committed by Stalinist bureaucracy; it was their highest treason.
This is what explains why imperialism has not yet been defeated. The Second International exists, but it is not a real International but a federation of social democratic parties, defenders of the capitalist system. The Third International and the Red Trade Union International were officially dissolved by Stalinism. In this way, the need for an International was wiped away from the awareness of the masses.
Today, we, the internationalists, are but a tiny minority of the working masses. We, the Trotskyists are the only ones who proclaim the absolute need for international trade union organisation and international politics too, a centralised world party.
Some seventy or eighty years ago, all advance guard workers stood for the International. In the first, you could find anarchists, Marxists, Proudhomists[3] and English trade unionists. When the Second was founded, all the trends of the workers’ movement, except for the anarchists, took part in it. It is not that they stopped being internationalists. They simply remained in the “First”.
Stalinism broke that tradition and simultaneously he worked out the theory of socialism in only one country.[4] According to that theory, USRR would defeat imperialism in the economic competition; that is why it was not necessary to have a world party to work out a programme and tactics for the workers’ movement. Khrushchev used to say that in twenty years’ time USRR would outperform the USA in power.
This ideology caused a great leap backwards in the awareness of the workers’ movement: it receded to the previous period, to the times before the 1848 revolution and the advent of the Communist Manifesto.
In pedagogy, we call people who learned how to read and write at school and then, for lack of practice, forgot how to do so, functional illiterates. We can say that, because of Stalinism, the workers’ movement suffers from functional illiteracy in the scope of proletarian internationalism. The world party, the only political tool that can defeat imperialism, appears to the eyes of the workers’ advance guard as a Utopian idea, something outlandish, wishful thinking.
The main base on which the theory of socialism in only one country stands has been proved false, for Workers’ States could not outdo imperialism in technologic development and production. It is in this way that – among other things – it has been once more proved that the adequate tool for destroying capitalism is not a technological competition of workers’ state against the USA but the world party, the International, that can challenge imperialism politically by mobilising workers all over the world or rather: two closely liked Internationals are badly needed: one of the trade unions and one political.
Now we might add that this does not deny national specificities. We are against an international leadership that can order the national parties the way they have to act, and what policy is to be applied…
Which is how Stalinism acts, isn’t it?
Stalinism is the opposite of an International. The USRR, as a great power, maintains and finances parties in all the countries of the world and these serve their interests and do whatever they are told. An International acts as a party does: it holds congresses where representatives of the national parties discuss and vote a political orientation.
Just have a look at the Argentine Communist Party (CP), which explicitly supported the March 1976 military coup[5] and the Videla administration. I just cannot believe that all the sectors of the Argentine CP and the millions of workers sympathisers agreed to this policy of supporting a dictatorship that tortured and murdered thousands of militants even from the CP. They did what they did because they are a party that depends on the USRR bureaucratic state and has to do what they are told to. During all that time the USRR enjoyed excellent diplomatic and commercial relations with the dictatorship.
And yet, in the opinion of many, internationalism is precisely that: a State dictates its will to the parties that sympathise with it. For example, a short time ago there was a meeting of Latin American communist parties in Havana. Was it not a kind of international? Was it but a façade?
It was neither one thing nor the other: just a meeting of ambassadors, similar to what Reagan holds when he travels to Europe and meets his ambassadors and the leaders of the pro-American parties.
A meeting of the CPs is not an international; if things are decided unanimously, it is not a workers’ party. Was there any resolution passed by the majority and not unanimously? Have you read in any paper that there were strong discussions? No, it was nothing but a briefing of agents of the Foreign Ministry of the USSR, with the latter explaining and then dictating its position to all the present.
The International, such as we conceive it, is characterised by the existence of deep differences, precisely because it is worldwide. It cannot be otherwise, if it is a meeting of representatives from different countries, reflecting different cultures, traditions and even languages. Unanimity under such circumstances is not possible.
The development of the revolution differs from country to country, doesn’t it? That causes an uneven development of the national parties, the sections of the International.
That is right.
Let us imagine that in a country, for example, Bolivia, we are in good conditions to advance towards the seizure of power, precisely when there is no strong International…
You’re asking if should we or should not seize power?
The question is: does the seizure of power in a country depend on the construction of a very strong international?
I should say that the construction of national parties and of the International is a combined process. In the first place, to intervene in the class struggle we must start with correct analysis of the national situation. The task of making this analysis and working out politics is what we call “guidelines” of the party – that is to say the combination of tasks and demands that we propose to mobilise the masses and build the party – this task is essential for the national party. But the analysis can only be complete within the context of a correct assessment of the international situation. How could we understand the situation in Argentina without taking into account the situation in Latin America and the policy of American imperialism? It is no coincidence that in our congresses we discuss the international situation before the national situations. Well, it is precisely here that the international organisation, even if it is weak and small, just as the IWL[6], has a momentous role to play for it compiles the experiences and opinions of members and leaders.
Now, the other aspect of the combination I mentioned at the beginning is that the International can only make a qualitative leap in its growth and strengthening if some of its parties seize power. A triumph of Trotskyism in any country would be under a lot of prejudice, in the first place the one that sustains that an International is not necessary. Honestly, I believe that no Trotskyist party – let us remember that we are talking about parties that aspire to socialism with workers’ democracy – may seize power without political and theoretical aid from the International, no matter how tiny and weak it may be. In this way, the deeply mistaken and false idea that an International is nothing but a trimming and not the deepest need of the international workers’ movement, will be smashed to smithereens.
On the other hand, the example of a Trotskyist government would cause a major impact by imposing workers’ democracy, with liberties of every type. Such a government would grant more freedom than and bourgeois or worker bureaucratic state.
These two facts would arouse great enthusiasm among the workers of the world and the International would, at long last, become an organisation of millions of workers.
You say that the International fulfils mainly the task of political working out. Can the international leadership, or should it, intervene in the life of national parties?
Not only in working out policy but also in the organisation of international campaigns, such as solidarity with great class struggles – from the Salvadorian guerrilla to the strike of the English miners and the anti-bureaucratic struggle of the Polish Solidarity – or the policy of unity of the masses in the underdeveloped countries against the payment of the foreign debt.
To answer your question, I think that at this stage the International should not intervene in the national parties. Maybe, later on, it will be different, when there is a great International, with a leadership enjoying huge prestige and when the sections hold power in several countries.
For the time being it must participate, and very strongly so, in the political discussions but it would be a dangerous mistake if the International leadership changed the leadership of a party or imposed a national policy. The national issue is a specific aspect of the international issue, but it does have a great degree of autonomy.
[1] Trade Union Federation (known as “yellow”) grouped the trade unions controlled by European social democracy. It disappeared during II World War. The Red Trade Union was created by the III International – and dissolved together with it – to group the trade unions founded by communists in opposition to the reformist bureaucracy.
[2] Georg Hegel (1770-1831), the German philosopher and logician, exerted a deep influence on Marx in the scope of logic.
[3] Pierre-Joseph Proudhom (1809-1865) was one of the first theoreticians of anarchism. His ideas were very popular among workers of the XIX century.
[4] The theory of socialism in only one country, formulated by Stalin to justify his abandonment of the international revolution, says that the USSR, due to its extension and natural wealth, is capable of “catching up with and overtaking” the most advanced capitalist countries and reach socialism. The Marxist theory says – to the contrary – that even if the first step is the conquest of power and expropriation of the bourgeoisie in the national states, socialism can only be reached by means of great development of productive forces, which requires the conquest of power all over the world and the abolition of the national frontiers. In this way, the great economic, scientific and technological development, today in the possession of a handful of countries, would reach the entire planet.
[5] When Videla took over the presidency of the country, the CP periodical commented: “General Videla’s formulations constitute a liberating programme that we share in. General Videla requests comprehension and he shall have it. It is required from all the patriotic sectors of our party to pay attention to this presidential request and participate in the democratic reorganisation”. (Tribuna Popular 8/4/76)
[6] IWL (FI) (International Workers’ League, Fourth International) was founded in 1982 to try and overcome the crisis of leadership of IV International. Moreno was one of its founders and its principal leader.
