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    Vol.60/No.30           September 2, 1996 
 
 
`Epoch Of Imperialism Has Explosive Character'  

BY LEON TROTSKY

The excerpts below are taken from Pathfinder's new edition of The Third International after Lenin by Russian Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky. Written from exile in Soviet Central Asia in 1928, this work is a defense of the proletarian course that had guided the Communist (or Third) International in its early years. For almost six decades it has served as a weapon in the arsenal of Marxism.

The main component of the book is a criticism of the draft program presented by Nikolai Bukharin and Joseph Stalin to the International's Sixth World Congress, held that year in Moscow. In doing so, Trotsky explains the evolution of world politics following World War I and of the Soviet regime under Stalin, and poses the tasks facing the international communist movement.

Smuggled out of the Soviet Union by North American communist leaders James P. Cannon and Maurice Spector, delegates at the Sixth World Congress, this work helped gather together the forces to continue the fight for a communist perspective.

Leon Trotsky was part of the central leadership team of the Bolshevik Party, from the time of the October 1917 revolution in Russia, and of the Communist International in its early years. Following Lenin's death in 1924, he became the principal leader of the Left Opposition, formed to wage a battle against the social forces led by Stalin and to defend the communist perspective Lenin had fought for.

The excerpts below are copyright Pathfinder Press and are reprinted by permission.

BY LEON TROTSKY

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,(1) 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....

Politics, considered as a mass historical force, always lags behind economics. Thus, while the reign of finance capital and trust monopolies already began towards the end of the 19th century, the new epoch in international politics which reflects this fact, first begins in world politics with the imperialist war, with the October Revolution, and the founding of the Third International.

The explosive character of this new epoch, with its abrupt changes of the political flows and ebbs, with its constant spasmodic class struggle between fascism and communism, is lodged in the fact that the international capitalist system has already spent itself and is no longer capable of progress as a whole. This does not mean to imply that individual branches of industry and individual countries are incapable of growing and will not grow any more, and even at an unprecedented tempo.

Nevertheless, this development proceeds and will have to proceed to the detriment of the growth of other branches of industry and of other countries. The expenditures incurred by the productive system of world capitalism devour its world income to an ever increasing degree. And inasmuch as Europe, accustomed to world domination, with the inertia acquired from its rapid, almost uninterrupted growth in the prewar period, now collides more sharply than the other continents with the new relation of forces, the new division of the world market, and the contradictions deepened by the war, it is precisely in Europe that the transition from the "organic" epoch to the revolutionary epoch was particularly precipitous.

Theoretically, to be sure, even a new chapter of a general capitalist progress in the most powerful, ruling, and leading countries is not excluded. But for this, capitalism would first have to overcome enormous barriers of a class as well as of an inter-state character. It would have to strangle the proletarian revolution for a long time; it would have to enslave China completely, overthrow the Soviet republic, and so forth. We are still a long way removed from all this. Theoretical eventualities correspond least of all to political probabilities.

Naturally, a great deal also depends upon us, that is, upon the revolutionary strategy of the Comintern. In the final analysis, this question will be settled in the struggle of international forces. Still, in the present epoch for which the program was created, capitalist development as a whole is faced with insurmountable obstacles and contradictions and beats in frenzy against them. It is precisely this that invests our epoch with its revolutionary character and the revolution with its permanent character.

The revolutionary character of the epoch does not lie in that it permits of the accomplishment of the revolution, that is, the seizure of power at every given moment. Its revolutionary character consists in profound and sharp fluctuations and abrupt and frequent transitions from an immediately revolutionary situation; in other words, such as enables the communist party to strive for power, to a victory of the fascist or semifascist counterrevolution, and from the latter to a provisional regime of the golden mean (the "Left Bloc," the inclusion of the social democracy into the coalition, the passage of power to the party of MacDonald, and so forth(2)), immediately thereafter to force the antagonisms to a head again and acutely raise the question of power.

What did we have in Europe in the course of the last decades before the war? In the sphere of economy-a mighty advance of productive forces with "normal" fluctuations of the conjuncture. In politics-the growth of social democracy at the expense of liberalism and "democracy" with quite insignificant fluctuations. In other words, a process of systematic intensification of economic and political contradictions, and in this sense, the creation of the prerequisites for the proletarian revolution.

NOTES

1. On that day the Social Democratic Party of Germany voted in parliament for a resolution granting war credits to the German government. That move was soon repeated by social democrats in France and a number of other countries.

2. The "Left Bloc" in France included the Socialist Party and the bourgeois Radical Party. Ramsey MacDonald was the leader of the Labour Party in Britain.  
 
 
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