This week’s Book of the Month is Writings of Leon Trotsky (1939-40). The selection is from the 1940 “Manifesto of the Fourth International on the imperialist war and the proletarian world revolution.” It was adopted at an emergency conference of the international communist movement in New York in May. Copyright © 1973 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.
The Fourth International considers that now is the time to say openly and clearly how it views this war and its participants, how it evaluates the war policies of various labor organizations, and most important, what is the way out to peace, freedom, and plenty.
The Fourth International turns not to the governments who have dragooned the peoples into the slaughter, nor to the bourgeois politicians who bear the responsibility for these governments, nor to the labor bureaucracy which supports the warring bourgeoisie. The Fourth International turns to the working men and women, the soldiers and sailors, the ruined peasants and the enslaved colonial peoples. The Fourth International has no ties whatsoever with the oppressors, the exploiters, the imperialists. It is the world party of the toilers, the oppressed, and the exploited. This manifesto is addressed to them.
Technology is infinitely more powerful now than at the end of the war of 1914-1918, whereas mankind is much more poverty-stricken. The standard of living has declined in one country after another. On the threshold of the present war, agriculture was in worse condition than at the outbreak of the last war. The agricultural countries are ruined. In the industrial countries the middle classes are being ravaged economically, and a permanent sub-class of unemployed — modern pariahs — has been formed. The domestic market has narrowed. The export of capital has been reduced. Imperialism has actually shattered the world market, breaking it up into spheres dominated by powerful individual countries. …
The colonial countries are suffering from their own internal crises, and from the crises of the metropolitan centers. Backward nations which yesterday were still semi-free are today plunged into slavery (Abyssinia, Albania, China …). Every imperialist country must have its own sources of raw materials, above all for war, that is, for a new struggle for raw materials. In order to enrich themselves further, the capitalists are destroying and laying waste to everything created by the labor of centuries.
The world of decaying capitalism is overcrowded. The question of admitting a hundred extra refugees becomes a major problem for such a world power as the United States. In an era of aviation, telegraph, telephone, radio, and television, travel from country to country is paralyzed by passports and visas. The period of the wasting away of foreign trade and the decline of domestic trade is at the same time the period of the monstrous intensification of chauvinism and especially of anti-Semitism. In the epoch of its rise, capitalism took the Jewish people out of the ghetto and utilized them as an instrument in its commercial expansion. Today decaying capitalist society is striving to squeeze the Jewish people from all its pores; seventeen million individuals out of the two billion populating the globe, that is, less than 1 percent, can no longer find a place on our planet. Amid the vast expanses of land and the marvels of technology, which has also conquered the skies for man as well as the earth, the bourgeoisie has managed to convert our planet into a foul prison.
On November 1, 1914, at the beginning of the last imperialist war, Lenin wrote: “Imperialism has placed the fate of European culture at stake. After this war, if a series of successful revolutions do not occur, more wars will follow — the fairy tale of a ‘war to end all wars’ is a hollow and pernicious fairy tale.” Workers, call this prediction to mind! The present war — the second imperialist war — is not an accident; it does not result from the will of this or that dictator. It was predicted long ago. It derived its origin inexorably from the contradictions of international capitalist interests. Contrary to the official fables designed to drug the people, the chief cause of war as of all other social evils — unemployment, the high cost of living, fascism, colonial oppression — is the private ownership of the means of production together with the bourgeois state which rests on this foundation.
With the present level of technology and skill of the workers, it is quite possible to create adequate conditions for the material and spiritual development of all mankind. It would be necessary only to organize the economic life within each country and over our entire planet correctly, scientifically, and rationally, according to a general plan. So long, however, as the main productive forces of society are held by trusts, i.e., isolated capitalist cliques, and so long as the national state remains a pliant tool in the hands of these cliques, the struggle for markets, for sources of raw materials, for domination of the world, must inevitably assume a more and more destructive character. State power and domination of the economy can be torn from the hands of these rapacious imperialist cliques only by the revolutionary working class.
That is the meaning of Lenin’s warning that without “a series of successful revolutions” a new imperialist war would inevitably follow. The different predictions and promises which were made have been submitted to the test of events. The fairy tale of the “war to end all wars” has been proved a lie. Lenin’s prediction has become tragic truth.