Internationalism and an international

I mentioned earlier the wrong method of building the International. This is inherent in the attitude of the majority, as expressed in the “Report on the Present Stage of Building the International”, presented by Segur and adopted by the United Secretariat in January.11 It’s really not very different from the attitude of the early ’50s — that you get your program, strategy and tactics right, and that then becomes the framework for everything else. But it has been modified somewhat by the real world. These comrades are serious; they’re trying to build parties the same way we are; they’re trying to grapple with things.

They don’t agree with our answers at the moment, and we’re discussing things with them.

But there’s still a failure to understand the real world, because of the failure to recognise that it’s not the programmatic documents you write, but the things you do in the class struggle, that really matter. For instance, Segur’s report says that we’re worse off today than at almost any other time in terms of building an international revolutionary organisation. We’re tiny and weak, but we’re the only ones even calling ourselves an international. The big parties don’t have an international; they just have fraternal relations between parties.

This is one of the tragedies of the Fourth International. This idea has been imbued in people so strongly: Because we don’t have a big international like Lenin had in 1921, things are terrible. It makes people demoralised or pessimistic because they can’t find a revolutionary task to fulfil as part of an existing mass international revolutionary movement. They don’t see the form they expect, so they can’t figure out how to do it. The Sandinistas or the Cubans aren’t telling us what to do, so therefore there’s no international.

We reject the idea that we’re worse off today than at any time in the past. How can you say that when we have the victory of the Vietnamese Revolution and the revolutionary developments in Central America? Here are mass formations that are trying to extend the world revolution.

But people get worried because these formations aren’t part of an international. You get a fetishism of the form. Because Marx called for an international before any revolutionaries had state power, and then there was the Second International before there were any socialist revolutions, and Lenin called for a Third International before the Russian Revolution, they assume that the same form must exist today. It doesn’t matter if there are only a few little parties calling themselves the international — it’s better to have that than nothing.

That’s an unrealistic view of politics. You have to look at why there’s no mass international today. And in any case the relations today between parties that stand at the head of state formations will not be the same as the relations between parties in the Third International. What kind of relations between parties are needed is a very concrete question, but people get into this framework of we need a new international, we must have a new international. So the US SWP puts out their magazine called New International and says the lack of that is the source of our problems.

But that’s not the situation at all. We’re able to develop relations with different revolutionary parties and currents around the world. The principle is not an international; the principle is internationalism, international collaboration among revolutionaries. That’s the key point: The form is secondary.

There are concrete things we can do to develop international collaboration with the Cubans, with the Sandinistas, with the Vietnamese. The problem is that the Fourth International is not doing them. We should link up with their parties wherever they exist: in Nicaragua, we’d join the Sandinistas; in Cuba we’d join the Communist Party. We’d join them to loyally build them. The same is true of other places where there are genuine revolutionary formations. We don’t have to create our own particular current in every country that agrees with our program if there are living revolutionary forces. We might have some differences with them, but perhaps by common work they’ll be sorted out.

The obstacle to doing this is a fetishisation of the form — and of the abstract program, since it all flows from the program. Here’s how it’s put by Segur in the report to the United Secretariat. Talking about currents that are actually leading revolutions, he says: “These currents are capable of rediscovering a revolutionary practice on the basis of their own experience …” The idea seems to be that they don’t read books like we do, they have to stumble on things in practice. “… but they do not immediately pose the question of the program of world revolution and the rebuilding of a revolutionary international.”12

In other words, these currents, like the Sandinistas, figured out how to make a revolution in their own country. That took a lot of their energy and time, so they didn’t figure out how to do it in Poland. Therefore, there is something wrong with them; they’re not really revolutionary Marxists. That’s what that means.

In the end, the essence of internationalism is that you seek to make a revolution in your own country. This is part of the world revolution — of internationalism. It’s not a new idea — Lenin insisted on this approach during World War I. He pointed out that there were plenty of people expressing fine sentiments about international solidarity, but who could not and would not act against their enemy at home, against their “own” bourgeoisie. Lenin knew it’s one and the same struggle.

Today in many advanced capitalist countries we see the same thing in the labour movement. Many offer solidarity with revolutions abroad and this is positive. But their practice at home is one of servile collaboration with their own ruling class, which in the long run, undermines their “internationalism”. And in the Trotskyist movement, it’s very common to see people who write and say a lot of fine things about revolutionary struggles abroad, but who abstain from the task of actively seeking to build a broad revolutionary movement in their own countries.