The revival of international Marxism could not be achieved through the reform of the Comintern, but only in a ruthless struggle against it. After long interrogations and brief secret trials, they were shot in October 1950. The turn by the USSR toward direct collaboration with the international bourgeoisie was complemented by the intensification of state repression within the borders of the degenerated workers’ state. Labour productivity was low, living conditions for many abysmal. Decades before the Soviet press discovered the evils of the “administrative-command economy,” Trotsky wrote: “Administrative planning has sufficiently revealed its power—but therewith also the limits of its power. However, when Stalin, as Trotsky had predicted, suddenly signed his “nonaggression” pact with Hitler and later invaded Finland, liberal sentiment turned sharply against the Soviet Union. Having starkly posed the political and historical alternatives, the task of the Fourth International was to show the working class the way out of the impasse created by the betrayals of its old organizations and resolve the crisis of revolutionary leadership. “We must formulate our slogans,” Trotsky wrote, “in such a way that the workers see clearly just what we are defending in the USSR (state property and planned economy), and against whom we are conducting a ruthless struggle (the parasitic bureaucracy and its Comintern). Pablo and Mandel found further justification for their revisions of the Trotskyist program and their proposed liquidation of the Fourth International in the political turmoil within the Kremlin following the death of Stalin in March 1953. written 1936 first published 1937 Translated by Max Eastman Transcribed for … But if the bureaucracy retained power and continued to stifle, in the interests of its own privileged position, the creative possibilities of the nationalized productive forces and central planning, a catastrophic relapse into capitalism, ending with the destruction of the USSR, was also possible. Moreover, the diplomatic initiatives of the Soviet Union imposed no obligations upon the local Communist parties, whose main concern had to be the maximum development of the independent revolutionary activity of the working class. In all our subsequent work it is necessary to take as our point of departure the historical collapse of the official Communist International” (Leon Trotsky, Writings of Leon Trotsky [1932-33] [New York: Pathfinder Press, 1972] pp. The Revolution Betrayed is one of the most important Marxist texts of all time. Like Social Democracy, Stalinism could not be “reformed,” i.e., made to serve the interests of the working class, because its own interests were tied to those of imperialism and hostile to the Soviet and international proletariat. “Objective socialist reality,” Pablo and Mandel wrote in the early 1950s, “consists essentially of the capitalist regime and the Stalinist world”—thereby dismissing the working class and its class struggle as significant, let alone independent and decisive, factors in the historical process. The February Revolution. Some of it was good, but its very idealistic, it sounds good, equality in everything but it dosent work out properly because conditions dont really improve, if anything they get worse. Within hours of Stalin's death they had begun demolishing their master's legacy. © The point is not merely that The Revolution Betrayed was the work of a genius. The circumstances which had facilitated the conquest of power by the Russian proletariat created staggering obstacles to the process of socialist construction in the newly established workers’ state. Standing in the Ministry of Justice before Trygve Lie (the future United Nations Secretary-General) and his associates, Trotsky confronted the frightened Social Democratic officials who were using the testimony of fascist hoodlums as a legal pretext for his deportation from Norway. You think yourselves secure and free to deal with a political exile as you please. The Revolution Betrayed is one of the most important Marxist texts of all time. Stalin had hoped that the expulsion of Trotsky would deprive him of the possibility of developing the activity of the Opposition in the Soviet Union. Despite the mistakes and even crimes committed by the Soviet bureaucracy, it was still executing, albeit in its own brutal and pragmatic way, the historical legacy of the October Revolution and the Bolshevik Party. Leon Trotsky (1879-1940), was the co-leader of the 1917 Russian Revolution, socialist opponent of Joseph Stalin, founder of the Fourth International, and strategist of world socialist revolution. By giving its assent to the policies which had led to the destruction of the German workers’ movement, the Comintern demonstrated that it no longer served, even in the most tenuous manner, the cause of international socialism. Was readily acknowledged by Trotsky in the economic basis of a systematic destruction the. Discussions at Party meetings ; no International congress, no discussions at meetings. 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