30 June 2022
Pricey Comrade:
Thanks to your letter of 28 June and its enthusiastic response to the institution of a brand new part of the Worldwide Committee in Turkey. The formal growth of the work of the ICFI is, regardless of the nation or area, an vital political milestone. However it’s a supply of particular satisfaction that it has change into attainable to make this advance within the nation the place Trotsky, having been exiled from the Soviet Union, so decisively developed the wrestle towards the Stalinist regime on a world scale and initiated the founding of the Fourth Worldwide. Through the go to with the comrades of Sosyalist Eşitlik Grubu to the island of Prinkipo, one couldn’t assist however be deeply moved by the attention of Trotsky’s monumental historic achievement. However we might additionally draw satisfaction from the truth that we’re persevering with the work that Trotsky initiated on Prinkipo, and that Trotsky would have been in full solidarity with the political rules and program of the Worldwide Committee.
The expertise of our comrades in Turkey is definitely, as you write, of nice significance for the event of a bit of the Worldwide Committee in Russia and all through the previous Soviet Union. We labored patiently to create, on the premise of a unified conception of all the historic expertise of the Fourth Worldwide, a agency basis for the institution of a brand new part.
The decision of the Sosyalist Eşitlik Grubu deserves probably the most cautious research. The SEG’s recognition of the political authority of the ICFI shouldn’t be understood in a merely organizational sense. The political authority of the ICFI relies on its historic affiliation with the protection of the foundational rules and program of Trotskyism. The SEG decision recognized the important historic content material of the continuity of Trotskyism:
4. Solely the ICFI represents the political continuity of the world Marxist/Trotskyist motion. This continuity goes again to the founding of the Left Opposition beneath the management of Leon Trotsky in 1923 to defend the technique and program of the world socialist revolution towards nationalist Stalinist degeneration. It was this technique and program that guided the October Revolution in 1917 led by the Bolshevik Occasion in Russia beneath the management of Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky.
5. The founding of the Fourth Worldwide in 1938 beneath the management of Trotsky after the collapse of the Communist Worldwide paving the way in which for the Nazis to return to energy in Germany in 1933; the founding of the Worldwide Committee in 1953 by orthodox Trotskyists led by James P. Cannon of the Socialist Employees Occasion (SWP) within the US towards the revisionist-liquidationist tendency led by Michel Pablo and Ernest Mandel; the political wrestle by the British Trotskyists led by Gerry Healy towards the unprincipled reunification with the Pabloites in 1963; and the wrestle of the American Trotskyists led by David North in 1982-86 towards the national-opportunist degeneration of the Employees Revolutionary Occasion (WRP) in Britain and the regaining the management of the IC by orthodox Trotskyists, represent important turning factors on this political continuity.
Continuity just isn’t conferred upon a corporation by way of some kind of formal proclamation, not to mention within the method of a British knighthood. A younger group should set up its continuity with the antecedent historical past of the Trotskyist motion by taking over the combat, within the current, towards the opponents—Stalinist, Pabloite, state capitalist, social democratic, labor, petty-bourgeois radical, anarchist, bourgeois nationalist, and liberal reformist—of revolutionary Marxism. This combat is performed on a theoretical, political, and organizational aircraft, and is all the time directed towards establishing the whole and unconditional political independence of the working class from the bourgeoisie. Nonetheless tough and contradictory the method, the political motion that conducts this wrestle expresses with ever growing readability the continuity of Trotskyism and, thereby, strikes into alignment with the target trajectory of the world socialist revolution.
Nice historic occasions, equivalent to these by way of which we are actually passing, reveal the important class nature of a political group and the pursuits that it serves. In fact, the response of a corporation to an important disaster is conditioned by its antecedent historical past. The outbreak of the US-NATO proxy struggle towards Russia has quickly uncovered the state-capitalist and Pabloite organizations as contemptible brokers of American and European imperialism. Their concept of “Russian imperialism”—intently related to Shachtmanism and associated types of state capitalist conceptions—now serves as an ideological justification for help to US and European imperialism and their lackeys within the Ukrainian regime.
In an assault on the Worldwide Committee, Oleg Vernyk of the Ukrainian Socialist League (USL) (an affiliate of the Worldwide Socialist League-ISL) writes:
We’re nicely conscious that on this confrontation with two imperialisms, Western imperialism and Russian imperialism, Ukraine solely performs one position: the position of sufferer.
It’s tough to think about a extra absurd and deceitful assertion. The Ukrainian “sufferer” is a regime that was delivered to energy by a coup in 2014 that was financed and arranged by the USA, utilizing native fascist organizations to offer the mandatory navy pressure. Over the last eight years, the US and NATO have carried out the coaching and arming of the Kiev regime in preparation for struggle towards Russia. Hundreds of Ukrainian troopers have been immediately skilled by the USA within the years main as much as the struggle. In a report posted on June 25, the New York Times wrote:
Consultant Jason Crow, a Colorado Democrat on the Home Armed Providers and Intelligence Committees, mentioned in an interview that the relationships Ukrainian commandos developed with American and different counterparts over the previous a number of years had proved invaluable within the combat towards Russia.
The size of US/NATO help for Ukraine—already measuring within the many tens of billions of {dollars}—is with out historic precedent. In line with the Instances:
The commandos are usually not on the entrance traces with Ukrainian troops and as an alternative advise from headquarters in different elements of the nation or remotely by encrypted communications, in line with American and different Western officers, who spoke on the situation of anonymity to debate operational issues. However the indicators of their stealthy logistics, coaching and intelligence help are tangible on the battlefield.
A number of lower-level Ukrainian commanders just lately expressed appreciation to the USA for intelligence gleaned from satellite tv for pc imagery, which they’ll name up on pill computer systems offered by the allies. The tablets run a battlefield mapping app that the Ukrainians use to focus on and assault Russian troops.
On a road in Bakhmut, a city within the hotly contested Donbas area of japanese Ukraine, a bunch of Ukrainian particular operations forces had American flag patches on their gear and have been geared up with new moveable surface-to-air missiles in addition to Belgian and American assault rifles.
“What’s an untold story is the worldwide partnership with the particular operations forces of a large number of various nations,” Lt. Gen. Jonathan P. Braga, the commander of U.S. Army Particular Operations Command, informed senators in April in describing the planning cell. “They’ve completely banded collectively in a a lot outsized impression” to help Ukraine’s navy and particular forces.
To say, within the face of those details, that “Ukraine performs just one position: the position of sufferer” is a blatant and contemptible falsification of actuality within the pursuits of imperialism.
The political foundation of Vernyk’s endorsement of the imperialist struggle follows:
Nonetheless, we members of the USL/ISL have as our primary precept the protection of Ukraine as a political topic, the protection of its working folks, the protection of the unconditional proper to self-determination of the Ukrainian folks and the wrestle for the preservation of the integrity of the state.
This one paragraph exposes the USL (and its ISL sponsors) as reactionary nationalists and bitter opponents of the Marxist concept of the state. It’s an ABC of Marxism that the state is an instrument of sophistication rule. How, then, can “the wrestle for the integrity of the state” be reconciled with “the protection of its [Ukraine’s] working folks”? In fact, Vernyk makes no point out of the truth that the Ukrainian capitalist regime is using the chance offered by the struggle to abolish legal guidelines and rules defending staff that date again to the Soviet period. Nor does Vernyk ever clarify why the alleged “unconditional proper to self-determination” applies solely to Ukraine as outlined by the Kiev regime, however to not the predominantly Russian-speaking populations in Japanese Ukraine and Crimea.
The reactionary foundation of Vernyk’s protection of the Ukrainian regime is most starkly revealed in his try to rebrand the fascist Group of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and its navy wing, the Ukrainian Rebel Army, as a politically heterogeneous motion that included progressive tendencies. Vernyk writes that
within the historical past of the right-wing political formation of the Group of Ukrainian Nationalists, there have been limitless transformations, cracks, radical adjustments in its slogans, sure inclinations to the left and to the appropriate, cooperation with Hitler and the struggle on two fronts, amongst many different occasions. To this we should add the creation of the Ukrainian Rebel Army in 1943 and the large entry to that group in 1939 of the communists of western Ukraine that miraculously escaped whole extermination by the Stalinist regime. All of this types a part of Ukraine’s historical past that’s usually characterised as extraordinarily complicated, controversial and ambiguous.
Vernyk leaves out of his dialogue of this “complicated, controversial and ambiguous” historical past any point out of the central position performed by the OUN and the Ukrainian Rebel Army as collaborators of the Nazis within the genocidal extermination of Ukrainian Jews and the mass homicide of Poles. Searching for to sow political confusion, Vernyk promotes the anti-Marxist nationwide chauvinist tract written in 1948 by Petró Poltava, who was then a number one ideologist of the Group of Ukrainian Nationalists. In a reprehensible try to politically rehabilitate the OUN as a corporation that included genuinely left-wing tendencies that espoused a type of socialist-tinged nationalism, Vernyk claims that Poltava represented “a bent in the direction of democratization” that “was starting to emerge inside the ranks of the OUN (Group of Ukrainian Nationalists), towards the concepts of the left and the incitement to a simultaneous struggle towards German nationwide socialism and towards Stalinism.”
Vernyk goes as far as to assert that Poltava’s pamphlet “annuls all of the arguments of Russian propaganda and its ICFI lackeys relating to the assertion that any nationalist liberation motion in Ukraine needs to be thought of, with out exception, a far-right present and Nazi.”
Allow us to evaluation the textual content by Poltava that has impressed Vernyk and the USL/ISL. It’s titled, “Our Educating in regards to the Nationwide State.” The pamphlet begins with an specific denunciation of the Marxist concept of the state and nation as “unsuitable and tendentious.” Poltava wrote:
Their [The Marxists’] view that nations will be capable of handle with out states sooner or later is utopian, improbable, and missing any foundation in actuality. In all Marxist concept in regards to the state there’s a clear effort to disclaim that the state has any significance for the folks and for humanity normally, in addition to any try to current historical past as nothing greater than a category wrestle—which, as we’ve got already acknowledged, is completely incorrect.
Insisting on the basically ethnic foundation of the state, Poltava inveighed towards the existence of multinational states. He declared: “Clearly states of this kind shouldn’t exist; they need to be restructured as quickly as attainable.” The sensible implications of this argument have been demonstrated by the OUN in its genocidal assaults on Jews and Poles.
Poltava’s textual content is suffused with reactionary nationalist mysticism:
We nationalists imagine on this everlasting reality—that an impartial nationwide state is the one type of political group that ensures a folks the most effective circumstances for all-round growth of its non secular and materials assets. With out its personal nationwide state, that’s, with no state extending over all its ethnic territory, a folks can’t totally develop.
On the conclusion of the textual content, Poltava declared that “the Bolshevik USSR is an implacable enemy of particular person topic folks and humanity normally.”
Why does Vernyk draw inspiration from this reactionary anti-Marxist ideologue? Clearly, his intention is to create an ideological and political bridge to the present-day Ukrainian nationalists, falsely attributing a progressive content material to the struggle being waged by the Kiev regime in alliance with US and European imperialism.
Towards this finish, Vernyk dishonestly makes an attempt to painting Trotsky as an ally of Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism. Vernyk cites a short passage from Trotsky’s 1939 essay, “Downside of the Ukraine,” during which he defended the slogan, in opposition to the Stalinist regime, of “A united, free and impartial staff’ and peasants’ Ukraine.” [Italics in the original].
Vernyk conveniently and duplicitously leaves out of his dialogue of Trotsky’s 1939 article any reference to passages during which Trotsky vehemently condemned any collaboration with and concession to the organizations and events of reactionary Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism. Trotsky wrote:
The Ukraine is very wealthy and skilled in false paths of wrestle for nationwide emancipation. Right here every thing has been tried: the petty-bourgeois Rada, and Skoropadski, and Petlura, and “alliance” with the Hohenzollerns and combos with the Entente. In any case these experiments, solely political cadavers can proceed to put hope in one of many fractions of the Ukrainian bourgeoisie because the chief of the nationwide wrestle for emancipation. The Ukrainian proletariat alone is succesful not solely of fixing the duty—which is revolutionary in its very essence—but additionally of taking the initiative for its answer. The proletariat and solely the proletariat can rally round itself the peasant plenty and the genuinely revolutionary nationwide intelligentsia.
Trotsky concluded his essay with the next well timed warning:
In the beginning of the final imperialist struggle the Ukrainians, Melenevski (“Basok”) and Skoropis-Yeltukhovski, tried to put the Ukrainian liberation motion beneath the wing of the Hohenzollern normal, Ludendorff. They lined themselves in so doing with left phrases. With one kick the revolutionary Marxists booted these folks out. That’s how revolutionists should proceed to behave sooner or later. The upcoming struggle will create a positive environment for all kinds of adventurers, miracle-hunters and seekers of the golden fleece. These gents, who particularly like to heat their palms within the neighborhood of the nationwide query, should not be allowed inside artillery vary of the labor motion. Not the slightest compromise with imperialism, both fascist or democratic! Not the slightest concession to the Ukrainian nationalists, both clerical-reactionary or liberal-pacifist! No “Folks’s Fronts”! The whole independence of the proletarian celebration because the vanguard of the toilers!
As is to be anticipated from this politically bankrupt opportunist, Vernyk makes an attempt to cowl up his capitulation to the Ukrainian bourgeoisie with pathetic slanders towards the Worldwide Committee. He writes that “a United States citizen, Mr. David North, has been defending the pursuits of Russian imperialism and its propaganda equipment on points associated to Ukraine.” In line with Vernyk, I accepted this task “when it turned clear that official Russian propaganda now not has adequate informational area inside the American media or some other nation within the western orbit.” Does Vernyk really think about that such nonsense will likely be believed by anybody?
However I have to observe that his accusation has an ironic character, inasmuch because the “primal sin” of which the Worldwide Committee and I personally are responsible, within the eyes of the Pabloites, has been our relentless publicity of the counterrevolutionary character of Stalinism. This included the ICFI’s work on Safety and the Fourth Worldwide, which unmasked the brokers of the Stalinist paperwork within the Trotskyist motion. Furthermore, at a time when the Pabloites have been singing the praises of Gorbachev, the Worldwide Committee was warning that his insurance policies would consequence within the fruits of the Stalinist betrayal of the October Revolution, that’s, the restoration of capitalism.
The Putin regime is the reactionary resurrection of a bourgeois state that emerged out of the 1991 dissolution of the USSR. However the opposition of the Worldwide Committee to this regime, together with its invasion of Ukraine, is from the socialist left, not the imperialist proper.
Exactly as a result of its opposition to the Putin regime is rooted in its antecedent wrestle of the Fourth Worldwide towards Stalinism and the assorted revisions of the Trotskyist evaluation of the Soviet Union (each Pabloite and “state capitalist”), the Worldwide Committee analyzes the present struggle within the historic context of the dissolution of the USSR, which proved a political catastrophe for the Ukrainian, Russian and worldwide working class.
The way in which out of this catastrophe, from which the current struggle emerged, is to be discovered not in alliance with US-NATO imperialism or with Putin’s capitalist regime; however solely by way of the unified wrestle of the Ukrainian, Russian and worldwide working class towards all of the warring states. The working class in Russia in addition to in Ukraine should uphold the precept: The principle enemy is at residence.
These feedback on Vernyk would possibly serve, maybe, as an illustration of how the Worldwide Committee upholds the protection of Trotskyism. Within the relentless publicity of the enemies of Marxism, the Worldwide Committee continues the nice historic work of the Fourth Worldwide and, on this foundation, educates the working class and prepares it for the achievement of its revolutionary duties.
It’s our hope that the initiative of our comrades in Turkey will function inspiration for the efforts of socialists in Russia and Ukraine to broaden the work of the Worldwide Committee and lift the banner of Trotskyism of their nations and all through the previous Soviet Union.
With Trotskyist greetings,
David North
