programme for our times conditions for rebuilding a movement for international socialism were not the most favourable. On the contrary, by 1938 the consequence of stalinist policy was a legacy of working class defeats. This eroded working class combativity and was laying the basis for the second world war.
Trotsky had rightly declared the Third (Communist) International to be dead from the point of view of marxism - the victim of Stalin's policy of 'socialism in one country'. Its policies were dictated not by the necessities of the class struggle but by the exigencies of the foreign policy of the bureaucracy.
In Germany a revolutionary proletariat had been divided, weakened and betrayed by its communist and social democratic leaders and was suffering under the rule of a triumphant fascism which destroyed even its basic class organisations.
In Spain the revolution had already suffered a serious setback in 1936 with the formation of the Popular Front and the resulting suppression of independent working class politics. By 1938 the civil war was drawing to an
CEL MEN agonising close; the sacrifices of the workers and peasants were not enough to overcome the misleadership of their traditional parties.
It was under these conditions that Leon Trotsky and the International Left Opposition reaffirmed their conviction in the ultimate triumph of the proletarian revolution and announced a programme not only to meet the tasks of the day, but one that synthesised the lessons of the workers' movement for the whole imperialist epoch -The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International: the "transitional programme'
The central core of the transitional programme is that only an independent working class in alliance with the oppressed can liberate humanity from the horrors of capitalist war, exploitation, hunger, racism and all forms of oppression; and that the objective material conditions for such a liberation have historically matured in our epoch - the epoch of wars and revolutions.
This simple marxist idea is opposed to all those ideas and
continued on page 17
"this central idea of class independence is based on the whole history of the twentieth century" Page 15
eye-witness report