From The Militant, Vol. VI No. 29, 3 June 1933, pp. 1 & 3.
Transcriebd & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
The opportunist theory of socialism in one country is showing its fruits. A correct revolutionary, Marxist Russian Foreign Policy, based upon the theory of the permanent revolution, would have seen its chief tasks in the problems of the Chinese, the German, the world revolution. Of greatest importance was the Comintern as the instrument of world revolution. To its interests, diplomacy, which only has a technical significance, should have been subordinated.
Thus, with a correct policy, the central problem of the Soviet Union in the last few years should have been the struggle against German Fascism, which should not have been permitted under any circumstances to seize power. Furthermore, China should have been supported against the brigand invasion of the Japanese.
But the representatives of this correct, international tactic which conforms to the objective requirements do not decide the policy of the USSR and the Comintern. They stand in opposition to it and fill the jails and places of deportation in the state for which they have fought. Bureaucrats who have arisen on the basis of the reactionary theory of socialism in one country, which stands in contradiction to objective reality, decide the policies.
Soviet diplomacy has rid itself of all control by the Comintern and made an opportunist practice out of a juridical fiction in the Soviet constitution. If Russia alone could build up socialism, it had to conduct a nationalist foreign policy, the Comintern had to become a negligible factor whose interests had to be subordinated to diplomacy. Then non-aggression pacts, participation in the Kellogg Peace Pact, struggle for international disarmament “as the only means of preventing wars” (see the Charter tor Peoples’ Rights submitted by Litvinoff at Geneva last February) had of necessity to become things which could replace the world revolution.
The leading Soviet statesmen and diplomats became disinterested in the policies of the revolutionary parties. In this whole last period, from 1928 to 1933, a period alive with struggles of the greatest proportions, not a single congress of the Comintern has been called. In this same period neither Stalin nor any other leading Soviet statesman has as much as uttered a single word on the German problems. No, on the basis of the workers’ state, they have conducted a bourgeois foreign policy. “The Soviet Union is everything, the world revolution is nothing,” that is the unexpressed principle of Stalinist policy.
In reality, the Soviet Union, without a concretely pursued aim of world revolution, is nothing, and doomed to decline. The world bourgeoisie has realized this much better than the narrow-minded Stalinist bureaucracy. That is why it staked everything on the attempt to take the Comintern out of the hands of the Soviet Union, even if it had to pay with small concessions for this achievement.
The Stalin diplomats, led by opportunist policy and practice, have seized upon these small advantages (credits, favorable trade agreements) and for their sake have neglected the policy of the revolutionary party, as was the case in Germany, even went so far as to give it up altogether. It cannot be forgotten that Litvinoff declared demonstratively in Geneva last February – shortly after the appointment of Hitler as Chancellor – that the Soviet Union is prepared to live in peace and friendship will every government, even an openly counter-revolutionary government. And now, after the party has been destroyed, Stalin hands out gigantic orders to Fascist Germany, which in gratitude “straightens out” the Derop (the reference is to the raids on the Soviet Oil Trust Representative in Germany, which took place on the pretext of weeding out the Communists inside them – Ed.) for him, And Soviet diplomacy renews the friendship treaty concluded with Rathenau.
Hitler Germany has been isolated for a while insofar as its foreign policy is concerned. The great powers do, to be sure, want to utilize Hitler for the general attack against the Soviet Union, but they only assign to him a modest role in this. The present hostilities serve merely to show the loudmouthed Fascists back to their proper places. In reality, the Big Powers’ pact is being formed against the Soviet Union, since international capitalism sees in the colonization of Russia the way out toward a new conjuncture. Faced with this tremendous danger, the Stalinist democracy merely sticks its head into the sand. The diplomats of the Soviet Union have lost confidence in the forces of the world proletariat. But they do have faith in the contradictions among the imperialist powers themselves, they seek friendship with Hitler. At the conclusion of the Berlin treaty, Isvestia wrote on May 6, 1933:
“Public opinion in the Soviet Union has never set forth any plans directed against the present political current in Germany.”
That means the Stalinists have never considered how the German proletariat could be saved from Fascism! This could not have been said in a more cynical, more brutal fashion. It shows not only the moral conscienceless, but also the political narrow-mindedness of Stalinism. Therewith the bankrupt dissipaters of the world revolution confess that they have never developed any serious plans of saving the Soviet Union from destruction! Hitler will become the super-Wrangel. The colonial and corridor problems can be solved only on the prostrate back of the Soviet Union. The whole world knows this today, only the Stalinists remain blind and believe – like the social democrats did in the Weimar constitution – in the tenability of the non-aggression pacts.
All that is reactionary in the theory and practice of “socialism in one country” also comes to the fore in the behavior of Soviet diplomacy in the Far Eastern conflict. Instead of maintaining its duty-bound loyalty to the Chinese proletariat and instead of thereby creating for itself a powerful ally against imperialist Japan, Stalinist diplomacy has to make the greatest concessions to the torturer of China, to imperialist Japan, for the sake of its “fundamental peace policy” – as if the existence of the Soviet Union had done away with the international class struggle.
Yes, the “revolutionary diplomats” were of late even prepared to recognize the vassal state of Manchukuo and to sell it the Chinese Eastern. (The vassals of Japan ignored this proposition and confiscated the railroad, so as to be better able to seize Vladivostok and Irkutsk from the Soviet Union in the near future.) The Soviet Union denied the report officially, but the conservative Temps has been in a position to prove that the report of the proposition rested on facts. The French Ambassador had it confirmed by the Japanese Foreign Minister! Thus, the international bourgeoisie is better informed about the policy of the Soviet Union than the working class, whom a certain Michael Hollay tells in the Basle Rundschau (Stalin organ):
“The Soviet Union will not deliver its locomotives and railroad trains to the Manchurian lackeys of Japanese imperialism, it will know how to defend the property of the workers and peasants, of the liberated Soviet peoples. Should the Japanese imperialists, whose hands already drip with the blood of the Chinese people, lift them arrogantly against the Soviet Union, the Red Army will give them their just deserts.”
Strong in words, but weak in deeds, this is how Stalinism looks on the international arena. The theory of socialism in one country which struck the Stalinist blind as to the close interconnection of international class struggle with the foreign policy of the Soviet Union, and which is now leading on to the road of open treachery against the German and the Chinese proletariat, becomes an acute and immediate danger to the existence of the Soviet Union itself.
This theory must be irrevocably condemned, the forces of the October revolution must be gathered, the Marxist opposition (Bolshevik-Leninists) readmitted into the C.P.S.U. Back to a Marxist, internationalist policy which alone can save the Soviet Union from destruction!
Last updated on 4 September 2015