a) The “Third Period”

Recoiling from the opportunist line that had led to disaster in Britain and China, Stalin moved to salvage the regime’s “revolutionary” credentials by imposing an exact opposite course at the sixth Comintern congress in August 1928 – the first that had been held in four years.

Capitalism, Stalin proclaimed, had passed through two “periods” since 1918 – first, a revolutionary period until 1923; then, a “gradual and partial stabilisation”. Now a “third period” of intensive crisis was beginning, that would spell the “final collapse” of capitalism and place the struggle for power on the order of the day.

Marxism explains that there is no such thing as a “final crisis” of capitalism. The capitalist class will always resolve their problems at the expense of the working class until their rule is overthrown. Stalin’s aim, however, was not to develop a Marxist position but to stampede the Comintern to the left. The Communist parties had to smash all other tendencies in order to capture the leadership of the movement; the time for debate was over!

As a recipe for civil war in the labour movement, Stalin in 1924 had already proposed the argument that ”objectively, Social Democracy is the moderate wing of fascism… They are not antipodes but twins.” (Full text)

Under ‘third-period Stalinism’, this approach was now applied disastrously in Germany, where social democratic workers were condemned as being ‘social fascists’. It split the working class, allowed Hitler to take power, and made the Second World War inevitable.

The collapse of the New York Stock Exchange in October 1929 had led to a world-wide capitalist depression. Germany, in particular, was devastated. The crisis of leadership and sectarianism which paralyzed the labour movement, however, allowed Hitler’s Nazis to build up growing support. The ruined middle class, the unemployed, the workers and youth looked in vain to the SPD and KPD for a solution. The Social-Democrat (SPD) leaders were married to capitalism; the Communist Party (KPD) obsessed with attacking the SPD and breaking up its meetings.

The middle class and the most downtrodden layers in particular were drawn in increasing numbers to the ”National Socialist” rallies. The fascists’ demagogic attacks on capitalists and Jews; their mystical promise to restore German ”greatness”; above all, their appearance of purposeful determination seemed the only alternative to these layers. Among organized workers, support for Hitler was almost non-existent.

Trotsky explained the critical need for a united front of workers\’ organizations to crush the fascist menace and, in so doing, to prepare the working class for the conquest of power. The German labour movement was the most powerful in the world. Both the SPD and the KPD had military wings. But, on Moscow’s instructions, the KPD leaders refused all cooperation with the ”social-fascists” – even going so far, in 1931, as to join the Nazis in trying to bring down a Social-Democratic government in Prussia!

The German workers’ movement, the hope of workers everywhere, was annihilated without any serious attempt at resistance by its leadership. The Stalinists were incapable of drawing the conclusions. In April 1933, with Hitler in power, the Presidium of the ECCI declared that the KPD’s policy had been ”completely correct”!

b) The “People’s Front”

The disastrous outcome of the Stalinist policy in Germany, and the absence of any criticism from the ranks of the Communist International, finally convinced Trotsky that the Comintern – like the Second International before it – was dead as an instrument of workers’ revolution. A new international was necessary to regroup, to build and prepare the Marxist tendency for the critical struggles ahead.

Germany under Hitler posed a far more immediate threat to the bureaucracy than the western imperialist powers. Stalin feared both war and the effect it would have on the Soviet masses. He calculated that it was essential to appease Hitler. Throughout 1933, while Hitler liquidated the KPD, the SPD and the trade unions, and began the genocide of the Jews, Stalin uttered not a word of criticism.

But Hitler was relying on the “Communist menace” as a pretext for rearmament in defiance of his ”Allied” imperialist rivals. He could not be seen to fraternize with Stalin at this stage. It was only in August 1939, when Hitler was preparing to strike to the west, that the notorious Stalin-Hitler non-aggression pact was signed.

Surrounded by fascist and right-wing regimes, Stalin’s “revolutionary” ultra-leftism evaporated. Trotsky and the International Left Opposition explained, as the Comintern had explained a dozen years earlier, that the only real security for the USSR lay in revolutionary internationalism – in supporting the workers’ struggle for power in the capitalist states, carrying the war to the enemy and paralyzing reaction.

But the Russian bureaucracy was incapable of following this course; their own dictatorship would have been the first casualty if the Russian workers became infected with these ideas! Instead, quietly forgetting that capitalism was supposedly in its “third period”, they looked for support against Hitler to – the western imperialist powers!

The imperialists were not unwilling to use Stalin for their own purposes. In September 1934 they accepted the Soviet Union’s application to join the League of Nations (describe by Lenin as a “robbers’ den”); in May 1935 French imperialism signed a pact of “mutual assistance” with Stalin!

This turn by the Soviet bureaucracy marked a qualitative new stage in their degeneration. For the first time they entered openly and deliberately, into political alliances with the capitalist class itself. Their opportunist failures, from this point onwards, became transformed into a deliberate betrayal of the workers’ revolution internationally as a condition for capitalist “friendship”.

The writing had been on the wall at the 1928 Comintern congress, where the idea of “socialism in one country” was swallowed without a murmur (See Lesson Thirteen). Trotsky had warned that this would be “the beginning of the disintegration of the Comintern along the lines of social-patriotism”. After 1934 this prediction rapidly became a fact.

The Soviet bureaucracy’s entanglement with the “progressive” capitalist powers was followed, inevitably, by the turn of the Communist parties internationally seeking alliances with “progressive” capitalist and reformist parties in their own countries. The slogan now became “the people’s front”. The workers’ class demands were dropped from the programs which the Communist partied put forward – this would “alienate” the supposedly “progressive” bourgeoisie!

“Broad support” among the middle class, the Stalinists wisely proclaimed, could only be won through a program confined to bourgeois-democratic demands. The full bankruptcy of this position was exposed in the revolutionary events that erupted in France and Spain during 1935 and 1936. First in France, then in Spain, “Popular Front” governments swept to power with Communist support. In both countries, after the rigours of the depression and right-wing rule, this opened the floodgates of mass struggle.

In Spain, a military coup was launched against the “People’s Front” government in July 1936. The reformists, Stalinists and bourgeois Republicans dithered; the workers and peasants took up arms. Within days, most of the country was under their control. Spain was plunged into a full-scale revolutionary crisis, at a far higher level than Russia in 1917.

Stalin, no less than the capitalist class, viewed the unfolding revolution with horror. All his hopes of stable ties with the Anglo-French imperialists were at risk. Worse still, the example of the Spanish workers threatened to infect the Russian workers with the same will to struggle for control of society. The Spanish revolution had to be strangled at all costs.

Slavishly following Moscow’s directives, the Communist Party of Spain waged an all-out struggle against the workers’ revolutionary movement. In the name of “Bolshevism” they argued the Menshevik theory of “two stages”, confining their program to “bourgeois democracy” in the futile hope of reassuring the capitalists that “Communism” posed no threat to them. GPU death squads were sent to Spain to assist in the gruesome task of disarming the workers’ militias and exterminating their vanguard.

Deferring to Stalin’s wheeling and dealing with the imperialist powers, the “Communists” shut their eyes to the first lesson of the Russian revolution: capitalism cannot guarantee democracy and stability to the working class in the conclusive epoch of imperialism. The tasks of “bourgeois democracy” in semi-developed countries such as Spain could only be carried out under the rule of the working class itself.

Tragically, Trotsky’s sympathizers in Spain missed the golden opportunity of winning the Socialist youth to their program, establishing a mass base for Marxism and leading the movement to victory. Without Marxist leadership the working class could not withstand the onslaught of the class enemy combined with that of their own reformist and “Communist” leaders.

Stalinism succeeded in dividing the movement, isolating the left and murdering its best fighters. This made the victory of fascism inevitable. The last hope of working-class victory had been extinguished in Europe, at least until the conclusion of the imperialist war which now became unavoidable.