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Over the last period, year in and year out, potentially revolutionary situations have kept developing. There is already, to an
extent, a new generation of militants coming out of the urban proletariat.
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It is a fighting generation made of hundreds of thousands of proletarians, of uprooted youth, who have proved everywhere their
readiness to risk theirs lives in strikes and demonstrations: in Chile, in the black ghettos of the Cape and Johannesburg, in
the suburbs of Manila, Seoul and Rangoon, in the Palestinian occupied territories and, even closer to the imperialist
strongholds, in the working-class districts of West Belfast.
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These young fighters know that the lives and the morale of others depend on them, that they cannot allow themselves to be
scared. Obviously they are ready for all revolutionary sacrifices.
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But this is a generation which has been recruited, trained and organised by the military-political machines which are the heirs
of the various post-war nationalist movements and of the Stalinist methods they adapted to their needs. The flag of this
generation is nationalism. Their heroism is called 'armed struggle' or 'terrorism'.
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The militant generation which existed at the time of Trotsky had had a direct experience of the revolutionary storms which
followed World War I. It had been trained by these storms. Above all it had lived through the whole process of building the
Communist International under the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky. The real tragedy was that, in the name of the corrupted brand
of Marxism favoured by the Stalinist bureaucracy and on the basis of a caricature of Leninist methods, these militants were used
to implement the worst policies within the working-class movement.
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This revolutionary generation, which had been aroused and unified behind the same ideal by the Communist International, became
politically disorientated and corrupted in its practice. The real drama was that eventually it was incapable of passing on to
the following generation the revolutionary capital of the International!
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Since then history has followed its course. Other militant generations have emerged one after the other all over the world. But
each time their level of political consciousness was lower than that of the previous generation. Their leaders kept changing
side, drifting from communism to nationalism, from the standpoint of the proletariat to that of the bourgeoisie until, in the
end, they had no class reference at all.
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Fascism and Stalinism - the former acting from outside the working-class movement and the latter even more effectively from
inside - have, with the additional contribution of the exterminating wave of World War II, fulfilled their task: they created a
political no man's land between generations through which the old revolutionary traditions could not be transmitted.
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Today the generation which is at the forefront of all the political and social struggles, from Chili to South Africa, from
Argentina to the Philippines, from Poland to Azerbaidjan and to Northern Ireland, is largely proletarian. But it has no idea of
proletarian internationalism, even as an old souvenir, even as an abstract reference. A whole revolutionary historical
experience is lost for this generation. In this respect the international working class movement is now far more backward than
it was fifty years ago.
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Yet the nationalism of today's militant generation is no more natural or spontaneous than a proletarian consciousness.
Nationalism has become the flag of this generation only because the nationalist intellectuals were the only ones to offer a
flag. Where intellectuals claiming to be proletarian internationalists existed, they renounced the defence of their ideas and
explained that the nationalist leaders could be trusted.
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Neither is it the living conditions in the ghettos and the shanty towns which push the young militants towards nationalist
demands which confine them within the boundaries of their native country.
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Twenty-five years ago, Malcolm X used to say: The most formidable blacks in the USA are those in the ghettos, because they have
no religion, no conception of morals and citizenship. Nothing frightens them. Because they are constantly frustrated, they are
always restless, impatient to take action. And whatever they do they always do it with the utmost commitment.
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Malcolm X, who was a black nationalist militant, may have never suspected that his description of the blacks in the ghettos was
very similar to that which Marx gave of the proletariat in general. Yet these proletarians from the ghettos and the shanty
towns, who are proletarians in the most restricted sense, who have been deprived of everything including religion, morals and
any illusion in citizenship, who can show such commitment, why should they not become internationalists, since they have no
fatherland, nothing to loose but their chains and a whole world to conquer? Why should they be less receptive to an
internationalist education than to a nationalist one?
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Why should the South African blacks, piled up as they are in their townships, have to believe that their emancipation can take
place within a future Azania (as the nationalists call South Africa), as if changing a name could end poverty or even white
domination? After all the South African blacks can see for themselves how in the former Rhodesia the black nationalists have
failed to solve these problems despite Rhodesia becoming Zimbabwe!
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In 1903, in the slum districts of Warsaw, when a young Jewish proletarian, most of the time illiterate and half unemployed, was
spotted for his courage and commitment by the Bund, the Bolsheviks, the Polish Socialist Party or any other tendency in the
socialist movement (and at grassroot levels, most young workers could not tell the difference), he was invited to take part in
the educationals which each group made a point of organising in the unions in which they were most influential. And the
competition to build influence within the unions was fierce.
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In these educationals people became familiar with the socialist organisations abroad and a lot was said about internationalism.
It was part and parcel of the basic militant outlook of the time which any conscious workers had to be taught to start with. To
be suspected of not being internationalist was an insult while claiming one's internationalism was a gesture of pride.
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In most cases young socialist workers would only further their political education in jail, in what were more or less favourable
conditions. These were the 'revolutionary universities', as militants used to say.
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If a militant got out of jail at a time when resuming underground work was too difficult, the party would sometimes help him to
go abroad. He would be directed to France, Britain, Germany or Switzerland, depending on the opportunities, the underground
network available to cross the borders, the contacts which existed. Once he was there, what happened was a question of
individual luck. But, if willing, the revolutionary worker could then complete his political training while establishing links
with the legal organisations which existed in the rest of Europe.
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At first, the revolutionary emigré, whose experience was confined to utter poverty, was taken aback when he attended political
meetings in Germany where the militants dressed like bourgeois - or so it seemed to the vagrant Polish militants. Then, once he
got used to it, he would use every opportunity - public meetings, electoral campaigns, etc.. - to learn as much as he could. As
happened frequently among political emigrés he would also go through periods of demoralisation and isolation. But overall, when
he went back to Russia or Poland, his political capital would be considerably enriched. And, as Trotsky used to say,
internationalism would become the driving force of his life.
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What is nowadays the situation of the young revolutionaries who belong to nationalist organisations?
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Today, as well, prisons play the role of revolutionary universities, even in South Africa. Of course what militants learn in
jail is different from what revolutionaries used to learn in the early years of the century. But the black American movement of
the 70's did recruit in the jails, by providing young black petty criminals with a political culture.
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The real difference starts on another level. When a young black union activist from one of the poor districts of Johannesburg,
usually forced half underground by the constant watch of the police, has eventually to fly away after a demonstration which went
wrong, his experience as an emigré is very different from that of the revolutionaries in the 1900's.
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Once he has been helped out of South Africa by the underground network of one of the political groups, his only option is in
most cases to go to Botswana, Angola or Zimbabwe, to get some military training in one of the camps organised by the ANC and
others thanks to the financial and military help provided by the USSR, China, Czechoslovakia or Cuba. What happens in the Middle
East to Palestinian militants and in Central America is basically the same.
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This sort of training in nationalist military canps is not likely to make internationalism the driving force of the lives of all
these youth, even though they do come from all over the world. But such is not the aim of those who train them. Today the armed
struggle has its own bureaucrats and its own international military personnel, but the ideal of an international revolution is
not part of the revolutionary consciousness any more.
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In Northern Ireland, many of the present leaders of the nationalist movement became familiar with revolutionary ideas in British
and Irish universities. Some of them were even members of revolutionary organisations linked to the Trotskyist movement, either
in Britain or in Ireland. Yet, today, the only school of revolution they offer to the young militants who grew in the council
estates of West Belfast stoning British squads, is either the conspiratorial isolation of the IRA military units or the
wishy-washy pseudo- socialist nationalist language of Sinn Fein.
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At the same time, most Trotskyist groups in Britain feel they have achieved something when they get a speaker from Sinn Fein to
come to one of their meetings and they fall over themselves to offer their advice to the nationalists. What advice? That Sinn
Fein should take a more radical stand on women's or gay rights or adopt the slogan of a 'Socialist United Ireland'? As if
proletarian internationalism was just the addition of a few radical slogans to nationalism! And what can young Irish militants
learn from the moralistic support made of middle-class guilt which most British Trotskyists offer to the nationalist leaders?
That, except for a few shortcomings, Sinn Fein's politics are the only ones worth considering!
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Yet, it is up to us, Trotskyists, as we are today, to make sure that the proletarian internationalist knowledge and skills built
by the old generations reach the new ones, so that at last the international working class movement can restart on a basis
politically more advanced than that of the 30's.
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A challenge? Yes, as is any human undertaking which is worth fighting for. All the more so as the political heritage left by
Trotsky, from which all Trotskyist groups have picked bits and pieces, is not just a doctrine or a set of programmatic
ready-made formulae which have only to be adapted to the current trends.
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Trotsky used to say that Bolshevism is not a doctrine but a system of revolutionary education aimed at achieving the proletarian
revolution. The same can be said of Trotskyism.
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The whole problem is there. Will we, the Trotskyists, have the will, the intellectual and political audacity and the personal
stubborness to recreate and reinvent, through militant activity and revolutionary action, this system of revolutionary education
referred to by Trotsky so that it can permeate the fighting generation which is emerging today from the ranks of the oppressed?
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