64. Under the influence of “Third Period” policy embraced at the Sixth Congress of the Comintern in 1928, the Communist Parties were instructed to replace their adaptation to the trade unions, Social-Democratic parties and bourgeois nationalists with an ultra-left program that included the formation of independent “red” unions and the rejection of the tactic of the united front. The united front tactic was replaced by the designation of Social-Democratic parties as “social fascist.”

65. The new policy of the Comintern was to have disastrous consequences in Germany, where the rise of fascism posed a mortal challenge to the socialist movement. Fascism was a movement of the demoralized petty bourgeoisie, devastated by the economic crisis and squeezed between the two main classes, the bourgeoisie and the working class. The defeats of the socialist movement had convinced broad sections of the petty bourgeoisie that the working class was not the solution but rather the source of its problems. The German bourgeoisie employed the fascists to destroy the labor organizations and atomize the working class. The victory of Hitler’s Nazi Party in January 1933 was the result of the betrayals of Social Democracy and Stalinism. The Social Democrats placed their confidence in the bourgeois Weimar Republic and tied the working class to the capitalist state. The Stalinist policy of “social fascism”—which claimed that the SPD and Hitler’s party were “twins”—opposed all forms of collaboration between the Communist Party and the Social Democracy, even for defensive purposes. It deprived the Communist Party of any means of winning the confidence of workers still loyal to the SPD. As the Communist Party leadership developed the criminally complacent slogan, “After Hitler, us,” Trotsky warned in December 1931, “Worker-Communists, you are hundreds of thousands, millions; you cannot leave for any place; there are not enough passports for you. Should fascism come to power, it will ride over your skulls and spines like a terrific tank. Your salvation lies in merciless struggle. And only a fighting unity with the Social Democratic workers can bring victory. Make haste, worker-Communists, you have very little time left!”^[1] This warning was tragically confirmed after Hitler came to power in 1933 and proceeded to arrest or execute the leadership of the working class and destroy its independent organizations.

66. The victory of fascism in Germany was a turning point in the degeneration of the Communist Parties. Despite the unprecedented magnitude of the defeat suffered in Germany, there was no opposition within the parties of the Communist International. In response, Trotsky issued the call for the founding of new parties and a new International. “The Moscow leadership has not only proclaimed as infallible the policy which guaranteed victory to Hitler, but has also prohibited all discussion of what had occurred,” he wrote in July 1933. “And this shameful interdiction was not violated, nor overthrown. No national congresses; no international congress; no discussions at party meetings; no discussion in the press! An organization which was not roused by the thunder of fascism and which submits docilely to such outrageous acts of the bureaucracy demonstrates thereby that it is dead and that nothing can ever revive it.”^[2] While Trotsky continued to define the Soviet Union as a workers’ state, albeit one that had undergone a far-reaching degeneration, he warned that its long-term survival, not to mention its development along genuinely socialist lines, depended upon the overthrow of the bureaucracy in a political revolution.

67. The Stalinist Comintern, which paved the way for Hitler’s rise to power by rejecting Trotsky’s call for a “united front” of the Social Democratic Party and the Communist Party against the rise of the Nazis in Germany, shifted to the right after this historic defeat. At the Seventh Congress of the Comintern in 1935, the “Popular Front” program was adopted to subordinate the working class to the bourgeoisie. Accordingly, working class parties were directed to ally with bourgeois “democratic” parties in the name of defending democracy against fascism. The Marxist perspective that fascism could only be defeated by the working class taking power and overthrowing capitalism as part of the international socialist revolution was rejected. This class collaborationist approach was based on the defense of the interests of the Soviet bureaucracy at the expense of the world revolution, on the basis of the nationalist theory of “socialism in one country.” This policy, which consciously prevented the working class from taking power by revolutionary means in favor of an alliance with bourgeois governments, had devastating consequences in Spain and France. In France in 1936-38, the Stalinists’ support for the bourgeois Popular Front government demoralized the working class, while the Popular Front betrayal in Spain defeated the socialist revolution and paved the way for the victory of fascism under Franco.

68. In the same period, the TKP decided to “decentralize” itself and openly supported the Kemalist government as the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union strengthened its relations with Ankara in Turkey. Zeki Baştımar, one of the leaders of TKP at that time, later summarized it as follows: “The [Seventh] Congress [of the Comintern in 1935] gave our party the key to open a new era of activity. The party determined a new way of war. It was decided to actively support the government of [Prime Minister] İsmet İnönü in all its actions that serve the national independence and social development of the country and benefit the country and the people.”^[3]

69. Preparing the political and theoretical basis for a new International was a long and challenging process. For five years, from 1933 until the founding of the Fourth International in September 1938, Trotsky waged a patient but determined political struggle to separate the program and perspective of proletarian internationalism from the standpoint of the various centrist political tendencies. Claiming to agree with Trotsky’s criticisms of Stalinism, the centrists opposed the creation of a new International and sought a middle way between reformist and revolutionary politics. The centrists’ opposition to the creation of the Fourth International stemmed from their rejection of Trotsky’s analysis of the counterrevolutionary role of the Stalinist regime and its Communist Parties and from their fundamentally nationalist orientation.