103. Trotsky predicted that the catastrophe of World War II would give birth to a revolutionary upsurge. This was confirmed both in Europe and in the colonial world, including China. In Europe, large sections of the bourgeoisie, discredited by their support for fascism, would not have been able to reestablish their power and stabilize capitalism without the help of the Stalinist bureaucracy. The Kremlin instructed the Stalinist parties in France, Italy and Germany to support the bourgeois governments, disarm the resistance fighters and suppress any independent initiative of the working class. Later, in Greece, the Soviet bureaucracy deprived the resistance fighters of vital support and ensured the victory of the bourgeoisie in the civil war.

104. In Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America countless millions of workers and peasants sought to throw off the shackles of colonialism. These mass struggles imparted immense relevance to the Theory of Permanent Revolution and the lessons of Trotsky’s struggle against Stalin’s betrayal of the Chinese Revolution. Once again, the essential problems posed by the anti-imperialist struggle—the liquidation of the remnants of feudalism; the end of colonial rule and the establishment of national independence; and the organization of economic life to end poverty and raise the social and cultural level of the masses—could be achieved only under the leadership of the revolutionary working class, armed with a genuinely democratic and international socialist program. But the objective necessity of such a program and perspective came up against the domination of the anti-imperialist movement by the national bourgeoisie, abetted by the Stalinist parties.

105. In India, the Theory of Permanent Revolution was vindicated in the disastrous betrayal of the anti-imperialist independence movement by Gandhi, Nehru, and the bourgeois Congress Party in 1947-48. The Indian bourgeoisie’s acceptance of the country’s partition into a predominantly Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan led immediately to communal conflict that cost up to one million lives. The dreadful legacy of partition is recorded in decades of war, violence and persistent mass poverty. In one form or another, the subordination of the working class to the bourgeois-led national movements produced political disaster in country after country. The key role was played by the Stalinist parties, which consistently advanced their class-collaborationist “two-stage” theory of struggle—first independence under the leadership of the bourgeoisie, and only later, at some unspecified point in the future, socialism—effectively blocking the struggle by the working class to establish its political hegemony in the mass anti-imperialist movement and take power.