Resolution of the RCP Conference on the Nature of the Regimes in Europe¶
Core Argument¶
This chapter digest presents the core argument of the 1946 Resolution of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) Conference on the nature of post-war European regimes. The document’s central narrative thrust is that the bourgeois democratic governments established in Italy, France, Holland, Belgium, and elsewhere in Western Europe after the Second World War are not the product of a revived bourgeois revolution, but rather the unstable political form of a democratic counter-revolution. The Conference reaffirms Trotsky’s 1930 prognosis that where a proletarian revolution is betrayed or crushed before seizing power, the bourgeoisie may be compelled to reconstruct its rule on democratic-parliamentary bases, not as a conquest of the bourgeoisie but as a “pre-terminal foetus” of an insufficiently matured workers’ revolution.
The key claim is that the nature of a political regime is not a direct reflection of the economic base. Bourgeois democracy’s economic foundation disappeared decades ago, yet the regime lingers because its immediate determination comes from the course of the class struggle and the balance of forces between the bourgeoisie, petty bourgeoisie, and proletariat. The mass basis for fascism evaporated with the destruction of Hitler and Mussolini. The real power in the immediate post-war period rested with the social democratic and Stalinist parties, whose counter-revolutionary policies prevented the workers from taking power. Because the bourgeoisie had to rely on these agents to destroy the revolution, it could not do so through Bonapartist or fascist methods, but only through the forms of bourgeois democracy. The regimes are therefore characterised by the existence of independent workers’ organisations, trade unions, the right to strike, and elected parliamentary government, rather than absolute rule by decree.
The document draws heavily on the Marxist theory of the state and the concept of Bonapartism, defined as a military-police dictatorship where the state assumes a certain independence from all classes, acting as an “arbiter” when class forces are in relative equilibrium. The polemic is directed squarely against the social democrats and Stalinists, whose treachery paralysed the mass movement and gave the bourgeoisie a breathing space. The Conference warns that this democratic interlude cannot last. Economic crises and the further decline of capitalism will prepare the way for new Bonapartist or neo-fascist formations. The final alternative posed for the coming epoch is stark: either the victory of the socialist revolution or a neo-fascist reaction on an unprecedented scale. The task of the Fourth International is to pursue a flexible policy, defending and extending the democratic rights won by the working class as a necessary step toward mobilising the proletariat for the conquest of power.