Our principles stood the test¶
Core Argument¶
The chapter argues that the Second World War was not an unforeseeable catastrophe but the predictable outcome of imperialism’s reactionary character, a thesis first elaborated by Lenin and Trotsky after 1914–1918. Imperialism, having ceased to be a progressive force, had become a fetter on productive, social, and cultural development. Lenin and Trotsky demonstrated that capitalist national boundaries would inevitably generate a new world war unless the working class overthrew capitalism and unified Europe on socialist foundations. The failure to achieve this unification was not accidental: it resulted directly from the treachery of social democratic and Stalinist leaderships, who controlled the mass organisations capable of defeating reaction. In Germany, they capitulated to Nazism without a fight; in France and Spain, the Popular Front policy of coalition with the bourgeoisie betrayed the revolution. This opened the door to the Nazis’ reactionary unification of Europe through enslavement, the so-called “new order.”
The chapter situates the Fourth International as the sole inheritor of Bolshevik revolutionary traditions after the rise of nationalist revisionism under Stalin’s “socialism in one country.” Against both Stalinists and reformists, the Fourth International warned that neither the League of Nations nor any “peace blocs” could prevent imperialist war; only proletarian revolution could halt the coming bloodbath and imperialist intervention against the Soviet Union. The Trotskyists pledged defence of the Soviet Union alongside principled opposition to the war in all capitalist countries, refusing support to any ruling-class government or its war effort. The class struggle, they insisted, remains the motor of progress in wartime as in peacetime.
The polemical thrust is directed squarely at the social democrats, Labourites, and Stalinists who, at the outbreak of war, allied themselves with their own imperialist rulers—whether fascist or democratic. By contrast, the Trotskyists continued the revolutionary struggle, confident that imperialist war would give way to proletarian revolution as workers’ enthusiasm surged. Four years of war, the chapter asserts, have tested and confirmed the Marxist analysis. The Workers’ International League reaffirms these principles unchanged: the task is to assimilate the Marxist method and translate the ideas of the Fourth International into action in the upheavals to come.