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From Socialist Appeal, Vol. 4 No. 52, 28 December 1940, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
The fateful year of 1940 draws to a close. Amid all the bleating about Xmas goodwill and peace on earth, the carnage goes on. The coming year can only witness its extension to even broader fronts, a deepening of the horrors, an unimaginable increase of the tension, the suffering, the mass privation engendered by the world war of the bosses.
The past twelve months have witnessed volcanic changes in the political map of Europe. Moribund bourgeois democracy went down in Norway, Holland, Belgium, and finally in proud France, where it was cradled. Totalitarian Germany became master of the continent and came to grips with England for mastery of the world. England itself shed its democratic fig-leaf and is girding all its strength for the test that the coming year must bring. And even England’s leaders admit that afterward, win or lose, things can never return to their old grooves.
The capitalist system has long been incapable of providing adequately for society’s needs. The first world war of 25 years ago first exposed the cancers that were already then destroying it. That conflict brought the crisis of society to a time of great decision: this society would either be permitted to live onto rot from within and to kill in its agony all the myriad organisms dependent, upon it – or else it would be thrust away once and for all and a new society created better fitted to the means of production and the human needs of the modern world.
The great movement of proletarian insurrection that rose out of the ruins of 1914–18 represented the tremendous effort made by the submerged masses of the world to make the change cleanly and swiftly. Everywhere but in Russia, they failed. The workers lacked the revolutionary parties capable of leading to victory. The socialists and other fakers who led them were concerned not with building a new power of the workers but with preserving the power of the bosses. For these crimes and failures, isolated workers’ Russia had to pay by passing into the control of the Bonapartist clique of Stalin. The capitalist world retched and writhed on into a new world conflict.
This war is encompassing the destruction of the old political system of capitalism as we have known it for three centuries. The new totalitarianism is the harbinger of a new political system for the capitalist order, a system based upon contracted production and reduction of the masses to unrelieved slavery. And in this precess, millions must die and suffer and starve.
The old way is gone. The great question is still before us: Who shall usher it out? Who shall build the new world and what kind of a world should that be? We say there is still time for the workers of the world to take into THEIR hands the business of re-making the world. We say there is still time to check the onward rush toward a new form of capitalist barbarism. We say there is still time to put the world on the rails toward a new socialist order, an order of new realization for all men and women.
The Fourth International stands for this future and none other. In lands already engulfed by war or about to be, its partisans fight on toward this goal. To them, this end of the year of 1940, we send our fraternal salute.
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