 So I want to start with a conversation that Stalin had with an American journalist, a guy called Roy Howard, back in March 1936. I'm just going to read out, you know, what was said. The conversation kind of turned towards Soviet foreign policy. And this guy, Roy Howard asked, has the Soviet Union to any degree abandoned its plans and intentions for bringing about world revolution? Stalin replies, we never had such plans and intentions. Howard was a bit perplexed by this. He was like, you appreciate no doubt, Mr. Stalin, that much of the world has long entertained a very different impression. Stalin replies, this is the product of a misunderstanding. Howard says, a tragic misunderstanding. And Stalin replies, no, a comical one, or perhaps tragicomic. So, you know, we see right here that the Soviet Union has went from a stronghold of the international working class and a beacon for world revolution to a state led by narrow nationalists and great Russian chauvinists portraying revolutions every turn. And understanding why and how this took place is the task of this discussion. I think we should start with asking ourselves, why Marxists are internationalists in the first place. Now as Marxists, we believe that the fight for communism is international or it is nothing. And this isn't due to some, you know, romanticism or sentimentalism or a vague sense of solidarity, nor is it to do with the fact that we just, you know, love togetherness and diversity and so on. We are scientific socialists. We look at the developments that have already taken place under capitalism. Now, as Trotsky pointed out, in the era of imperialism, the two biggest barriers to the development of the productive forces are, can anyone guess, private property and the nation state. Excellent. Yeah, you'll do well in the quiz tonight, I'm sure. You know, the nation state is a barrier to the development of the productive forces and even the capitalists themselves are aware that the question that this poses, they try but ultimately fail to overcome these barriers through international trading and finance organizations like the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and so on and trading blocks like the EU. And under capitalism, a world market arises, which sucks every country into its vortex. A division of labor occurs on a world stage. Nations become linked together through trade and finance and you have supply chains that span across countries and even continents. And the imperialists vie for markets and spheres of influence, leading to bloody wars like World War I and World War II and so on, which have often plunged the world into a blood blast, sacrificing millions of workers and oppressed peoples in the process. And through all of this, all of this creation of a world market and world capitalism, a world working class is created as well with common interests, which must be fought for collectively. And the second international as well understood this. They understood that even actually for basic demands, like the eight hour working day, an international struggle is necessary. Hence why we have International Working Day, which was set up by the second international. And if that's the case for basic demands under capitalism, then internationalism is even more necessary in the task of establishing a new socialist society, which is a much greater task. So here we can see that internationalism is a part of the scientific program of Marxism. And it's not just an optional extra as some people treat it. And this is precisely why Marxists have always fought to establish international organizations from the first international through to the communist international and beyond in our own organization, the IMT. So next I want to move on to the Russian revolution and what the Russian revolution signifies. And instead of the socialist revolution commencing in the advanced capitalist countries like Britain and Germany, as Marx and Engels had anticipated, what we saw was that the chain of imperialism broke at its weakest link and actually quite a backwards country on the periphery of Europe. Now the Russian empire was an extremely backwards country. Despite having some pockets of quite advanced industry, it was very much a peasant based agrarian economy, where the majority of production had taken place in the same primitive ways as it had done for centuries essentially. The tasks of capitalist development had not been achieved and the cultural level was very low. You know, the overwhelming majority of the population were illiterate, for example. Now clearly Russia could not achieve socialism by itself. And this was something that was agreed upon by every single tendency within the Russian social democracy from even the most right-wing Mensheviks all the way through to the Bolsheviks. In fact, Russian Marxism itself was born out of a struggle against the Narodniks and their idea that Russia could just simply grow over to socialism by itself. This is where Russian Marxism was born essentially. And from 1905 onwards, Lenin understood that even a democratic regime led by the workers and the peasants, let alone a dictatorship of the proletariat and a socialist regime, could not survive without the aid of the working class in Europe and a socialist revolution in Europe. Now Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution, which he began to put forward in the aftermath of the 1905 revolution, understood this process most clearly. He said that upon taking power, the working class must immediately play a leading role in forging a new society. And it must begin the tasks of transforming society along socialist lines. By, for example, nationalizing the banks and industry and taking steps to plan production and spreading the revolution internationally as well. And Lenin and Trotsky were, you know, they both understood that the Russian revolution could only be viewed as the firing shot of an international revolution, a beacon to the workers of Europe. And I will just say it as an aside that while Lenin and Trotsky did have slightly differing views up until 1917 on the question of permanent revolution and the tasks after the revolution, through the experience of 1917, Lenin came over to the position of Trotsky and they were firmly united on that. And that is, you know, proven by countless quotations from Lenin himself. I just wanted to make that very clear because Stalinists will often say the otherwise as we'll get on to. But this theory of permanent revolution was proven in practice by the experience of the October Revolution. You know, the workers seized power and they didn't institute capitalism. They immediately nationalized the commanding heights of the economy, instituted workers control, and so on. And, you know, 21 foreign armies invaded to crush the workers state and Russia was cut off from foreign trade through embargoes and so on. So you can see that, you know, the revolution from the get-go had the question of internationalism placed upon it, you know, from day one essentially. So the Bolsheviks therefore set up the communist international, you know, to accelerate the formation of mass communist parties ready to take power immediately. That was their perspective of the immediate seizure of power in the revolutionary wave that followed the end of World War One. This was dictated by, you know, the need to defend the Russian Revolution and to break its isolation. This was a life and death question for the Russian Revolution and the young workers state. And Lenin even said that without this internationalist policy, without creating the common turn and fermenting revolution abroad, the Russian Revolution would be reduced to an adventure. That's quite a, you know, a strong statement. And this is proven by countless other quotations from Lenin himself. He said in March 1918, so soon after they'd, you know, took power, he said that without a revolution in Germany, we shall perish. World imperialism cannot live side by side with a victorious, advancing socialist revolution. A month later, he said almost the same thing. We will perish if we are unable to hold out until we meet with the mighty support of the insurrectionary workers of other countries. Now the young workers state was in fact able to hold out, you know, and defeat the armies of intervention and stabilize itself. Importantly, with the assistance of the workers in Europe who, you know, campaigned to force the imperialists to withdraw. In fact, there were mutinies of the British and French soldiers who were invading Russia. And that was all part of the pressure of the working class upon the imperialists. But even when this small breathing space, this small equilibrium was won. Lenin said at the Third Congress of the common turn in 1921, that this equilibrium was extremely precarious and unstable and could not exist for any great length of time. And I'm sure comrades have heard, you know, that Lenin went so far as to say that he would sacrifice the Russian revolution in order to gain the victory of the German revolution. Such was his internationalism, right? This shows the unwavering internationalism of the Bolsheviks their willingness to subjugate the part to the whole and to take a long view of history above what was immediately, you know, quote-unquote pragmatic. And this view was absolutely consensus among all of the Bolsheviks, up until 1924, the likes of Bakharin, as Novyev, Kamenev, and even Stalin as well actually was, you know, he agreed with this. For example, in 1924, following Lenin's death, Stalin published a short pamphlet called Foundations of Leninism, which I've read. And I wouldn't recommend it, but also I would recommend it to get an idea of just how low Stalin's political level was. But anyway, he says, point blank, this is like a smoking gun right here, can the final victory of socialism in one country be attained without the joint efforts of the proletariat of several countries? No, this is impossible. But this was revised a mere few months later, a new addition was brought out, and the exact opposite was asserted that socialism in one country was in fact possible. And no explanation was really given for this whatsoever. So you might ask yourself, you know, how did Stalin manage to achieve this feat of theoretical innovation one, you know, bright morning in 1924? But I think to understand this, it's important to remind ourselves of the context in which this took place in the years following the Russian Revolution. Now, as I mentioned, after 1917, and inspired by the example of the Russian Revolution, there was a wave of revolutionary struggles across Europe in places like Germany, Bavaria, there was a worker's state right there in Hungary in 1919, they managed to set up a Soviet Republic, which was quite short lived. And Italy as well, you had, you know, real mass revolutionary movement, which could have taken power in Britain, too, there was, you know, intense class struggle. But all of these revolutions, unfortunately, failed to seize power because of the lack of a mature Marxist leadership. And, you know, as we discussed in the, I think it was the previous session on the German Revolution, the German Revolution of 1923 failed due to the vacillation and the hesitation of the leadership of the German Communist Party under the guidance of people like Zanov, the urban Stalin, who were very conservative in their outlook and, you know, weren't really true, you know, didn't have a true grasp of the Marxist method, I would say. And this, the failure of this revolution kind of signaled the end of this revolutionary wave. And the USSR kind of realized that from this point on, they were kind of, you know, isolated for at least for the time being. So, yeah, the USSR was left isolated. It survived the civil war by the skin of its teeth. But its industry was laid to waste. The masses were exhausted by years and years of struggle. And they began to receive from politics. The Soviets began to be less attended and so on. People became a bit demoralized and people had to work long hours and they couldn't, therefore, participate in the governance of the economy and politics and so on. And in this context, the bureaucrats and the ex-Zarist functionaries who had weaseled their way into the state apparatus began to feel their strength. They began to go into the offensive. They wanted to defend the privileges and, you know, the positions that they had won on the back of the revolution. And around this time, there was a new policy carried out called the New Economic Policy, which was carried out to stabilize the economic situation in Russia. And this basically allowed for, you know, private markets to function under the strict guidance of the workers' state, under the strict limitations of the workers' state. But inadvertently, this did produce a small layer of small capitalists, net men, Lenin called them. I've always found that quite funny, the speculators and black marketeers and so on. And of course, rich peasants, Kulaks, who, you know, made quite a lot of money on the back of this policy. And the bureaucracy based themselves upon this petty bourgeois layer, this reactionary layer, who were chafing against the planned economy and they wanted to undermine it. And Lenin and Trotsky were aware of this growing bureaucratic danger and did begin a struggle against it, actually. I think there's some books in the well-read tent that deal with this question, Lenin's Fight Against the Bureaucracy. But when Lenin died in 1924, an accident does play a role here, of course, a power struggle opened up and the bureaucracy sort of came out of the shadows, so to speak, and flexed its muscles. And it was Stalin who placed himself at the head of this nascent bureaucracy that was feeling its strength. So the theory of socialism in one country suited the mood of the bureaucracy, who wanted plain sailing and an easy, comfortable existence and weren't interested in the storm and the struggle of revolution, of world revolution. And I think this layer in Soviet society can very easily be compared and contrasted with the reformist layer of bureaucracy in capitalist countries who also don't want to rock the boat too much. You can quite easily, I think, think of the Stalinist bureaucracy like, you know, a trade union bureaucracy but in power, essentially. And, you know, they too were steeped in empiricism, in gradualism, and narrow nationalism as well, as is the case with bureaucrats of all stripes. They saw themselves above all as realists and pragmatists. Now, a white Russian emigre called Petrov recalls the mood of this new layer of Soviet administrators at the time. One of them said, you know, responding to the question of whether, you know, we can build socialism in one country or not. He said, how is it possible that we in our own country cannot contrive to build a happy life? If Marx has it otherwise, that means that we are no Marxists. We are Russian Bolsheviks. That's what. So you can see the nationalism right there kind of creeping in. So as we can see, the theory of socialism in one country didn't produce this new turn in the Soviet Union. On the contrary, Stalin and his clique sort of merely give form to this already existing conservative mood. They tried to justify it to give it a pseudo-Marxist coating and to sort of present it as a new innovation in front of the eyes of the party masses and so on. And they didn't really believe in what they were saying as well. They were just putting forward any idea that would justify their opportunism. And as an aside, this is characteristic, I think, of all Stalinist quote unquote theory. It doesn't start with a scientific analysis of the real world, of events like Marxism does. Stalinist theory is always an attempt after the fact to justify the latest zigzag and the latest twists and turns of the bureaucracy. And therefore it's important not to get too sucked into the details of this or that theory and argument, but to look at the fundamental social interests which condition and drive these twists and turns. Now, I think the arguments that were put forward by the proponents of socialism among country are definitely worth looking at, despite what I've just said, because through that we can understand how these ideas stand in complete contradiction to genuine Marxism. So Stalin teamed up with a guy called Bakharin who at this point was on the right wing of the party. He was on the ultra-left of the party and then he went all the way to the right wing. He was a real, yeah, all over the place basically. And he was the most fervent defender of the new economic policy as well. And Bakharin and Stalin put forward this idea that the Soviet Union could build socialism on a pulpit technical basis. So a pulper being a very poor person like a beggar or something like that essentially. What they're saying is that socialism can be built on the basis of scarcity of economic scarcity. And Stalin also complained that there is no need to inject the international factor into our socialist development. This is a far cry from the internationalism that we saw of Lenin and Trotsky. In 1926, in Pravda, Stalin wrote that the contradictions of Soviet society can be entirely overcome on the basis of the inner forces of our revolution. And to justify this madness, this turn in their policy, this leading clique, shamelessly, first of all, waged a war against Trotsky and Trotskyism. This is when Trotskyism was invented as a word, actually, as an obvious I think it was. But they also shamelessly cherry-picked and doctored isolated quotes from Lenin to try and justify this. They chose, I think, an unfinished text called On Cooperation, which is very good, actually. I would recommend reading it. But the point is that it wasn't a finished work. Many parts of it were in note format. Lenin didn't get time to finish it because unfortunately he died. But they seized upon isolated quotations in this text. They republished it and say, look, right there, Lenin says that socialism can be built in one country. That was never what Lenin meant. Lenin was just writing down notes. And moreover, this goes against the entire mountain of quotations and theories put forward by not just Lenin, but Marx, Engels, and everyone who agreed that socialism could not be built in one country. And what was essentially being put forward here by Stalin and Bakharin in the right wing was the idea of an autarchy. In other words, an economy entirely cut off from the rest of the world market and isolated bastion of socialism. Of course, it wasn't actually socialism at all. And this is a totally un-Marxist theory. Marxists have always understood that socialism must be built upon the most advanced productive forces available. It must be more advanced than even the most advanced capitalism is. Even an advanced capitalist country today, like the USA for example, which is replete with natural resources in a high technical level, could not achieve socialism in isolation due to its reliance upon the world market for importing the materials which it relies upon, the technology that it lacks. I mean, there are certain materials like, you know, rare earth elements, which are only present in certain parts of the world, which are essential to production, things like coltan and lithium and so on, and zinc. And yeah, and to export what it produces too much of as well. And we can see this with the crisis that was caused across loads of different industries back in 2020 when there was an acute shortage of microchips. Now, microchips are currently only produced in a handful of factories across the world, but they're vital to production. In fact, one factory in Taiwan is responsible for over half of the world's microchips. That gives you a taste of how interlinked the world market is, and how specialized it is as well, and how much different nations and industries rely upon one another. So the question we must ask ourselves is how can a more advanced social system be built on a lower technical basis? So Marxists progress really can only be understood as the development of the productive forces and little else more, really. How can a socialist society flourish without access to the world market? In this sense, otaki represents a step backwards from capitalism, actually. As Marx understudies said in the critique of the Gotha program, I think, on the basis of scarcity, all of the old crap will return inequality, privilege, oppression, abuse of state power, all of these things will rear their head once again, as they did in the Soviet Union. Socialism requires material superabundance, hopefully that is clear to everyone here. Now, at the time, Trotsky's left opposition were putting forward the idea that rapid industrialization was required to defend the Soviet Union. And this was entirely in line with what Lenin said at the 11th party congress, which was his last appearance before the party. He said that after the civil war, the USSR would face perhaps an even greater task. He said, this is a test which will be put to us by the Russian market and the international market, to which we are subordinate and from which we cannot escape. So Lenin's saying right there, we can't escape from the world market. We need to participate in it as a part of it. And as the left opposition pointed out as well, a forward tractor, which is cheaper and better than the Soviet equivalent, is just as dangerous as the threat of military intervention as it allows the pressure of capitalism to seep into the USSR and it will undermine the Soviet economy. The left opposition pointed out that actually the threat of cheap, well-made foreign commodities is actually even worse than the threat of military intervention because military intervention, it can only be used a few times and it requires the mobilization of mass opinion in the imperialist countries. But the pressure of the world market is brought down to back constantly upon the Soviet economy. But in response to this obvious need for rapid industrialization and raising the productive forces to defend the Soviet Union, Stalin and Bakharin basically said, don't worry about it, there's no rush. They actually mocked the left opposition for saying that we need to build hydroelectric dams and factories and so on. They were saying, let's just take it easy, let's just let all these rich peasants just continue farming the way they did and we'll just gradually build the economy up. There's no rush whatsoever. They put forward the idea that socialism can be built at a tortoise tempo. That's the words that Bakharin used and this is an idea that it equally is detached from reality as the ideas of autarchy are as well. The rate of development can't be arbitrarily decided by bureaucrats in the Kremlin as if there's just one big dial that they can just twist that goes from fast to slow to tortoise and then back up again. That's how a bureaucrat thinks by the way. They think that they can just control everything but obviously there's an objective logic to this. The rate of development was forced upon the USSR by the pressing need to compete with the rest of the capitalist world. So the Stalinists cooked up all sorts of lies and distortions in this time about what Trotsky stood for in this period and many of these are still repeated by the Stalinists to this day. They said, for example, that Trotsky underestimated the power of the USSR and thought that they should just basically give up essentially, show us over folks, let's just go home, we've tried, we failed, whatever. I hear that said quite a lot actually. It's a very kind of low-level interpretation, not what Trotsky said at all. Or at the same time, in complete contradiction to the other thing, they will say that Trotsky thought the only way forward was every country having a revolution at once. I'm sure everyone's heard of that before when people think of permanent revolution, right? Or they thought as well that Trotsky thought the USSR had to break its isolation by spreading the revolution by force at the end of a bayonet essentially. They're paying the Trotsky as this kind of red Napoleon because he was at the head of the Red Army and so on when of course actually it was Stalin who was the more perfect analogy with Napoleon, I would say. But all of these things are false, of course. They're complete distortions. This is what the left opposition actually put forward. They said that while helping the various communist parties around the world to seize power, the only way to protect the USSR was not hiding away from the world market but raising the productivity of the Soviet economy as fast as possible on the basis of the planned economy and with trade with the rest of the world. Now this completely disproves the idea, I think, that socialism in one country was pragmatic and realistic versus Trotsky's adventuristic and utopian theory of permanent revolution. In fact, the Stalinist was soon forced to adopt large parts of the left opposition's program. In the late 1920s, they abruptly ended the NEP and rapidly industrialized the country. This was done of course in a very bureaucratic, haphazard and very destructive way. But nonetheless, on the basis of letting the planned economy flourish relatively speaking, the potential of the Soviet Union was unleashed and was able to rival the United States in a very short space of time. But even this itself was not proof of the achievement of socialism as Stalin ridiculously proclaimed as early as 1935. And in fact, I think it was Khrushchev later on who claimed that we were like, you know, a few years away from communism, right? And this was at a time when, you know, you had, you know, imprisonment and execution even just for basic economic crimes like embezzlement. Children were put in slave labor camps essentially and so on. This is their proof of socialism being achieved. Well, I want nothing to do with that. Thank you very much. Schesity very, very clearly still prevailed. The fruits of all of this development were not enjoyed equally, but were largely consumed by a swelling cast of bureaucrats who acted as parasites. And inequality was still very widespread, hence all of the oppression. Now a real socialist society which had actually achieved superabundance would allow complete political freedom because it would have demonstrated that its society was more advanced. People could agitate against it if they wanted to. No one's going to listen to them. Imagine if someone just came around today and just started saying, we should return to feudalism. They'd be laughed out of the shop, wouldn't they, right? So, you know, obviously socialism would mean much, much greater independence than we've seen not just in the USSR, but in even the most kind of liberal capitalist countries. You know, as Trotsky explained, it would take the removal of the bureaucracy and a full workers democracy which would break the isolation of the revolution for the full potential of the planned economy to be achieved and for the Soviet Union to grow over into socialism. Now, when Stalin set out with this new theory of socialism in one country, he had no idea where it would lead. He was proceeding on a very empirical basis one step at a time, as all bureaucrats do, I think. But socialism in one country carried with it its own objective logic. And in practice, this policy led to the gradual transformation of the communist international from a party of world revolution into a tool of the Kremlin foreign policy essentially. Now, we've already mentioned in the previous session the defeat of the 1923 German revolution and how this kind of strengthened the bureaucracy. This experience was repeated once again, I think, in 1926 in Britain and 1925-27 in China. Now, in both cases, the failure of these revolutionary struggles were down to the mystics flowing from the opportunist policies of the Stalinist leaders. In China, a mass movement of millions of workers and peasants had erupted. Workers had risen up in a number of cities and actually seized power essentially. The peasants were seizing land, as they had done in Russia just a few short years before. And the Communist Party of China was the only workers party. It had a dominating influence among the working class. And it could have easily taken power with the correct leadership. And yet despite the strength of the Chinese Communist Party, Stalin scandalously abandoned the Leninist policy of class independence by calling for the CCP to effectively dissolve itself into the Kuomintang, which was the party of the bourgeoisie. He even gave, as Ben mentioned yesterday, I think, he even gave Chiang Kai-shek, a capitalist general, a place on the Executive Committee of the Communist International, as an honorary member. This is absolutely ridiculous. And mere months after that, Chiang Kai-shek massacred the Chinese working class in cold blood. He executed, enslaved, and imprisoned, you know, millions of people actually, in fact. And this set the classroom back, you know, many years actually in China. Similarly, in Britain, a general strike erupted, which ground the country to a halt. There was workers control in many cases in the big cities. And again, the British Communist Party, though it was quite small and inexperienced, it had quite a large influence over the trade union movement through the national minority movement, which was their kind of faction, their platform. The Communist International should and could have encouraged the British Communist Party to put forward a revolutionary line and warn its followers of the inevitable betrayals of reformism. But instead, the Communist International leaders cosied up to the reformist trade union leaders in Britain, sowing illusions in them, essentially, and handing them the authority of the Communist International. So when the reformist inevitably did betray, which Trotsky warned, the rank-and-file communists were demoralized, they were disoriented. And the Communist Party couldn't take the struggle further. And this revolutionary potential was completely squandered. And scandalously, the Soviet leaders of the Communist International, they didn't even break off their alliance with the scab reformist leaders for a whole year after their betrayals. The truth is, at this point, the Stalinists had abandoned all intentions of fermenting socialist revolution abroad. They started putting forward the idea of, instead of overthrowing the imperialists, of neutralizing the threat of the imperialists, so they're diluting that down a little bit. Not a little bit, quite a lot actually. And the logical conclusion of this is to abandon revolution together in favor of backroom deals and maneuvers above the heads of the working class, with the reformists on one hand, bourgeois governments on the other, whom the Stalinists in reality had more in common with than the working class. In effect, the policy of socialism in one country became the policy of socialism in no country at all. Now, Stalin didn't set out to betray the working class, but with each of these successive defeats abroad, the bureaucracy felt themselves increasingly strengthened at home because of the demoralization that was produced among the Soviet working class. Now, for example, in 1933, the Nazis came to power without a single shot being fired, despite there being 6 million communists in Germany, as well as 8 million social democrats, and an influence over a far greater number of people as well. The common turn effectively failed to lift a finger to prevent the rise of Hitler, and they even failed to draw any lessons from this failure whatsoever. And at this point, Trotsky understood that the common turn was a stinking corpse, it was a rotting corpse, thank you. And there was no hope of saving it whatsoever. At this point, essentially, a qualitative transformation had taken place. And from this point on, the policy of the communist international can only be described as a conscious betrayal of the working class, and actively fighting on the side of counter-revolution. Now, there are far too many examples to go into, hopefully we can go into them in the discussion. But one example I would like to touch upon, because it was recently in the centre pages of the socialist appeal paper, is the Spanish Revolution. Now, without going into too much depth, in the Spanish Revolution, the Stalinists were literally the leaders of the counter-revolution. They supported the bourgeois government against the workers, and the workers had armed themselves and seized control in Catalonia. The Stalinists disarmed the workers' militias, they arrested hundreds of revolutionaries, and they reversed the policy of workers' control of industry, and the collectivisation that the peasants had carried out as well. So right there, you can see a counter-revolutionary role played by the Stalinists. Now, in the run-up to World War II, the Stalinists tried to very opportunistically balance themselves between the German imperialists, the Nazis in other words, on one hand, and the so-called democratic allies in the West, like the United States and Britain and so on. And this forced the Communist Party across Europe and elsewhere to change their line on the war, not once, but twice in some cases. They had a change between supporting their own bourgeois, to supporting an end to the war, and then back to supporting their own ruling class again as well. And this confused and demoralised a lot of people in the process. In Britain, for example, in the space of three years, the Communist Party put forward three different positions on World War II. And in the end, they fell in line with the British imperialists and actively sought a popular front with the liberals and the Tories and so on, and actually actively undermined strike action as well to support the war efforts, which was absolutely outrageous. And Trotsky summarises this in the following quote. The fundamental trait of Stalin's international policy in recent years has been this, that he trades in working-class movements, just as he trades in oil, manganese and other goods. In this statement, there is not one iota of exaggeration. He goes on. Stalin looks upon the sections of the common turn in various countries and upon the liberating struggles of oppressed nations as so much small change in deals with the imperialist powers. So much small change. That's the exact language, actually, that Lenin used when dealing with the imperialists in the period of the First World War, actually, which shows you just how much the Stalinists had generated at this point on an international stage. And yeah, this culminated in the Soviet Union essentially becoming a doormat for British and US imperialism. And as we said yesterday, Stalin unilaterally dissolved the Communist International in order to appease his British and American allies. Now, while the Communist parties came more and more under the control of the Soviet bureaucracy, there was another side to this process as well. It was quite a dialectical development, which actually saw the Communist parties gain greater independence, actually, from Moscow. They drifted further away from Moscow. Now, Trotsky perfectly predicted this as early as 1928, actually. He said that because of the theory of socialism in one country, the backbone of internationalism has been broken. He said, it will be the beginning of the disintegration of the common turn along the lines of social patriotism. So I'll give an example of this. In France, the Communist Party, I would say, in its early years had a very good track record on the colonial questions. Throughout the 1920s, its paper carried articles on the colonial struggles taking place in Algeria, Indochina, and so on. And it also took a correct stance on the national liberation struggle taken by the Moroccans against French and Spanish rule as well. So it had a good track record on that. But by the 1930s, when the Stalinist theory of socialism in one country had basically triumphed in the international, the French Communist Party scandalously came out in opposition to the national liberation struggle in Algeria. They said that a strong France was needed to fight fascism in Germany. It gets even worse than this. Now, after the war, its leader, Maurice Thauré, he said that he had nothing against French flyings remaining in Vietnam. Yeah, I know. And actually, the Communist Party leaders revised Marxism altogether by saying that the liberation of the colonies could only take place through the liberation of France itself. And for that reason, there should remain links between France and its colonies. Actually, they put forward, I think, the idea of a French union between Algeria and France essentially, which is a completely opportunist policy. And in Britain, of course, during World War II, we have the heinous spectacle of British communists marching with the Union Jack and singing God Save the Queen so as to appear as respectable true patriots to the liberals and the Tories that they were in popular France with. Now, we laugh at the Stalinists today for flying the Saint George's flag and calling for socialist patriotism and so on. But these ideas didn't fall from the sky. They aren't just mistakes. Thank you. They are a direct consequence of the Stalinism and the theory of socialism in one country. So as can be seen, the reformist, class-collaborationist policies of the Communist parties went hand in hand with their degeneration along the lines of social patriotism, reformism and nationalism go hand in hand. After all, if you've given up any perspective of internationalism and of world revolution, your main strategy then becomes making alliances with the capitalists and getting positions in national parliaments as well. So naturally, this is going to lead to nationalism and patriotism coming to the four, just as it did with the reformists in the second international as well. Because the ability to win gradual reforms depends on the strength of the national economy and the nation state itself, and so it becomes your business to defend the nation. And this gave rise to an array of national programs that were produced by the Communist parties. Suddenly there was no longer any international perspectives as we have or international programs, but a British wrote the socialism or a Polish wrote the socialism and so on. And in fact, the British Communist Party today still has this as its program. And internationalism is completely sidelined in their perspectives in place of forming an anti-monopoly alliance of all progressive forces, whatever that means. Now, this national reformist generation of the Communist parties eventually led to the Kremlin losing control over the Communist parties altogether. The effects of the Prague Spring in 1968, the rise of Maoism as well on a world stage, essentially led to the disintegration of this kind of Stalinist camp altogether. This also gave rise to the trend of Euro-Communism as well. From the late 1960s onwards, the Communist parties gravitated more and more in the direction of their own ruling classes and slavishly cringed before bourgeois public opinion, just as they had slavishly followed every single whim of the Kremlin bureaucracy before that. I'll give one example. The Italian Communist Party entered a coalition with the Christian Democrats, the main ruling class party at the time. They supported NATO against the Warsaw Pact, so they essentially supported NATO against the Soviet Union, which is incredible. And it eventually dissolved itself and became the Democratic Party, which is now actually one of the main capitalist parties in Italy. So just as Trotsky predicted, the common turn disintegrated along national reformist lines, and all of this can be traced back to the revision of Marxism, that was socialism in one country. Understanding this is vital to understanding the nature of Stalinism to this day. And there's more I'd like to say on that, but I haven't got enough time. I'm going to conclude just now. The theory of socialism in one country was the jumping off point for the Soviet bureaucracy, defending their distinct interests at home and abroad. This anti-Marxist theory was the firing shot in a war against Trotsky, the left opposition and Bolshevism itself. The narrow nationalism of the Soviet bureaucracy left a string of betrayals and defeats in its wake. But the bureaucratic rule of the Soviet Union ultimately offered no path forward. The USSR eventually collapsed under the weight of international isolation and the shortcomings of bureaucratic control. And one by one, China, Vietnam, Laos and maybe soon Cuba as well, which is going down the path of capitalist restoration, they've all restored capitalism. So the answer to the question of whether we can have socialism in one country can be found in the simple fact that there is not a single socialist country left to be found on this planet today, or even just a deformed working state for that matter. The Stalinists have failed to absorb any of the lessons of this experience. They can't give any explanation as to why any of this has happened. Their programs are still tainted with this same national narrowness. But today, the productive forces are even more interlinked than before. The world working class has never been bigger and more integrated. The reactionary fetter of the nation state is becoming ever, ever clearer as trade wars and fortified borders and interimperialist conflicts hold society back and cause untold chaos and destruction. The need for internationalism is inherent in the situation. We understand that task of socialism can only be solved on a world scale. That's why we organize as an international and look towards the lessons of previous internationals as well as we're doing today at this weekend at the summer camp. That's why we call out all examples of social patriotism and chauvinism in the labour movement. And that's also why we put forward the demand for a socialist federation of Europe, of the Middle East and of Latin America as well as a stepping stone towards a world socialist federation and a communist brotherhood of mankind. So I will end with the timeless rallying cry of the communist manifesto, which I think reminds us of the burning need for internationalism. Workers of the world unite.