The Crisis in Democratic Morality

The Crisis in Democratic Morality
In order to guarantee the triumph of their interests in big questions,
the ruling classes are constrained to make concessions on secondary
questions, naturally only so long as these concessions are reconciled
in the bookkeeping. During the epoch of capitalistic upsurge
especially in the last few decades before the World War these
concessions, at least in relation to the top layers of the
proletariat, were of a completely genuine nature.
Industry at that time expanded almost uninterruptedly. The prosperity
of the civilized nations, partially, too, that of the toiling masses
increased. Democracy appeared solid. Workers’ organizations grew. At
the same time reformist tendencies deepened. The relations between the
classes softened, at least outwardly. Thus certain elementary moral
precepts in social relations were established along with the norms of
democracy and the habits of class collaboration. The impression was
created of an ever freer, more just, and more humane society. The
rising line of progress seemed infinite to “common sense.’

Instead, however, war broke out with a train of convulsions, crises,
catastrophes, epidemics, and bestiality. The economic life of mankind
landed in an impasse. The class antagonisms became sharp and naked.
The safety valves of democracy began to explode one after the other.
The elementary moral precepts seemed even more fragile than the
democratic institutions and reformist illusions. Mendacity, slander,
bribery, venality, coercion, murder grew to unprecedented dimensions.
To a stunned simpleton all these vexations seem a temporary result of
war. Actually they are manifestations of imperialist decline. The
decay of capitalism denotes the decay of contemporary society with its
right and its morals.

The “synthesis” of imperialist turpitude is fascism directly begotten
of the bankruptcy of bourgeois democracy before the problems of the
imperialist epoch. The shoots of fascism now grow rapidly in all
democracies.

Let us note in justice that the most sincere and at the same time the
most limited petty bourgeois moralists still live even today in the
idealized memories of yesterday and hope for its return. They do not
understand that morality is a function of the class struggle; that
democratic morality corresponds to the epoch of liberal and
progressive capitalism; that the sharpening of the class struggle in
passing through its latest phase definitively and irrevocably
destroyed this morality; that in its place came the morality of
fascism on one side, on the other the morality of proletarian
revolution. There can be no middle ground.

Leon Trotsky—“Their morals and ours” 1938.

In the period of crisis the hegemony of the United States will operate
more completely, more openly, and more ruthlessly than in the period
of boom. The United States will seek to overcome and extricate herself
from her difficulties and maladies primarily at the expense of Europe,
regardless of whether this occurs in Asia, Canada, South America,
Australia, or Europe itself, or whether this takes place peacefully or
through war.

We must clearly understand that if the first period of American
intervention had the effect of stabilization and pacification on
Europe, which to a considerable extent still remains in force today,
and may even recur episodically and become stronger (particularly in
the event of new defeats of the proletariat), the general line of
American policy, particularly in time of its own economic difficulties
and crisis, will engender the deepest convulsions in Europe as well as
over the entire world.

Leon Trotsky—“The Third International after Lenin” 1928

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