This chapter from the book The Heritage We Defend reviews the discussions within the Fourth International about the nature of the Yugoslav revolution and the political and sociological characterization of the deformed workers states that were established across Eastern Europe after World War II. The book was written in 1987, just two years before the collapse of these regimes.

This report was given to the Fourth National Congress of the Workers League, held February 17–19, 1989 in Detroit. It gave a Marxist assessment of the first stages of the breakup of the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe, examining the dangers facing the working class of capitalist restoration and the responsibility of the International Committee to raise the consciousness of the working class and make it aware of Its historic tasks.

This report was given by David North to a membership meeting of the Workers' League (predecessor of the Socialist Equality Party in the US), held in Detroit on January 6, 1990. It analyzed the relationship between the breakup of the Stalinist regimes and the crisis of world capitalism.

This book traces the historical and social origins, the international context and the unfolding of the struggle of the Polish working class in 1980–81. It also analyzes the political forces at work in the mass Solidarity movement, as well as the intervention of the Pabloites in Poland, aimed at blocking this movement from assuming an independent, socialist character. 

In November 1989, mass demonstrations erupted against the hated Stalinist bureaucrats in Czechoslovakia. The collapse of the Stalinist regime of Milos Jakes brought to power an unstable alliance of the Stalinist bureaucracy with right-wing petty-bourgeois political groups attempting to restore capitalism.

This statement was adopted by the Bund Sozialistischer Arbeiter, then the German section of the International Committee of the Fourth International, at a special conference on January 26, 1990. It elaborated the political orientation of the Trotskyist movement to the events in East Germany.

This statement by the Bund Sozialistischer Arbeiter, predecessor of the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei, was published on October 21, 1990. The unification of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) with the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) on October 3, 1990 marked an end to an important chapter in the history of the German and international working class. It required the drawing of a political balance sheet, not only of the last 12 months, but of a whole historical period.

In response to the BSA’s intervention among workers and young people in East Germany, Ernest Mandel, a leader of the Pabloite United Secretariat, denounced the BSA on German public television.

This statement was published by the German section of the ICFI, the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei, on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of German reunification. It draws a balance sheet of the devastating results of capitalist restoration and reviews the intervention of the ICFI in the crisis of Stalinism three decades ago.