1938-1978 Forty years of the Fourth International

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By 1933 Trotsky analysed that Stalinism had become a counter-revolutionary force.

On September 3, 1938, thirty delegates from eleven countries met near Paris in secret conference.

Their business was the founding of a new World Party of Socialist Revolution-the Fourth International.

The USA, Latin America, the USSR and several European countries were represented. Due to "conditions of distance, illegality and other adverse factors" several important areas of the world were unable to send delegates, including Spain in the throes of civil war, South Africa, Australia, Palestine and The Founding Conference was the fruit of fifteen years of struggle to defend the programme and perspectives of revolutionary Marxism.

Reactionary

In 1923 Leon Trotsky had formed the Left Opposition in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to fight the rising parasitic and degenerate state bureaucracy led by Stalin.

By 1933 it had become clear that the Stalinist bureaucrats had successfully transformed the parties of the Third (Communist) International into no more than agencies for the reactionary diplomacy of the bloated Kremlin clique.

The Communist Parties since that time have served only to paralyse the revolutionary will of the working class.

Up to 1933 the Left Oppositionists had attempted to reform the Communist Parties.

Their minds were changed not by the vile slanders and persecutions of the Stalinists but by a great historic event-the refusal of the German Communist Party to fight for working class unity against Nazism, and Hitler's consequent coming to power.

The fact that this monumental betrayal, conducted by the most powerful Communist Party in the world, found hardly an echo of protest within the ranks of the Communist International, proved conclusively that the vanguard of the working class once grouped in that movement had been stifled, demoralised and destroyed by Stalinism.

The tasks had changedthe struggle for the Fourth International had to begin.

Since Marx and Engels participated in founding the International Working Mens' Association (First International) in 1864, communists had based their perspective on the understanding that the international capitalist system could only be ended by the working class as an international class with an international programme and an international revolutionary party.

Impetus

Yet each International was built (and destroyed) under different historical conditions. The Third (Communist) International was constructed rapidly under the inspiring impetus of the successful Bolshevik revolution in Russia and the revolutionary upheavals following the First World War.

The situation in 1933 was very different. Just as Lenin had been thought mad by renegades when he proclaimed the need for a new International in 1914, so the partisans of the Fourth International had to begin the fight as tiny groups against massive odds.

In the document Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International (Transitional Programme), adopted at the Founding Conference it was explained that:

"The Fourth International has already arisen out of great events: the greatest defeats of the proletariat in history"

In fact by 1938 this was even more true than it had been in 1933 with the height of Stalinist police terror in the Soviet Union and the diversion of the revolutionary struggles of the working class in France and Spain into the Stalinist treachery of the Popular Front-the new name for class collaboration and abandonment of revolutionary struggle.

The last hours of peace were drawing to a close before the Second World War unleashed its horrors on the world.

Foundations

It was during such a period that the foundations of the Fourth International had been laid.

The Trotskyist movewarned the working class of ment analysed events, the betrayals of its leadership, and fought in practice to uphold at each point the banner of working class political independence.

At the same time it combined its intransigent adherence to principle with flexible tactics aimed at seizing every opportunity to group new forces around the slogan of the new The process of selecting these forces was long and painful. At each stage through a combination of theoretical discussion and practical work the revolutionary currents had to be separated from the centrists who talked against reformism and Stalinism while remaining incapable of taking up the revolutionary struggle necessary destroy them.

The young Trotskyist movement tested out an almost innumerable series of tendencies in this way.

For instance in February 1933 the International Left Opposition had arrived al the need to break off all collaboration with the Italian group Prometeo lec In 1940 Trotsk by Amadeo Bordiga becau of its hopeless sectari: positions.

Later in the same year step forward was taken wi the Declaration of Fou written by Trotsky, at signed by the Internation Left Opposition, German Socialist Worke

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SOCIALIST PRESS, Wednesdas & September, 1978 Page T The Fourth International declared all out war on Popular Frontism such as that in France (above) and Spain Party (SAP) and two Dutch organisations, the Revolutionary Socialist Party and Independent Socialist Party (OSP) which were later to fuse.

The Declaration outlined the need for the new International and the basic principles upon which it should be based-including total opposition to centrism.

Trotsky hoped that through common work these organisations could become a part of the new World Party.

A permanent commission of the four movements was established with the task of preparing a manifesto and theses as well as to "represent the undersigned organisations in the eyes of the whole world"

In fact the SAP proved an untrustworthy ally from the beginning. Along with the OSP it participated in the work of the so-called London Bureau-a loose federation of centrist parties including the British Independent Labour Party (ILP).

At the same time it refused to fuse with the German section of the Left Opposition and quickly deserted the work of the Fourth International altogether.

While Trotsky did not close his eyes to the London Bureau or take a sectarian attitude (he at one stage advised his British followers to enter the ILP, submit to its discipline and fight to win it over from within no quarter could be given to organisations which refused to take a clear position on the Fourth International.

Rich lessons for the revolutionary movement today can be found in Trotsky's struggle in the 1930s to find ways of overcoming the isolation of the vanguard and preparing the new International.

Heavy blow

The immense pressures generated by Stalinism and crisis-ridden imperialism frequently led to the defection and desertion of forces unable to assimilate the lessons and tasks of the period.

In Spain a heavy blow was struck when a relatively powerful section of the movement completed a record of vacillation on central political questions by forming a centrist blocthe POUM (Workers Party of Marxist Unification). murdered by Stalinist agents The POUM went on, under the leadership of one-time Trotskyists Nin and Andrade, to play a criminal role in the Spanish civil war, acting as the major obstacle to the building of the revolutionary party by posing as a revolutionary Marxist organisation while conducting a policy of silence on the betrayals of the leadership and giving support to the Popular Trotsky made many efforts to win back the best elements of the POUM to a correct policy-in fact observers from that movement were even invited to the Founding Conference of the Fourth Internationalbut at the same time waged an implacable struggle against it.

Heavy The POUM paid a heavy price for its centrism, many members, including Nin, being murdered by the Stalinists whose authority they had helped to boost.

It was significant that the POUM's right-wing opportunism had been preceded by spates of verbal ultraleftism.

The POUM leaders were among those who opposed the turn to entryism into social-democratic parties initiated in several countries from 1934 onwards.

This tactic, which scored successes in Belgium and the USA where the Socialist Party was destroyed as a serious force by the entry and subsequent departure of the Trotskyists, also created major possibilities for the French Trotskyist movement.

Invaluable

The aim again was to break the isolation of Trotskyism by forging links with, and working alongside the leftward moving centrist currents in the reformist mass parties.

The tactics used varied greatly from country to country depending upon the objective situation, but it was of universal significance that those who yelled loudest about 'capitulation' and believed that one some how would lose one's purity by entering a non-revolutionary party, were the quickest to capitulate in actuality to their own bourgeoisie and the bureaucracy when the time came in their own countries.

In short, by 1938 the young ranks of the Fourth International had an invaluable history of political struggle behind them.

The sections remained numerically small, the largest organisation being in America where successful work in the mass struggles of the working class had gathered a membership of some 2,500.

The Belgian movement was the largest in Europe with some 800.

The British section-the result of a fusion shortly before-numbered some 170 members.

But as the Transitional Programme stated:

"If our International be still weak in numbers, it is strong in doctrine, programme, tradition, in the incomparable tempering of its cadres"

Shadow

The Founding Conference took place under the shadow of a series of murders of leading Trotskyists-the response of the Stalinist GPU to Trotskyist exposure of the Moscow Trials.

Following the murders of Erwin Wolf, Trotsky's secretary, Leon Sedov, Trotsky's son, and Ignace Reiss who broke with the GPU and came over to Trotskyism, the Stalinists in July&1938 struck down Rudolph Klement who was responsible for organising the work of the Founding Conference.

In fact, as history was to reveal, one of the delegates at the Founding Conference itself, Etienne (Mark Zbrowski), was a Stalinist GPU agent.

Of those who had participated in the Declaration of Four only the International Communist League (the later name for the International Left Opposition) had remained loyal.

The defection of the SAP was supplemented by that of the Dutch movement under the leadership of Sneevliet (later martyred by the Nazis) who sided with the POUM's capitulation to the Popular Front.

The Fourth International passed a resolution entitled • Salute to our Living Martyrs and our Heroic Dead, which listed the many Trotskyists murdered and imprisoned by bourgeois and Stalinist regimes internationally.

The spirit in which such repressions were viewed was revolutionary through and through:

"Today's sacrifice tomornw's nissantes of triumph. The proletarian revolution, victorious under the banner of the Fourth International, will avenge the comrades who have fallen, and snatch from the prisons those who languish there"

questions As well as sending greetings to Trotsky, unable to personally attend the conference because of his forced exile in Mexico, and to the revolutionary fighters in the front lines of the Republican ranks in Spain, the conference occupied the main body of its time with the burning political questions facing the working class of the world in the wake of the awesome collapse of the Communist The Leninist position towards the coming World War was reaffirmed in a Manifesto which counterposed to imperialist slaughter the international brotherhood of toilers and the revolutionary struggle for power:

«The working class has no fatherland to defend except where it conquers and rules. No support to the warmakers and imperialist war—we say-but continuation of the class struggle in every situation and utilisation of the war crisis for the overthrow of capitalist rule, i.e., the overthrow of the war and of capitalism itself"

Confronted

In particular the social-patriotic myth that the war would be one against fascism' was confronted:

66 ... fascism cannot and will not be destroyed by the bayonets of French imperialism. Only the independent class action of the proletariat will put an end to the hideous rule of While devoting considerable attention to the problems of particular areas of the world-for example to the tasks of revolutionists in the war between colonially exploited China and imperialist Japan-and of certain Trotskyist sectionsin particular of the crisis-ridden French organisation -the main discussion naturally focussed upon the draft of the Transitional Experience The Programme, slightly amended by the Conference, brought together the whole experience of the struggle for Bolshevik parties in the working class from the Russian Revolution onwards.

As the official review of the conference pointed out the aim was not the adoption of a series of abstract formulae for purposes of discussion and propaganda:

"Where the Bolshevik. Leninists have been armed in the past mainly with a profound analysis of the present social order and, in general, with the knowledge of the principles and methods by which the new society may be attained, they are now additionally equipped with the indispensable programme of action which can enable them to defend not only the tomorrow of the proletariat but also its today.

The programme of transitional demands contains the guidelines for the day-to-day struggle. It is not merely the programme for the convinced revolutionary worker, but for the working class as a whole..."

Formulations

Conflicts of opinion existed on certain questions. The Polish delegates (in by no means their most important dispute with the majority) objected to the Programme's enthusiastic reception of the wave of sit-down strikes in many countries at the time, declaring them often to be nothing more than expressions of despair and "dumb protest" on the part of the workers.

Different formulations were favoured (with the American section presenting an amendment) on the exact attitude towards the question of regenerating the Soviet Union and building organs of workers' democracy-though only one delegate-Yvan Craipeauwas of the opinion that the class character of the USSR had changed and that the bureaucracy had become a new ruling class.

Finally the Transitional Programme was adopted with Craipeau alone voting against-it having been agreed that an editorial commission would be elected to make final stylistic and factual amendments to the document.

The closing section of the Transitional Programme in fact contained an argument which anticipated a central difference at the Founding Conference and challenged a view that had been raised by various centrist elements as an excuse for non-participation in the fight for the new International.

The Polish delegates, voicing the theories of Isaac Deutscher, objected to the creation of the Fourth International on the grounds that 'the Fourth was in no sense a mass organisation, and it would be folly to proclaim it till it was.

In fact a position similar to this-that it would be 'premature' to "proclaim' a new International-had been accepted by the movement in 1936 despite Trotsky's opposition.

By 1938 the overwhelming majority had come round to the view that having declared the Communist International dead, the task could be postponed no longer.

Deutscher The forces were small and weak. The repressions were massive. Reaction was ascendant. The tasks were immense.

At that level all the arguments and fears • of the opponents of "proclaiming' the International had a basis.

Depth of the crisis But a position that began from this alone left out completely the depth of the international crisis which would drive the working class forward seeking leadership.

Moreover it left out the practical revolutionary obligations of the Marxist movement.

"But has the time yet arrived to proclaim its creation? ... the scepties are not quieted down. The need of and it fights... Outside of these cadres there does not exist a single revolutionary current on this planet really meriting the name."

On the fortieth anniversary of the founding of the Fourth International Trotskyism still exists and still fights, and the task remains the building of an international revolutionary party that can lead the proletariat to impose its dictatorship and reconstruct society.

Under the hammerblows of war and the massive upheavals that followed it the cadres of the young Fourth International suffered disorientation that led to the fragmentation of the movement and the growth of revisionist currents like Pabloism which paid lip service to Trotskyism while theoretically and practically undermining the central tenet of its programmethat the working class alone is the revolutionary force capable of destroying capitalism and establishing socialism.

This fact does not for one moment change the record-that the Fourth International alone on the eve of the Second World War fought against all difficulties to provide Marxist leadership; that since that time Trotskyism alone has fought to uphold the political independence of the working class.

If the list of martyrs has grown longer, and if the forces of Trotskyism remain numerically weak, the Trotskyists of today have on their side the fact that they live not in a period of reaction but of revolutionary ascent.

It is such a period that opens the road for the best commemoration of the founding of the Fourth International-the fight for its reconstruction on the basis of a practical reaffirmation of its founding principles and programme, the building of revolutionary parties based on the method of the Transitional Programme, and the destruction of both Stalinism and reformism and of the decadent imperialist system which they defend.

Next Week:

Reconstruct the Fourth

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Fourth International, we aring proclaimed, lt exists