Fourth International

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For the left communist "Fourth International", see Communist Workers International.

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The Fourth International has been the international organisation of Trotskyist communists. It was founded in 1938 in Paris, with the backing of Leon Trotsky, when many leading Marxists considered the Stalinist Comintern (the Third International) incapable of leading the international working class towards power.

The International was hounded by Stalinist GPU agents and repressed by democratic countries such as France and the United States. It struggled to maintain contact under conditions of illegality around much of the world during World War II. It was also disorientated by the absence of workers' uprisings, or where they did occur, by their co-option by Stalinist and social democratic groups, leading to new successes for opponents of Trotsky. The International suffered a split in 1940 and an even more significant split in 1953.

Despite a partial reunification in 1963, more than one group claims to represent the political continuity of the Fourth International. The broad array of Trotskyist Internationals are split over whether the Fourth International still exists and if so, which organisation represents its political continuity.

Contents

Trotskyism

Main article: Trotskyism

The Trotskyists regarded themselves as working in opposition to both capitalism and to Stalinism as embodied by the leadership of the Soviet Union after Lenin's death. Trotsky advocated proletarian revolution as set out in his theory of "permanent revolution", and believed that a workers' state would not be able to hold out against the pressures of a hostile capitalist world unless socialist revolutions quickly took hold in other countries as well. This theory was advanced in opposition to the view held by the Stalinists that "socialism in one country" could be built in the Soviet Union alone. Furthermore, Trotsky and his supporters harshly criticized the increasingly totalitarian nature of Stalin's rule. They argued that socialism without democracy is impossible. Thus, faced with the increasing lack of democracy in the Soviet Union, they concluded that it was no longer a socialist workers' state, but a degenerated workers' state.

Origins

Trotsky and his supporters had been organized since 1923 as the International Left Opposition, an opposition within the Comintern. They opposed the bureaucratisation of the Soviet Union, which they analysed as being partly caused by the poverty and isolation of the Soviet economy. Stalin's theory of socialism in one country was developed in 1924 as an opposition to Trotsky's Theory of Permanent Revolution, which argued that capitalism was a world system and required a world revolution in order to replace it with socialism. Prior to 1924, the Bolshevik's international perspective had been guided by Trotsky's position. Trotsky argued that this theory represented the interests of that bureaucracy in direct opposition to the working class.

After the rise of Hitler, with the cooperation of the Stalinist Communist Party of Germany, Trotsky observed that the Comintern had fallen irreedemably into the hands of the Stalinist bureaucracy. Thus he and his supporters founded the International Communist League in 1933.

By declaring themselves the Fourth International, the "World Party of Socialist Revolution", the Trotskyists were publicly asserting their continuity not only with the Comintern but also with the earlier Socialist International and the International Workingmen's Association, the first International, which had been led by Karl Marx. Their recognition of the importance of these earlier Internationals was coupled with a belief that they eventually degenerated. Although the Socialist International and Comintern were still in existence, the Trotskyists did not believe they were capable of supporting revolutionary socialism and internationalism.

The foundation of the Fourth International was therefore spurred in part by a desire to form a stronger political current, rather than just being seen as the communist opposition to the Comintern and the Soviet Union. Trotsky believed that its formation was all the more urgent for the role he saw it playing in the impending World War.

The decision to form the International

In the early 1930s, Trotsky and his supporters believed that Stalin's influence over the Third International could still be fought from within and slowly rolled back. They organised themselves into the International Left Opposition in 1930, which was meant to be a group of anti-Stalinist dissenters within the Third International. However, Stalin's supporters, who dominated the International, no longer tolerated dissent. All Trotskyists (indeed, all those suspected of being Trotskyists) were expelled. As a result, they were forced to regroup into an independent organization, the International Communist League, in 1933. Later, in 1936, this group was renamed the Movement for the Fourth International, as its members agreed that any attempt to dislodge the Stalinist leadership of the Third International was futile, and therefore a new International needed to be established.

The foundation of the Fourth International was seen as more than just the simple renaming of an international tendency that was already in existence. It was argued that the Third International had now degenerated completely and was therefore to be seen as a counter-revolutionary organisation that would in time of crisis defend capitalism. It was also argued that the coming World War would produce a revolutionary wave of class and national struggles, rather as the First World War had done.

Stalin, fearing the growing strength of Trotsky's supporters, responded with a political massacre of hundreds of thousands of people within the Soviet Union, as well as the assassination of Trotsky's supporters and family abroad. Stalin attempted to kill not only Trotsky's supporters, but anyone who knew any of his supporters. He had agents go through historical documents and photos in order to attempt to erase Trotsky's memory from the history books. Stalin's supporters even turned to anti-semitism to whip up sentiment against Trotsky.

Nevertheless, the Fourth International was founded at a World Congress held in 1938.

The Founding Congress and WWII

The International's rationale was to construct new mass revolutionary parties able to lead successful workers' revolutions. It saw these arising from a revolutionary wave which would develop alongside and as a result of the coming World War. Thirty delegates attended the founding conference, held in September 1938, in the home of Alfred Rosmer just outside Paris. [1] Present at the meeting were delegates from all the major countries of Europe, and from North America, although for reasons of cost and distance, few delegates attended from Asia or Latin America. An International Secretariat was established, with many of the day's leading Trotskyists and most countries in which Trotskyists were active represented.

It also adopted the Transitional Programme and other resolutions. [2] The Transitional Programme was the central programmatic statement of the congress, summarising its strategic and tactical conceptions for the revolutionary period that it saw opening up as a result of the war which Trotsky had been predicting for some years. The Transitional Programme is not, however, the definitive programme of the Fourth International — as is often suggested — but instead contains a summation of the conjunctural understanding of the movement at that date and a series of transitional policies designed to develop the struggle for workers' power. In this it builds on the positions and methods of the earlier Communist International and, as argued by Trotsky, the Transitional Programme is best seen as supplementing the traditional programmatic understanding of the movement.

At the outbreak of World War II, in 1939, the International Secretariat was moved to New York, where it came under the increasing influence of the Socialist Workers Party.

Trotsky developed his positions on the Fourth International in In Defense of Marxism, a series of documents written in 1939-1940 as a polemic against Max Shachtman and James Burnham's tendency in the US SWP. The disagreement was centered around both the Shachtmanites' disagreements with the SWP's internal policy and their rejection of Trotsky's degenerated workers' state analysis of the Soviet Union. Shachtman argued that the Soviet Union was not a degenerated workers' state, but a new form of class society: "bureaucratic collectivism".

Trotsky opened a public debate with Shachtman and Burnham, leading eventually to their resignation from the International in early 1940, alongside almost 40% of the SWP's members. Around half of those who resigned formed the Workers Party, almost one third the size of the SWP. Secretariat members who supported Shachtman were expelled, with the support of Trotsky himself. While Cannon later said that he hoped this split would not be permanent, so it proved to be.

The Emergency Conference

In May 1940 an emergency conference of the international met �somewhere in the Western Hemisphere�. It adopted a manifesto drafted by Trotsky shortly before his murder and a range of on the work of the International, including one calling for the reunification of the then-divided Fourth Internationalist groups in Britain. [3]

The Fourth International was hit hard during World War II, with Trotsky assasinated and many of its European affiliates destroyed by the Nazis and several of its Asian affiliates destroyed by the Empire of Japan. The survivors, both in Europe, Asia and elsewhere, were largely cut off from each other and from the International Secretariat. The new secretary, Jean Van Heijenoort (a.k.a. Gerland), was able to do little more than publish articles in the SWP's theoretical journal Fourth International. Despite this dislocation, the various groups sought to maintain links and some connections were kept up throughout the early part of the war by sailors belonging to the US Navy who had cause to visit Marseilles. Contact was also steady, if irregular, between the SWP and the British Trotskyists with the result that the Americans exerted what influence they had to encourage the Workers' International League into the International through a fusion with the Revolutionary Socialist League, a fusion that had been requested by the Emergency Conference. [4]

In 1942, a debate on the national question in Europe opened up between the majority of the SWP and a current around Van Heijenoort, Albert Goldman and Felix Morrow. [5] This minority anticipated that the Nazi dictatorship would be replaced with capitalism rather than by a socialist revolution, leading to the revival of Stalinism and social democracy. In December 1943, they criticised the SWP's view as underestimating the rising prestige of Stalinism and the opportunities for the capitalists to use democratic concessions [6]. The SWP's central committee argued that democratic capitalism could not revive, resulting in either military dictatorship by the capitalists or a workers' revolution. [7] It held that that this would reinforce the need for building the Fourth International, and adhered rigidly to their interpretation of Trotsky's works.

The European Conference

The war-time debate about post-war perspectives was accelerated by the resolution of the February 1944 European Conference of the Fourth International [8], which also appointed a new European Secretariat and elected Michel Raptis the organizational secretary of its European Bureau. Raptis and his team had re-established contact with between the Trotskyist parties. The European conference extended the lessons of a revolution then unfolding in Italy, and concluded that a revolutionary wave would cross Europe as the war ended. The SWP had a similar perspective [9]. The British Revolutionary Communist Party disagreed and held that capitalism was not about to plunge into massive crisis but rather that an upturn in the economy was already underway. A group of leaders of the French Parti Communiste Internationaliste argued a similar position until they broke away from the PCI in 1947.

The International Conference

In April 1946 delegates from the principal European sections and a number of others attended a "Second International Congress" [10]. This set about rebuilding the International Secretariat of the Fourth International with Michel Raptis (generally known as Pablo), a Greek resident in France, and Ernest Mandel (sometimes called Germain), a Belgian. They were chosen because of their role in leading the European Secretariat established by the European conference. Pablo became the new secretary of the International.

Pablo and Mandel aimed to counter the opposition of the majorities inside the RCP and PCI, initially by encouraging members to vote out their leaderships. They encouraged Gerry Healy's opposition in the RCP, and in France supported elements, including Pierre Frank and Marcel Bleibtreu (also known as Favre), opposed to the new leadership of the PCI for different reasons.

The Stalinist occupation of Eastern Europe was the issue of prime concern, and it raised many problems of interpretation. At first, the International held that, while the USSR was a degenerated workers' state, the post-WW2 East European states were still bourgeois entities, because revolution from above was not possible, and capitalism persisted. This position was revised later as the economies of the East European states and their political regimes came to resemble that of the USSR more and more. These states were then described as deformed workers states in an analogy with the degenerated workers state in Russia. The term deformed was used rather than degenerated, because no workers' revolution had led to the foundation of these states.

This issue was not merely an argument over names. Those who argued that the new states amounted to a progressive development, in however limited a fashion, concluded that the Stalinist bureaucracy was not an entirely counter-revolutionary force. To Pablo and Mandel, this meant that they should now undertake long-term entrism of the various sections of the Fourth International into the Stalinist Communist Parties.

Another issue that needed to be dealt with was the possibility that the economy would revive. This was initially denied by Mandel (who however was quickly forced to revise his opinion, and later devoted his PhD dissertation to late capitalism, analysing the unexpected "third age" of capitalist development). Some leaders of the RCP (Britain) however anticipated an economic recovery. A polemical article was written in an internal party bulletin by Tony Cliff in 1947, entitled All That Glitters is not Gold. [11] In that article, he argued out that an economic revival was already underway, and that the economic perspectives of Mandel were wrong.

In the sectarian retrospectives, this was naturally total proof of Mandel's analytical ineptitude, once and for all. However, there was much uncertainty at that time about the future viability and prospects of capitalism, not just among all Trotskyist groups, but also among leading economists. Paul Samuelson had envisaged in 1943 the probability of a "nightmarish combination of the worst features of inflation and deflation", worrying that "there would be ushered in the greatest period of unemployment and industrial dislocation which any economy has ever faced" ("Full Employment after the war", in S. Harris (ed.), Post war Economic Problems) Joseph Schumpeter for his part claimed that "The general opinion seems to be that capitalist methods will be unequal to the task of reconstruction". He regarded it as "not open to doubt that the decay of capitalist society is very far advanced" ("Capitalism in the post-war world", in: ibid.).

The Second World Congress

At the Second World Congress in 1948, Pablo and Mandel attempted to open communications with Tito's regime in Yugoslavia. It differed from the rest of the "Eastern Bloc" because it was established by the partisans of World War II who fought against Nazi occupation, as opposed to by Stalin's invading armies.

The leadership of the British RCP (led by Jock Haston and supported by Ted Grant) were highly critical of this move. By this point the FI was united around the view that the Eastern European countries were indeed deformed workers' states, but still strongly divided about what this meant for the future of Stalinism. Mandel and Pablo increasingly assigned a progressive role to the bureaucracy, and attempted to bridge the gap between Trotskyism and Stalinism.

The Congress was also notable for bringing the International into much closer contact with Trotskyist groups from across the globe. The largest groups were the Revolutionary Workers' Party (POR) of Bolivia and the Lanka Sama Samaja Party in what was then Ceylon; the previously large Vietnamese Trotskyist groups had largely been eliminated or absorbed by the supporters of Ho Chi Minh.

The Third World Congress

At the Third World Congress in 1951, Pablo - like many others at the time - envisaged the real possibility of a Third World War in the near future, in which the official mass communist and social democratic parties would be the only significant force that could defend the workers of the world against the imperialist camp. This was strikingly different to Trotsky's prognosis, who had foreseen an independent role for the Fourth International as a leader of the working class.

This was widely accepted within the Fourth International, yet sowed the seeds for the split in 1953. At the Third World Congress, the parties later to become the USFI and ICFI agreed with the perspective of a Third World War and with entryism sui generis. However, the French section disagreed, and held that Pablo was underestimating an independent role for the working class parties in the Fourth International. A Third World War did not happen, of course: However, it should be noted that US strategists seriously considered the possibility of detonating nuclear weapons in China and Korea. This would clearly draw in the Soviet Union.

In line with this geo-political perspective, Pablo argued that the only way the Trotskyists could avoid isolation was for the tiny forces of the FI (outnumbered by the official communists by 1,000 to 1 or more) should join the mass Stalinist or Social Democratic parties. This tactic was known as entrism sui generis, to distinguish it from the short term entry tactic employed before World War Two. For example, it meant that the project of building an open and independent Trotskyist party was shelved in France, because it was regarded as not politically feasible alongside entry into the French Communist Party. The leaders of the majority of the Trotskyist organisation in France, Marcel Bleibtreu (also known as Pierre Favre) and Pierre Lambert, would not follow Pablo's line and would agree only to send a fraction of their members inside the Communist Party. The International leadership had them replaced by a minority, leading to a permanent split in the French section.

In the wake of the World Congress, the line of the International Leadership was generally accepted by groups around the world, including the SWP (US) whose leader, James P. Cannon, wrote to the French majority to support the tactic of entrism sui generis. At the same time, however, Cannon, Gerry Healy and Ernest Mandel were deeply concerned by Pablo's political evolution. Cannon and Healy were also alarmed by Pablo's intervention into the French section, and by suggestions that Pablo might use the International's authority in this way in other sections of the Fourth International that felt entrism "sui generis" was not a suitable tactic in their own countries. In particular, minority tendencies in Britain (around John Lawrence) and the US (around Bert Cochran) that supported entrism "sui generis" hinted that the International might also demand Trotskyists in those countries adopt that tactic.

In 1953, the SWP's national committee issued an Open Letter to Trotskyists and organised the International Committee of the Fourth International. This was a public faction which initially included, in addition to the SWP, Gerry Healy's British section The Club, the PCI in France then led by Lambert (who had expelled Bleibtreu and his grouping), Moreno's party in Argentina and the Austrian and Chinese sections of the FI. The sections of the IC withdrew from the IS, and the IS suspended their voting rights. Both sides claimed they constituted a majority of the former International.

Sri Lanka's LSSP, then the country's leading workers' party, took a middle position during this dispute. It continued to participate in the ISFI but argued for a joint congress, for reunification with the ICFI.

From the Fourth World Congress to 'reunification'

Over the following decade, the IC referred to the rest of the International as the International Secretariat of the Fourth International, emphasising its view that the IS did not speak for the International as a whole. The IS continued to view itself as the leadership of the International. It held a Fourth World Congress in 1954 to regroup and to recognise reorganised sections in Britain, France and the US.

The sections of the International that recognised the leadership of the IS remained optimistic about the possibilities for increasing the International's political influence and extended the entrism into Social Democratic Parties which was already underway in Britain, Austria and elsewhere. The 1954 congress emphasised entrism into Communist Parties as well as Nationalist parties in the colonies, pressing for democratic reforms, ostensibly to encourage the left-wing they perceived to exist in the Communist Parties to join with them in a revolution.

However, tensions developed between the mainstream around Pablo and a minority that argued unsuccessfully against open work. A number of these delgates walked out of the World Congress, and would eventually leave the International, including the leader of the new British section, John Lawrence, George Clarke, Michele Mestre (a leader of the French section), and Murray Dowson (a leader of the Canadian group).

The IS organised a Fifth World Congress in 1957. Mandel and Pierre Frank appraised the Algerian revolution and surmised that it was essential to orient toward guerrilla revolutions in former colonial states. The Sixth World Congress in 1961 marked a lessening of the divisions between the mainstream in the IS and the organisations in the IC that were aligned to the SWP (US). In particular, the congress stressed support for the Cuban revolution and a growing emphasis on building parties in the imperialist countries. The supporters of Michel Pablo and Juan Posadas opposed the shift. The supporters of Posadas left the International in 1962.

In 1962 the IC and IS formed a Parity Commission to organise a common World Congress. At the 1963 congress, a majority of the IC agreed to reunify with the IS. This was largely a result of their mutual support for the Cuban Revolution, based on Ernest Mandel and Joseph Hansen's resolution Dynamics of World Revolution Today. This document distinguished between different revolutionary tasks in the imperialist countries, the "workers' states", and the colonial and semi-colonial countries. The fused organisation, formed in 1963, is known as the United Secretariat of the Fourth International.

Unity discussions continue

Lambert's PCI in France and the SLL in Britain did not take part in the reunification congress, but discussions continued on the topic. The PCI and SLL maintained the IC under their own leadership. The SLL and PCI opposed key elements in the reunification documents, including support for Fidel Casto, and argued that Cuba had remained capitalist. In the eyes of the SLL and PCI, the USFI's support for the Cuban and Algerian leaderships reflected a lack of committment to the building of revolutionary marxist parties. While not rejecting reunification in itself, the SLL and PCI argued that a deeper political discussion was needed to ensure that Pablo's errors were not deepened.

Those who largely shared this view inside the US SWP, led by Tim Wohlforth and James Robertson (Trotskyist), had formed a 'Revolutionary Tendency' in 1962. They argued that the party should have a full discussion of the meaning of Pabloism and the 1953 split. Along with the remainder of the IC, they argued that Cuba's revolution did not prove that the Fourth International was no longer necessary in the colonial countries. However, differences inside the RT developed. In 1964, with Wohlforth laying the evidentiary basis for claims of "party disloyalty" against Robertson, the tendency was expelled from the party.

The IC unsuccessfully repeated its appeal for a deep discussion with the USFI at the end of 1963, and on later occasions. Its 1966 conference called for a Fourth International Conference. The IC approached the USFI again in 1970, requesting "a mutual discussion that might open the way to the Socialist Labour Leage and its French sister organisation, the Organisation Trotskyiste, reunifying with the Fourth International". Similar approaches were rejected in 1973.

After the Lambert's current left the IC in 1971, its Organising Committee for the Reconstruction of the Fourth International opened discussion with the USFI. In May 1973, the OCRFI unsucessfully requested to take part in the discussions for the USFI's 1974 congress: the USFI did not take the letter at face value and asked for clarification. In September 1973 the OCRFI responded positively and the United Secretariat agreed a positive reply. However, in the rush of preparations for the world congress the United Secretariat's letter was not sent, leading the OCRFI to repeat its request in September 1974 through an approach to the US SWP. The following month the USFI organised a meeting with the OCRFI. However, discussions decellerated after the OCI made a factional attack on Ernest Mandel, which it later acknowledged as an error. In 1976 new approaches by the OCRFI met with success, when it wrote with the aim "to strengthen the force of the Fourth International as a single international organisation". However, these discussions decellerated again in 1977 after the OCI leaders stated that it had members inside the LCR, the USFI's French section.

Unification was also discussed between the USFI and Lutte Ouvriere. In 1970, LO initiated fusion discussions with the French section of the USFI. After extensive discussions, the two organisations had agreed the basis for a fused organisation. However, the fusion could be not completed. In 1976 discussions between the USFI and Lutte Ouvriere progressed again. The two organisations started to produce a common weekly suppliment to their newspapers, common electoral work and other common campaigning.

Michel Pablo's tendency also raised the question of unity in 1976, with an ambitious proposal that it and the USFI could eventually unify in a new organisation comprising tendencies that were, or were evolving towards, revolutionary marxism. The USFI felt unable to move ahead with the proposal.

However, the tide towards reunificaton turned after the FSLN-led revolution in Nicaragua in July 1979. The eleventh world congress of the USFI, held in November 1979, debated majority and minority resolutions which were both supportive of the FSLN and called for the building of a section of the Fourth International inside it. The USFI faction around Nahuel Moreno disagreed, and split shortly before the congress to unify with Pierre Lambert's current: their unity lasted only until 1981.

The Fourth International today

Since the 1963 reunification, at least five approaches have developed within international Trotskyism towards the Fourth International.

  • The United Secretariat of the Fourth International presents itself as "the" Fourth International, and is the only current to have done so continuously. At the time of reunification, it represented the majorities of all but two of the FI national organisations. It remains the only current with direct organisational continuity to the original Fourth International. Leaders of some other Trotskyist Internationals occasionally refer to the USFI as "the Fourth International": ICFI secretary Gerry Healy, when proposing reunification discussions in the 1970s, described the USFI as "the Fourth International"; the IST also refers to the USFI in this way.
  • The ICFI member groups customarily describe themselves as sections of the Fourth International. However, the ICFI presents itself as the "political continuity of the FI", not as the FI itself. It clearly dates its creation as 1953, rather than from 1938.
  • Some tendencies argue that the FI had dislocated politically by 1953, and consequently work to "reconstruct", "reorganise" or "rebuild" it. This view originated with Lutte Ouvriere and the international Spartacist tendency, and accounts from their divergence from the ICFI in 1966. The Lambert tendency continued this approach after it established an "International Secretariat of the Fourth International" in 1993: its supporters argue that this signified the refoundation of the Fourth International. In some countries, the Lambertist movement refers to itself as the Fourth International.
  • In June 1993, the International Center for Reconstruction of the Fourth International (ICRFI)—a tendency grouped around the French Parti de Travailleurs (Workers Party, PT)—held a World Conference of Sections of the Fourth International/ICR in Paris, at which sections from 44 countries voted to reproclaim the Fourth International on the basis of its founding text: the Transitional Program. The resulting international organization, linked closely with the International Liaison Committee for a Workers' International, is known among its adherents and national sections simply as the Fourth International, while some other Trotskyists persistently refer to it as the "Lambertist" Fourth International, after Pierre Lambert, a founding leader of the French PT. Others call it the Fourth International (La Verit�), after its international theoretical journal La Verit�.
  • Other Trotskyist groups argue that the Fourth International is dead. They call for the establishment of a "workers' international" or a Fifth International.

See also

References

Articles and books

Historical Documents

Recent Documents

External links

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