THE CRISIS OF THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL
AND THE TASKS OF CONSISTENT TROTSKYISTS

Adopted by the First International Conference of the
Faction for the Trotskyist International
(For the Political Regeneration of the Fourth International)
5 January 1992

1. Orthodox Trotskyism rests on the firm foundations laid in the documents elaborated -- following the line of the theses and resolutions of the first four congresses of the Communist International -- by the first three international meetings of the Fourth International: the Conference of the Movement for the Fourth International (1936); the Founding Congress (1938); and the Emergency Conference (1940).

In the documents of these international meetings, the general programmatic, strategic, and tactical lines are indicated which, as developed and brought up to date on the basis of the historical evolution of the subsequent decades, still constitute the political foundations of orthodox Trotskyism.

2. The death of Leon Trotsky and World War II struck hard blows at the International. Not only did the war mean the cessation of direct relations among the different sections, but a bloodbath wiped out many of the International's most important leaders, in particular in Europe.

The International Secretariat, under the leadership of the Socialist Workers Party of the United States (SWP/US), was able only partially to fulfill its responsibilities of political and organizational leadership of the international Trotskyist movement. Nevertheless, the Fourth International met the test of the war, politically and organizationally, and, during the period of reorganization (1943-1946), corrected the opportunist deviations which had developed in some sections, for example, the French section.

3. In the period following World War II, notwithstanding a certain growth in membership and increase in the influence of almost all its sections, the International did not become a mass organizing center, as, before the war, Trotsky and the entire Trotskyist movement had erroneously predicted would happen. The International attempted to deal with this fact by substituting a voluntarist orthodoxy for dialectical method: under the leadership of Pablo, the International acted as if the crisis of proletarian leadership were approaching resolution and the development of the International as a mass organization could be easily realized.

At the same time, the principal section of the International, the SWP/US -- using as the reason the reactionary Voorhis Act, which prohibits any American organization from maintaining an international affiliation -- came to isolate itself from the rest of the movement. In taking this stance, the SWP expressed what were actually federalist positions on questions of international organization and placed itself, in practice, on the right wing of the Fourth International.

Nevertheless, despite all its mistakes, the International continued to base its politics on orthodox Trotskyism. The theses of the Reorganization Conference (1946) and the Second World Congress (1948), although containing errors, should be included as part of the historic legacy of our movement.

4. The first serious opportunist failure on the part of the International occurred in 1948 on the occasion of the break between Yugoslavia and the Kremlin.

Instead of limiting itself to defending Yugoslavia against any possible military attack by the USSR, the International treated Tito's break with Stalin as an expression of the revolutionary potential of the Yugoslav Communist Party. The Yugoslav CP was characterized as "left-centrist" and was regarded as moving towards Trotskyism, while over and over attempts were made to reach agreement with either the Yugoslav CP or with pro-Tito forces in capitalist countries. With an ultimate perspective of the affiliation of the Yugoslav CP to the Fourth International, these policies were maintained until 1950. Clearly this involved a total misunderstanding of the nature of the Titoist bureaucracy, resulting from the desire to find, at any cost, a shortcut to reaching the masses. Still, the desire to win the Yugoslav CP to the Fourth International makes clear the difference between the policy of 1948-1950 and classical Pabloism from 1951 forward. The opportunism of 1948 opened the way to Pabloite revisionism but definitely did not reach the depth of the opportunism of actual Pabloism.

5. Pabloite revisionism, which emerged at the end of 1950 and triumphed at the Third World Congress in 1951, represented an opportunist deviation of a centrist type. Drawing a false lesson from the unexpected events of the postwar period (the consolidation and expansion of Stalinism with the creation of deformed workers' states through the social transformations in the countries occupied by the "Red" Army and in the victorious revolutions in Yugoslavia and China; the cold war; and the failure of development of the Fourth International), Pabloite positions went so far as to deny the necessity of the struggle to build mass Trotskyist parties in all the countries of the world. The role of the revolutionary instrument was, in effect, assigned to the ruling bureaucracy of the USSR and the Stalinist parties, driven to assume this role by the revolutionary pressure of the masses and confrontation with imperialism and the "inevitable" formation and possible triumph of internal centrist tendencies. The sections of the Fourth International, placed within the Communist parties according to the strategy of "entrism sui generis," had to limit themselves to functioning as small groups for discussion among cadres, in order to aid the objective development of the revolutionary process under the leadership of the Stalinists. In this way, disappointment over the lack of success in achieving transformation into a mass organization led to political liquidationism.

6. The counterposed theses presented at the Third World Congress (1951) by the majority of the French section, although containing some mistakes and lacking a balance sheet of the previous errors, constituted a defense of orthodox Trotskyism against Pabloite revisionism. The cost to the French section of the defense of its positions was its expulsion from the International in 1952.

7. Only the emergence of ultra-Pabloite internal tendencies, which carried liquidationism to its extreme, drove the British section and the SWP/ US to launch, in 1953, the struggle against Pablo. Conducted on the basis of the SWP's federalist conceptions, and so on the basis of relations among the separate national leaderships, this struggle did not come near to achieving all the results which were possible.

On 16 November 1953, using Pablo's bureaucratic methods as the reason, the SWP, with an open letter, broke with the Pabloite leadership on the eve of the Fourth World Congress, so refusing to wage a struggle to win the majority of the International to opposition to Pablo. One week later, on 23 November, the expelled majority of the Parti Communiste Internationaliste (PCI/France), the English section, the Swiss section, and the SWP founded the International Committee of the Fourth International (IC), which declared Pablo and his International Secretariat removed from power, proclaimed itself the new leadership of the movement, and invited Trotskyists all over the world to group themselves under its banner. This call received a positive response from a few sections of the International (China, Canada), from the faction led by Moreno (Argentina), and from small minorities in a few other sections. The refusal of the anti-Pabloites to wage a struggle to win the majority, combined with incorrect tactics at the moment of the split, meant that two-thirds of the International remained with Pablo.

8. In practice, the International Committee, based on organizational federalism, did not in any way represent a Bolshevik response to Pabloism. It proved incapable of drawing the slightest lesson from the crisis of the International. The successive policies of its different organizations (the entrism of Moreno's organization in the Peronist movement; the policy of the French PCI in relation to Algerian nationalism and, later, in relation to social democracy; the more and more marked adaptation of the SWP to petty-bourgeois intellectual circles in the US; the zigzags of the British section in its work within the British Labour Party; etc.) clearly demonstrated that the International Committee itself -- even if obviously in a less serious form than the Pabloite International Secretariat -- suffered from opportunist deviations of a centrist type, which its federalist character could only exacerbate.

9. The reunification achieved in 1963 between the Pabloite International Secretariat and a wing of the International Committee led by the SWP/US, was the product of capitulation by the SWP to Pabloism, originating in the revisionist SWP's own ongoing shift to the right. A fundamental element in this shift had been the impact of the Cuban revolution, which the SWP understood in impressionistic rather than Marxist terms, going so far as denying, at least with regard to Latin America, the necessity of the struggle to build mass Trotskyist parties and openly abandoning the Leninist strategy of proletarian revolution. At the same time, the International Secretariat, which agreed with the SWP and its allies (Palabra Obrera/Argentina, Partido Obrero Revolucionario/Chile, etc.) on the analysis of the Cuban Revolution and Castroism (which was presented as a revolutionary-Marxist current, although with theoretical limitations), continued to be based essentially on the entire policy of liquidationist Pabloism. In fact the International Secretariat had discarded only a few elements of Pablo's analysis (for example, the imminence of a third world war) which had obviously been shown to be false, while its fundamental positions remained the same as in 1951, in fact with a more open capitulation to petty-bourgeois nationalism in the colonies and former colonies -- positions which were connected to an impressionistic evaluation of the new period of capitalist development that followed the war. From 1964 on, this evaluation would lead to the theory of "neocapitalism" with the consequent underestimation of the actuality of the socialist perspective and the revolutionary role of the proletariat in the imperialist countries.

Despite such areas of political agreement, the 1963 reunification represented an unprincipled bloc, insofar as a number of fundamental political issues (such as entrism "sui generis" in Stalinist and social-democratic parties in Europe), on which profound differences persisted between the International Secretariat and the wing of the International Committee led by the SWP, were not confronted, in order to avoid disturbing the process of unification, while in essence an agreement was established which guaranteed the reciprocal independence of the original Pabloites with regard to Europe and the SWP with regard to the United States.

Significantly, it was precisely in the period immediately preceding and following this reunification that important splits took place from the right wing of Pabloism: the split in 1962 of the Posadas faction of the International Secretariat, still attached suprahistorically to all the formal aspects of original Pabloism, including the imminence of a third world war, and evolving toward openly pro-Stalinist positions; the expulsion in 1964 of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), numerically the most important section and the only section of the United Secretariat with a large mass base, which had gone over to counterrevolutionary reformism, entering the bourgeois government of Sirimavo Bandaranaike; and in 1965 the split of the Revolutionary Marxist Faction, led by Pablo himself, at the time an adviser to the Ben Bella government of Algeria, which carried to an extreme the position of the United Secretariat (USFI) on the priority of the colonial revolution over the proletarian revolution in the advanced capitalist countries and capitulated to Khrushchevism, among other things supporting the USSR in polemics with China, over against the rest of the USFI.

10. The struggle within the International Committee against the capitulation of the SWP was conducted primarily by the Socialist Labour League (SLL) of Britain and the Parti Communiste Internationaliste (PCI/France; later [1963-1981] the Organisation Communiste Internationaliste [OCI/France]; since 1981, again the PCI). This struggle, however, was not based on a genuine balance sheet of the experience of the postwar Trotskyist movement or of the International Committee itself. In effect the SLL and OCI combined sectarian attitudes (on the unification itself -- refusing to participate in the reunification in order to fight Pabloite revisionism within a united International, as would have been correct to do -- as well as on the character of the Cuban state) with the maintenance of essentially left-centrist politics.

The International Committee, maintained by the SLL and OCI with the support of a few other organizations (Greece, Hungary, and a left minority in the SWP), although attempting in its initial period (1963-1966) to draw certain lessons from its own past history, did not have a qualitatively different political character from the International Committee of 1953-1962.

11. The Third Conference of the International Committee (1966) decisively blocked any possibility of the leftward evolution of the International Committee. In fact, the Conference reaffirmed the federalist character of the organization (a rule requiring a unanimous vote for a proposal to be adopted) and signalled the suppression of serious political discussion with the exclusion of the Spartacist League of the United States for expressing generally correct positions on a number of fundamental questions, including the nature of Pabloism and the crisis of the Fourth International, the origin of the deformed workers' states and the character of the Cuban state, and the evaluation of international economic and political perspectives.

The essentially bipolar condominium of the SLL and OCI established at the 1966 Conference contained in embryo the premises of the split of the International Committee into two counterposed blocs. The deepening of the differences between the two blocs' policies (the OCI's adaptation to international social democracy and its opportunist spontaneism; the SLL's national Trotskyism, verbal sectarianism -- in particular regarding the Labour Party question -- and idealist conception of the relationship between party and class) in fact provoked first political paralysis and then the definitive breakup of the International Committee in 1971.

12. The USFI also revealed itself to be an unstable structure, although to a lesser extent than the International Committee. At the end of the 1960s an acute factional struggle developed in the USFI, which, in reality, recreated the division between the old Pabloite component, on the one hand, and the SWP and its allies, on the other hand. The first component, the majority, adapted to the petty-bourgeois "gauchisme" which dominated the radicalized sector of the student youth. It adopted a line of vanguard guerillaism for Latin America. And subsequently, during the 1970s, it theorized the "imminence of the decisive clash," in which the role of revolutionary leadership would be played by the so-called "new vanguard with mass influence," that is, the confused mixture of spontaneist and centrist organizations built from the youth radicalization.

To this the SWP and its allies -- among which the Argentinian Socialist Workers Party (PST), acquired more and more importance -- counterposed the defense of formally "orthodox" positions. This was, in reality, an expression of a deeper adaptation to the political framework of bourgeois democracy and a more classic revisionism, as shown during the Portuguese revolution of 1974-75 and the Argentinian crisis of 1975-76.

This factional fight developed in unexpected ways in the second half of the 1970s. On the one hand, the Argentinian PST, clearly more determined than the SWP to lead a struggle against the USFI majority and rejecting the more openly opportunist positions of the SWP, built its own international faction, the Bolshevik Faction (BF). On the other hand, the SWP made a complete change of line, shifting to a Castroite position and deepening this until it finally broke with the USFI in 1990.

The sharpening of the factional fight in the USFI led to a split by the Bolshevik Faction in 1979 over the adaptation of the USFI majority to the leadership of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) and its consequent open condemnation of the activity of the Nicaraguan and other Latin American Trotskyists who had intervened in Nicaragua on the basis of the policy of the BF.

13. The crisis of the Fourth International provoked more and more organizational division but did not mean a shift of the forces of the Trotskyist movement to the ground of reformism and the acceptance of capitalism or Stalinism. In fact, only two organizations broke decisively with the perspective of international socialist revolution -- the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) of Sri Lanka, which entered the People's Front Government of Bandaranaike in 1964, and the Posadaist "Fourth International," now reduced to a political ghost, which shifted to a semi-Stalinist position following its support for the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.

Some other organizations, without shifting to the ground of reformism or Stalinism, have broken with their Trotskyist origins. They represent, at their present stage of development, organizations of a centrist type. The most important examples of these are the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) of Britain and its international allies, the Workers World Party (WWP) of the US, and the SWP/US. The SWP/Britain was born in a split from the British section of the Fourth International at the beginning of the 1950s. It takes a "third-camp" position in relation to the struggle between imperialism and Stalinism and regards the societies dominated by the latter as "state capitalist." The WWP was born in a split from the SWP/USA at the end of the 1950s and is characterized by pro-Stalinist positions.

However, the great majority of organizations that present themselves as Trotskyist have gone through a more limited process of political degeneration, which has led them to express politics of a centrist or left-centrist type without having broken their fundamental links with the Trotskyism. These organizations live a contradiction between their Trotskyism and the centrist character of their policies. Taken together with the small forces remaining on the ground of consistent Trotskyism, they form the world Trotskyist movement, the present Fourth International. The Fourth International, although divided into separate organizations -- which should be considered, more exactly, separate factions of the same organization -- and dominated by various types of revisionist politics, is not dead. It can and must be politically regenerated and organizationally reconstructed.

Of the numerous and various forces of the world Trotskyist movement there are five main international organizations that contain the large majority of the militants who identify themselves as Trotskyists.

A. The United Secretariat of the Fourth International (USFI)

The USFI is the main political heir of liquidationist Pabloism. It expresses this fact, first of all, by its denial of the need to build mass-based Trotskyist parties in every country as necessary instruments for the victory of the socialist revolution. Absolutely consistent with this, the USFI's goal is not the building of a mass Fourth International but the building of a so-called "New Revolutionary International," without a complete and consistent programmatic basis.

In reality, the USFI continues the old Pabloite project of liquidating the Trotskyist movement into a confused centrist amalgam. The failure of this project is due to the fact that the various "partners" sought by the USFI, even when they really did exist and were not merely figments of its imagination, were not interested in an international perspective, even of a centrist type, because that went far beyond their nonrevolutionary programmatic and political horizons.

For forty years the Pabloites have searched for mythological "centrist trends evolving to the left" with which to fuse, but they have never found them, because the trends either were, in reality, more or less nonexistent -- like the "left currents" in the Communist Parties in the 1950s or the "new vanguards with mass influence" in the 1970s -- or were not evolving to the left.

This Pabloite policy led the USFI to adapt itself politically, programmatically and organizationally to various centrist and left-reformist forces. The type of adaptation has varied from one time to another. So, from 1968 to the mid-1970s the USFI capitulated to the confused forces of the centrist and spontaneist organizations produced by the "New Left" youth radicalization. But at the end of the 1970s the USFI changed direction and began to adapt politically to the social-democratic and Stalinist leaderships of the mass movements.

The leaderships of the USFI and of its most important sections once more began to see their relationship with the working class as necessarily mediated by the leaderships of the mass parties and trade unions or by particular sections of these leaderships. From this derives the myth of the "unity of the proletariat," interpreted as the need for strategic unity of the organizations of the workers' movement, unconditional support for the formation of national or local "left governments" -- for example, the initial attitude of the USFI's French section, the LCR, toward the Mitterrand government in France in 1981 -- and adaptation to the reformist left of the trade unions in various countries.

This policy continues today in the framework of the new situation of general crisis of the international workers' movement. The opportunist policy of the USFI particularly addresses itself to the left reformists. Examples are the uncritical support the USFI gave to the former leader of the French Communist Party, Juquin, in 1988, and its attitude toward the reformist majority of the Workers Party (PT) of Brazil.

In the oppressed countries the USFI maintains an adaptation to the policy and the ideology of the radical petty-bourgeois nationalist movements, as shown by its uncritical political support for the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua, which it presented as the regime of a proletarian dictatorship in the framework of a healthy workers' state.

In all the nonproletarian mass movements the USFI tends to adapt itself to the dominant ideology and petty-bourgeois positions.

In the deformed and degenerated workers' states the leadership of the USFI for a long time has adapted to the reformist oppositional forces.

The revisionist positions of the USFI majority can be traced to the objectivist conception of the revolutionary process which Pabloism developed at the point of its origin. This conception implies an underestimation of the critical role of the conscious, subjective factor -- the Trotskyist party and program -- and the need for a conscious, organized, determined struggle to develop mass revolutionary socialist consciousness. This objectivism necessarily means the misrepresentation of the active Trotskyist perspective of permanent revolution as some sort of objective and more or less automatic process.

But in its process of development the revisionism of the USFI leadership has gone so far as to challenge some key elements of revolutionary Marxism. These include the role of the vanguard party as a necessary instrument for socialist revolution and the understanding of proletarian democracy as counterposed to any form of bourgeois democracy.

The revisionist development of the positions of the USFI leadership was shown clearly by the attitude it took toward the crisis of international Stalinism. After decades of adaptation to Stalinism under the pressure of the dominant petty-bourgeois attitude of the official workers' movement and also among the masses, the USFI shifted to a Stalinophobic attitude. It showed itself incapable of developing a policy based on the intransigent defense of collectivized property in the means of production and the counterposition of the perspective of a democracy of workers' councils as bodies of political administration and management of the planned economy, to both the bureaucratic dictatorship and the shift toward formal democracy of a bourgeois type. On the contrary, the USFI leadership has fallen into a fully centrist democratism, confusing bourgeois democracy and proletarian democracy and applying formalistic criteria to the problem of the self-determination of the republics of the former USSR and Yugoslavia.

B. The International Workers League (IWL; Morenoist)

The International Workers League (IWL), better known by its initials in Spanish, LIT, exists primarily in Latin America and Spain. Its main leading figure was Nahuel Moreno, dead some years ago, and its leading section is the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS, formerly the PST) of Argentina, which Moreno had headed.

The IWL is the political continuation of the old Bolshevik Faction of the USFI, built after a short period of formal unification with the Lambertist current from 1979 to 1981.

The Morenoist trend has been characterized by wide variation and contradictions in its political positions, both over the course of its history and in different countries at the same time. An amazingly broad range of perspectives has been put forward by the IWL and its forerunners, from extreme adaptation to the trade-union bureaucracy to antiunion attitudes, from open support of popular-front strategies to rejection of united-front tactics with reformist and petty-bourgeois-nationalist organizations, and from embellishment of Stalinist regimes to forms of Stalinophobia.

What underlies those abrupt zigzags is a pronounced opportunist versatility, that is, the "ideology" of "Morenoism," which is a chameleonic current incapable of carrying out the process of building revolutionary parties on sound Trotskyist foundations.

The Argentinian MAS, like its predecessors, has a record of deeply centrist politics, including, despite some left turns and vacillations, adaptation to the trade-union bureaucracy, bourgeois nationalism and popular-frontism, and the concealment of the revolutionary aspects of its program. For many years, moreover, the MAS followed a policy of a political and electoral bloc with the Argentinian Communist Party, in this case, too, with some zigzags. Starting from a wrong conception of the united front, the Morenoists transformed their bloc with the CP from a specific tactic for concrete demands into a strategy, despite the CP's reformist political character and bureaucratic organizational character.

On the central question of the building of the Fourth International as the leadership of the future international socialist revolution, the IWL, despite its criticism of the opportunism and liquidationism of the USFI, expresses confused and contradictory positions, which are also potentially liquidationist. For example, the IWL put forward in its own "International Manifesto" the perspective of a "quasi-Trotskyist" mass international, which would regroup diverse forces and in which the Trotskyists, meaning those with Trotskyist positions, might be a minority.

C. The International Militant Tendency (IMT)

The International Militant Tendency (IMT) is the international projection of the British Militant Tendency (MT), historically led by Ted Grant, which developed entry work inside the British Labor Party with significant organizational success.

The MT had its origins in the majority faction of the British section of the Fourth International in the 1940s, the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP). In the World Congresses of 1946 and 1948, the RCP put forward generally correct criticisms of the political analysis of the International leadership, in particular about the capitalist recovery in the West and the expansion of Stalinism in the East.

The faction led by Grant had been placed at the margin of the International, because, ironically, it had not followed the policy of total entry into the Labour Party proposed by the International Secretariat and applied with its support by a large minority which split from the RCP. For this reason, the Grant faction was not directly involved in the split of the Fourth International in 1953. For more than ten years after that, a contradictory relationship existed between the group led by Grant and the Pabloite International Secretariat, subsequently the USFI. After the mid-1960s the Grant group separated from the USFI, and what became the "Militant Tendency," from the name of its newspaper, had its own autonomous development, first as a national organization and subsequently with its own international extension.

The IMT is characterized by a general strategy of decades-long "deep entry," first of all into the British Labour Party and then, internationally, into forces of a social-democratic type. The IMT has extremely sectarian positions towards the other forces of the Trotskyist movement, calling them "the sects."

The IMT's deep-entry strategy has produced a policy of adaptation -- partly formal, partly substantive -- to reformist positions, for example, on the nature of the bourgeois state and the necessity of a revolutionary mass insurrection to destroy it. Developing a spontaneist-like conception of the "socialist consciousness" of the working class, the IMT openly criticizes the Leninist view of the party expressed in What Is to Be Done? Claiming to apply the method of the Transitional Program, the IMT tends in reality to limit itself to general propaganda, without trying to transform transitional demands into agitational slogans, where possible.

The IMT has expressed serious adaptation to imperialism, particularly to British imperialism, masked by a bombastic "socialist" and "internationalist" rhetoric. This is shown clearly in its attitude toward the Irish question. The MT demagogically and moralistically condemns the actions of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), equating the IRA activists with Loyalist paramilitaries and calling them "green Tories." In the Malvinas war in 1982 the IMT effectively took a position far from anti-imperialism: no support to Britain, but for "workers' sanctions against Argentina" and for the abstract hypothesis of a "socialist war" against Argentina.

In the last period the IMT has made a turn to the left, in part a response inside the British section to the long process of its expulsion from the Labour Party. The turn was realized through a faction fight which put the former leader Ted Grant, who remained linked to the totality of the old positions, in a small minority. While the big majority of the British members aligned themselves against Grant, under the leadership of Peter Taaffe, the big majority of the members of the other national sections aligned themselves with Grant. This left turn, which is related primarily to the character of the entry work in the British Labour Party, has not been translated into a general challenge to the main bases of the IMT's overall revisionism.

D. The International Center of Reconstruction (ICR; Lambertist)

The International Center of Reconstruction (ICR) is the international extension of the French International Communist Party (PCI, formerly the OCI). The main leader of the ICR and PCI is Pierre Lambert. In practice, all the sections of the ICR are strictly subordinated to the PCI, which is deeply national-Trotskyist.

The main features of the ICR's politics are capitulation to social democracy around the world, political adaptation to the trade-unionist consciousness of the working class, transformation of the tactical policy of the proletarian united front (and the anti-imperialist united front in oppressed countries) into a permanent strategy, Stalinophobia, and economic and political crisis-mongering (the perpetual theory of "imminent revolution").

The ICR lacks any real internal democracy, especially in the French PCI. Its leadership has become notorious for its slander campaigns and gangster attacks against political opponents, particularly on the occasions of the major splits of its organizational predecessors, the Organizing Committee for the Reconstruction of the Fourth International (OCRFI, 1972-1980) and the short-lived bloc with the Morenoist trend in the Parity Committee (1979-1980) and the Fourth International (International Committee) (FI[IC], 1980-1981) -- that is, the splits leading to the creation of the Vargaite organization in 1972-73, the Fourth Internationalist Tendency in 1979, and the breakdown of the bloc with the Morenoists in 1981.

Developing more and more anti-Leninist positions, the ICR, like the other revisionist trends, liquidates the perspective of building Trotskyist parties in every country and building a mass Fourth International. The ICR, in fact, tried to create the conditions for unifying the so-called "legitimate trends of the working class," claiming to base itself on the tradition of the First and Second Internationals, in counterposition to the "organizational sectarianism" of the Third International.

In developing that perspective, the ICR mixes extreme opportunism -- linking itself to trends and organizations marginal on an international scale and essentially reformist or semi-reformist, like the Venezuelan MIR -- with the most demagogic bluffs. In January 1991 the ICR, with only its own forces plus some tiny reformist and petty-bourgeois allies, proclaimed a so-called "Workers' International Alliance for the Workers' International" and a continental section, the "European Workers' Alliance."

In France in November 1991 the PCI proclaimed, on a minimalistic and semireformist basis, a so-called "Workers Party," which was supposed to unify the current Trotskyists, anarchists, socialists and communists. This Workers Party was nothing more than a body bureaucratically controlled by the PCI, which regrouped essentially its members and strict sympathizers plus a certain number of individual workers deceived by the Lambertists' lies. At the same time, the Algerian section of the ICR utilized the Lambertists' opportunist conception of the anti-imperialist united front to justify political support for the Islamic Salvation Front.

The ICR is one of the most degenerated and presumably unsalvageable trends of the international Trotskyist movement.

E. The Internationalist Communist Union (Lutte Ouvriere)

The Internationalist Communist Union (ICU) is the international projection of the French organization, Lutte Ouvriere (LO), with small groups in the US, the "French Antilles" and the African immigrant communities in France.

The LO originated from a group formed in France during World War II on sectarian positions (the Class Struggle Communist Group, after World War II the Communist Union), which in 1944 refused to unify with the other Trotskyist trends in the new French section of the Fourth International.

A main revisionist feature of LO's politics is economist workerism, expressed in the virtual reduction of intervention in the class struggle with transitional demands to the demand for sliding scales of hours and wages, combined with abstract popularized propaganda for socialism. LO has a myth of building a "genuine workers' party," wrongly seeing the cause of the crisis of the Fourth International -- a crisis that it considers to have originated in the period of the formation of the Fourth International -- in the petty-bourgeois composition of the organization. This conception shows LO's national outlook, because, although the French section had this objective problem at the end of World War II, other sections had much larger proletarian compositions -- for example, the British RCP, the Belgian FI section, the SWP/US, the Bolivian POR, and the LSSP of Sri Lanka -- and these avoided neither the crisis of the Fourth International nor the degenerative effects of national Trotskyism.

On the basis of those positions, LO has adopted non-Leninist methods of intervention and internal organization and functioning. As a result, even though LO has been receiving relatively large votes -- about half a million -- in French elections since 1973 on the basis of its abstract popular propaganda, it has been unable to make use of these electoral gains for revolutionary party-building.

LO has traditionally had a semi-state-capitalist analysis of the degenerated and deformed workers' states, recognizing the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers' state but regarding the deformed workers' states as state-capitalist.

LO's workerist positions lead it to abstain from many political struggles. This has extremely negative consequences for its positions on special oppression, especially women's oppression and lesbian/gay oppression. With regard to these, LO largely reflects the reactionary positions of backward sectors of the masses.

F. The Smaller Trotskyist Groups

In addition to the five major trends we have indicated, there are many other minor trends. Some are national organizations, in some cases with a relatively significant role in their own country, and some are international trends, formally or informally constituted.

Some of these trends are to the left of the major organizations of the world Trotskyist movement and apply policies not far from consistent Trotskyism. This is the case, for example, of the Workers Party (PO) of Argentina, which has some organizations in solidarity in other Latin American countries, and the League for a Revolutionary Communist International (LRCI), whose main section is the British Workers Power group.

In general, however, these organizations tend to have an essentially national outlook, to subordinate the struggle for the Fourth International to their national perspectives, and to adopt a sectarian attitude of building their own little organizations and disdaining other Trotskyist forces. This is the case, for example, with the PO and Workers Power.

If these relatively small, left Trotskyist organizations succeeded in separating themselves from their national and sectarian outlooks, they could play a significant role in the struggle for the political regeneration and organizational reconstruction of the Fourth International. But this could only be the result of a political struggle with these organizations by the forces that understand the tasks of consistent Trotskyists in this historical phase.

14. The Fourth International has suffered a grave process of political degeneration and organizational fragmentation. As a united, organized revolutionary political force, as the body of the international proletarian leadership, as the world organization of genuine revolutionary Marxism -- it has obviously ceased to exist. This fact poses the fight for the international proletarian leadership in an extremely elemental form as the primary task facing proletarian revolutionaries today. The first question of international strategy which the consistent, orthodox Trotskyists must, then, take up is the question of how actually to proceed in this elemental fight for the international proletarian leadership.

While politically degenerated and organizationally fragmented, the Fourth International has not died politically. Despite its acuteness, the historical crisis of the Fourth International still differs qualitatively from the historical crises of the Second and Third Internationals.

In August 1914 the betrayal of proletarian internationalism by almost all the national social-democratic parties at the outbreak of World War I signalled the conversion of social democracy into a counterrevolutionary agent of the imperialists within the workers' movement, whose primary political function was to prevent the revolutionary unity of the proletarians of all countries and the revolutionary seizure of power by the working class of any country. The social-democratic program of reforms, real and illusory, became primarily a means of inhibiting the militant development of the proletarian class struggle and tying the workers of each nation to "their own" bourgeoisie and the economic development of "their own" national capitalism. The essentially counterrevolutionary role of the social democracies was confirmed by their responses to the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the revolutionary situations that developed throughout the world in the aftermath of World War I.

In 1933 the most important section of the Third International outside the Soviet Union, the German Communist Party, thanks to the grotesque "third period" line of the Stalinist Comintern, proved utterly incapable of mounting a serious struggle against Hitler's seizure of power. Instead of openly drawing the lessons of this catastrophic failure, the entire Third International pretended no serious political errors had been committed, while moving, initially behind closed doors, from the bureaucratic ultimatism and adventurism of the late 1920s and early 1930s to the crassly opportunist policies of popular-frontism in 1934-1936. Popular-frontism and global class-collaborationism became the fundamental strategy of the Third International, to which the actual organization of the Third International itself was sacrificed in 1943.

The incapacity of the German Communist Party or the Comintern to respond in any sort of communist fashion to the victory of Hitler led Trotsky in 1933 to turn from the strategy of fighting to regenerate the bureaucratic-centrist Third International to the strategy of fighting to build a Fourth International, seeing the Comintern as still bureaucratic-centrist but no longer capable of regeneration. And with the adoption by the Stalinist government and Comintern of policies openly endorsing the "right to national self-defense" of the "democratic" imperialists, the Comintern became itself, by the time of its seventh world congress in 1935, a counterrevolutionary force, in practice social-patriotic and committed to preventing world proletarian revolution.

In the aftermath of World War II, Stalinist parties betrayed the working classes throughout Europe and Asia, preventing or aborting revolutionary struggles. The bureaucratic extension of collectivized property in Eastern Europe and, eventually, East Asia and Cuba, did not alter the essential character of Stalinism as an international counterrevolutionary force.

The Fourth International has not gone through such a decisive transformation. Its degeneration and fragmentation have led to the development of a set of organizations which, with a few exceptions -- essentially the LSSP of Sri Lanka and the Posadists -- cannot be regarded as consolidated counterrevolutionary organizations within the workers' movement. The international and national organizations presenting themselves as Trotskyist differ qualitatively from the essentially counterrevolutionary social-democratic and Stalinist formations.

The great majority of the forces which have degenerated from Trotskyism maintain politics which are generally revisionist and centrist -- or, in a few instances, ultraleft-revisionist -- without openly breaking with or fully liquidating the Trotskyist program.

The Pabloites have distorted the Trotskyist program and adapted it to various nonrevolutionary petty-bourgeois and bureaucratic currents. They have subordinated or denied the role of Trotskyist parties as the necessary expression of the political independence of the working class, in favor of adaptation to these nonproletarian and nonrevolutionary forces. The organizations of the International Committee of 1963-1971 tended to combine national-Trotskyist adaptationism with extreme forms of national-Trotskyist sectarianism (Lambert most clearly characterized by capitulation to social democracy, Healy by collapse into crazy sectarianism).

But, from both sides of the 1953 split, organizations and tendencies survive whose opportunist and sectarian revisions of Trotskyism have not yet produced a complete and decisive break with the programmatic bases of revolutionary proletarian politics. These organizations continue to relate themselves positively, in various ways, to the Transitional Program of 1938. Programmatically they still stand on the perspective of the proletarian dictatorship based on soviet democracy, still formally reject popular-frontism, still declare their commitment to proletarian internationalism, and still -- with some confusion and some significant exceptions -- maintain the Trotskyist analysis of the Stalinist regimes and the necessity of defense of the collectivized property forms against imperialism -- even while revising and distorting these principles and adapting to currents hostile to them. They are essentially centrist organizations, but centrist organizations of a special kind.

In continuing to proclaim their adherence, even in a distorted fashion, to the revolutionary program of Trotskyism, these organizations continue to attract militants breaking towards revolutionary politics from social democracy, Stalinism, and conventional forms of centrism.

The actual and potential role of these "Trotskyist-centrist" organizations as apparently revolutionary-Marxist poles of attraction to advanced workers in the majority of the advanced capitalist, semicolonial, and Stalinist countries, creates a highly contradictory, complex and historically unprecedented situation with fundamental implications for the strategic perspectives of orthodox Trotskyists fighting for the political regeneration and organizational reconstruction of the Fourth International. Not only do these organizations themselves vacillate between revolutionary and opportunist policies. In continuing to claim to base themselves on the Transitional Program, they retain the capacity to expose cadres, however inadvertently, to actual Trotskyist positions. Their constant vacillation between Trotskyist and revisionist policies tends to generate not only frequent splits but also frequent clashes of internal tendencies and factions, in which, over and again, some militants rise to the defense of at least some Trotskyist positions against revisionism.

All of this means that, even though, by and large, the leaderships of these organizations are hardened in their revisionist and adaptationist positions, these organizations, viewed as a whole on an international scale, tend: to contain militants who are moving toward orthodox Trotskyist positions; to be subject to a constant process of limited struggles for Trotskyist positions; and to display a constant tendency to draw toward themselves advanced workers searching, in reality, for the revolutionary alternative of Trotskyism.

For the orthodox Trotskyists to turn their backs on the advanced workers being drawn toward Trotskyist positions by the "Trotskyist-centrist" organizations and the militants fighting for Trotskyist positions within them, would be an act of sectarianism of historically tragic proportions. Rather, the task of orthodox Trotskyists is to develop an international tendency oriented strategically toward reconstructing the Fourth International through linking up with, supporting, and organizing every struggle for Trotskyism, every genuinely Trotskyist development throughout the world, both within and outside the major "Trotskyist-centrist" organizations.

In situations in which they find themselves organized independently, orthodox Trotskyists must develop exemplary work in the class struggle in ways that will make them genuine poles of attraction to advanced workers, both outside and within the "Trotskyist-centrist" groupings. Within the "Trotskyist-centrist" organizations, Trotskyist factions must fight for the political regeneration of these organizations, basing themselves in particular on struggles arising from the problems of revolutionary intervention in the ongoing proletarian class struggle.

In the sense that in all the organizations derived from the crisis of the Fourth International and claiming to base themselves on the Transitional Program, some conscious struggle for the political regeneration of the Fourth International has taken place, is taking place, and must take place in the next period, in this sense, we must recognize and define the contours of a somewhat amorphous international movement in which consistent Trotskyists must fight to develop and unify all the genuinely Trotskyist forces in the regenerated and reconstructed Fourth International.

By this perspective we do not mean that orthodox Trotskyists in any way identify or confuse their program with the concrete program and policy of either Pabloite or anti-Pabloite revisionists. Nor do we mean that any form of centrism or revisionism, including Pabloism, can somehow, in and of itself, be treated as a consistent, revolutionary Marxist trend. Nor do we mean that these "Trotskyist-centrist" organizations derived from the crisis of the Fourth International should be the sole arena of the struggle to regenerate the Fourth International. An international Trotskyist faction could decide to enter as a whole into one international "Trotskyist-revisionist" organization, to work primarily within a number of such organizations, to function primarily as a group of independent organizations, and so on -- all depending on the concrete conditions best favoring the struggle to regenerate the Fourth International.

What the recognition of the special character of these centrist groupings does mean is that orthodox Trotskyists must maintain a strategic orientation toward them. Further, their special character has a number of specific practical implications.

Within the "Trotskyist-centrist" organizations, we must promote the formation of orthodox Trotskyist factions, united on an international basis with each other -- independently of the various international or national organizations in which they may respectively be intervening -- and with the independent orthodox Trotskyist organizations, all the components together forming an international Trotskyist faction, organized on a democratic-centralist basis both internationally and in its national sections.

The Trotskyist factions working within the "Trotskyist-centrist" organizations should, as a general rule, have neither an orientation committed in advance to short-run entries aimed at quickly splitting these organizations nor an orientation never under any circumstances to split these organizations. Rather, the main tactical orientation of such Trotskyist factions should be to fight in a disciplined way for their political ideas within the rules of these organizations and to make the centrist leaders clearly responsible for any administrative measures, such as expulsions.

Such tactical considerations do not imply that there is a clearly established, guaranteed course of action which necessarily leads to the revolutionary regeneration and reorganization of the Fourth International. Nor do such considerations imply that it is inevitable or even probable that we will actually succeed in regenerating any one or more of the extant "Trotskyist-revisionist" formations. However, only the flexible, dialectical strategy of such a struggle for political regeneration, combining independent work in the proletarian class struggle with factional intervention within the "Trotskyist-revisionist" organizations, will allow us to complete the actual complex process, however it may develop concretely, which -- through splits, fusions, partial regenerations, and growth of independent work -- will enable the international Trotskyist faction to win the political majority of the militants orienting to Trotskyism throughout the world and be transformed into the regenerated Fourth International.

A whole series of practical alternatives for the development of the activity of orthodox Trotskyists will present themselves. Trotskyists must be prepared to adjust their tactics to the concrete development of the struggle to regenerate the Fourth International and the concrete development of the international struggle of the working class -- on the sole condition that they maintain the absolute political independence of the international orthodox Trotskyist faction.