SIXTY YEARS OF THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL

The Struggle to Build the World Party of Socialist Revolution

By Matt Siegfried

"The sense of history is the consciousness of participation in the collective destiny, in the constant development of mankind; it involves knowledge, tradition, choice, and hence, conviction; it commands a duty – for, from the moment we know, have understood and discriminated among the possible directions, we must live (act) according to this sudden awareness…The difficulty is that the sense of history comes into conflict with ruling interests; for the same reason, history remains a terribly inexact science. The wars and revolutions begun in 1914 will give – do give – a likely tremendous momentum to this form of clear consciousness in spite, or even because, of the partial and temporary obscurations which they cause."--Victor Serge, January 5, 1944

Since the founding of the International Workingmen’s Association in 1864, the revolutionary Marxist movement’s most important tool for developing and putting forward its ideas, as well as intervening in the international class struggle with the aim of fostering socialist revolution, has been the building and maintaining of an international organization. As well as attempting to provide, in action, the basis for the slogan "Workers of the world, unite!" an International has been an essential component of the building of strong national and regional organizations. Since Marxism reacts to and is molded by the forces and pressures of history, the Internationals have taken very different organizational forms and occasionally suffered from severe political confusion. For this reason, it has repeatedly been necessary, in the midst of a crisis affecting the whole of the Marxist movement precipitated by crisis affecting the whole of humanity, to create a new International. When a tool is dulled and weakened, a new tool must be found to replace it.

From the First International to the Second

The First International collapsed in the reaction and confusion following the defeat of the Paris Commune of 1871, the first time workers had taken power in their own name. As strong national organizations were rebuilt, Marxists set out to build a new International. Engels, Marx’s closest friend and collaborator, was one of the outstanding figures in the struggle for and then the early life of the Socialist (Second) International. The Second International rose with the increasingly strong and conscious working class of Europe. Socialism became the ideology of this working class, as it set out to defend its interests against emerging monopoly capital.

Trade Unions made and won demands on a vibrant European capitalist economy bolstered by the looting of colonies and semicolonies in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Superprofits from the export of capital made the ruling classes of Europe wealthy enough to buy relative social peace with the working class. Political parties were made legal and won seats in parliaments. It seemed to some in the Marxist movement that socialism would advance without interruption to a peaceful restructuring of society. They began to develop a theory of "evolutionary socialism." If socialism could be achieved through reforms, the argument went, then revolution wasn’t necessary. To win reforms, socialists needed to moderate their demands and strengthen the institutions of bourgeois democracy, which would carry out the reforms.

Against this false notion that capitalism could be peacefully reformed out of existence, many, including Rosa Luxemburg, argued for a return to the basic Marxist precept that the bourgeois state must be smashed. They argued that for socialism to be realized, the working class must build new, infinitely more democratic institutions on a new social foundation. When the mad grab for colonies and spheres of influence led to conflict among the imperialist powers, the Second International was unprepared for the cataclysm. Most sections of the International had enjoyed years of "peaceful" growth, focused on trade-union and parliamentary tasks. Instead of seeing the ruling class and the state as enemies to be fought, many had come to see them as partners in reform. This led to abandonment of their professed internationalism as soon as actual fighting broke out and World War I began.

The majority of the sections of the International chose to support their own ruling classes in a war being fought to redivide the world. Rosa Luxemburg called the Second International a "stinking corpse" in response to its betrayal of the working class. From the Second International to the Third A very small number of revolutionaries insisted on challenging the leadership of the International by appealing directly to the working class, as well as the rank-and-file Social Democrats. They gathered at the Zimmerwald and Kienthal conferences to discuss the situation. The left wing of the internationalists insisted that the war among the imperialist governments of Europe should be turned into a civil war between the international working class and all the national ruling classes. Their battle calls were "The main enemy is at home" and "Turn the guns around."

The Russian Revolution of 1917 was the beginning of a great revolutionary upheaval that spread across Europe and into Asia and North and South America at the end of World War I. While the Russian Revolution was still fighting for its life from invasion and internal reaction, the Bolsheviks called for a conference to found the Communist (Third) International or Comintern. The left of the Second International, including well-known figures like Clara Zetkin and Franz Mehring, were won to the new International.

The Comintern began to build or rebuild revolutionary parties throughout the world in places were the working class had been radicalized by the experiences of the war and the Russian Revolution. The new International attracted the most conscious and determined revolutionary fighters from around the world. The experience, tasks, and difficulties of the Russian Revolution and the seething situation in Europe and the East led to many advances in Marxist thinking. These were reflected in the wide and deep range of discussions and activities the International engaged in during its first years of existence.

The rise of Stalinism

The Bolsheviks were able, at a great price, to defeat fourteen invading armies, including troops from the US and Canada, as well as the remaining Czarist forces, on a fluctuating front 5,000 miles long. But the Bolsheviks had known all along that their revolution could not survive in isolation. Backward Russia could never, on its own, achieve socialism.

From 1921 the revolutionary tide began to ebb in Europe. The much-anticipated and hoped-for German revolution went through dramatic and violent struggles – including the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebnecht – but the German working class failed to seize and hold power. Revolutions were defeated in several countries of Eastern Europe. The struggle ebbed, even in Russia, the working class exhausted after years of war and revolution. The Comintern, built in the midst of rising class struggle, had to come to terms with a temporarily restabilized imperialism and a working class in retreat. In Russia, a realignment was taking place. A faction of the Communist Party, representing the interests of the government bureaucracy and led by Joseph Stalin, sought to establish a new, peaceful relationship with imperialism. To justify this policy, the Stalinists invented the notion of "building socialism in one country." This not only flew in the face of all established Marxist thought about the necessity of worldwide economic restructuring, it completely ignored the reality of the Soviet Union. The country was too backward and too isolated to achieve socialism. Stalin’s faction began a campaign of lies about the history of the Revolution to discredit those in the leadership, like Trotsky, who stood for a revolutionary policy nationally and internationally. They turned the Comintern into an instrument of the opportunist foreign policy of the new ruling elite of the Soviet Union.

Falsely claiming the mantle of the Russian Revolution, they sacrificed the parties of the Comintern as pawns in a chess game with imperialism. Their zigzags had disastrous consequences for the working class, as in the Chinese revolution of 1925-27. The Struggle of the Left Opposition Against this, many veterans of 1917, including Leon Trotsky and other key leaders of the Revolution, formed the Left Opposition and then the International Left Opposition (ILO). They combined a national struggle against the bureaucracy, for workers’ democracy, and for planned economic development, with an international struggle for a revolutionary policy in the Comintern. The Left Opposition battled for the soul of the Comintern for a decade. The Revolution in Russia was degenerating to a frightening degree. Many of the old practices and prejudices of Czarist Russia were being revived, including bureaucratic and managerial arrogance, national chauvinism, anti-Semitism, and sexism. The Comintern faced the rise of fascism and the growing crisis in Germany with a mix of sectarian pontification and opportunist impotence. What was needed, instead, was a policy of the united front for defense of the working class – the unity of all the workers’ organizations against the fascists. Having defeated the fascists, the German working class, led by the Communist Party, could have moved quickly to an offensive struggle against the fascists’ paymasters, the German capitalists.

The whole of the Comintern, apart from the ILO, stood by and watched, as the most powerful working class in Europe suffered its greatest defeat. The Comintern stupidly proclaimed "Hitler’s policies will discredit the fascists, then it will be our turn to take power," as the Nazis took power and immediately began destroying the organizations of the working class and the left, including the German Communist Party. Apart from the ILO, no organized tendency in the Comintern challenged the leadership’s disastrous policy. This was the final straw. The ILO concluded that the Third International, as a revolutionary tool, was broken beyond repair. It was now necessary to build a Fourth International.

The first years of the Fourth International

The Fourth International (FI) was officially founded at a conference in early September 1938 in a small village outside Paris. Its forces were small, and its activists hounded, some murdered, by the secret police of various governments. Reaction seemed to be triumphing everywhere. Fascism was on the march throughout Europe. The "Midnight of the Century" had already darkened Germany and Italy. The antifascists in Spain were encircled, having been betrayed and abandoned by the remaining "democracies" and the Soviet Union. In the Soviet Union, the last of the Left Opposition – the true heirs to the legacy of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 – were being liquidated. Japan had begun its murderous campaign in China, soon to expand to all parts of Asia. The New Deal in the US and the popular fronts in Europe, having succeeded in "saving capitalism from itself," were careening towards the inevitable consequence of their policies, a new world war. Humankind was on the verge of its darkest hour – the imperialist slaughter of World War II.

The Fourth International worked heroically against the war. Its members smuggled documents into the Soviet Union as merchant marines and clandestinely published antiwar newspapers for the soldiers of both sides on the western front. The Fourth International took part in the military defense of China and Vietnam against Japanese imperialism. In Holland, they led the only industrial action in Europe against the deportation of Jews to concentration camps. In the US, the top leaders of the Socialist Workers Party, the US section of the Fourth International, were arrested and jailed for sedition, because of their revolutionary opposition to the war. The war had a devastating effect on the cadre of the Fourth International. In the runup to the war, the FI was infiltrated, and leading members were killed by Stalin’s GPU, forerunner to the KGB. These included Rudolf Klement, the secretary of the FI, Trotsky’s son Leon Sedov, and a leading member of the GPU who had defected to the Fourth International, Ignace Reiss. In the war, many militants of the FI perished on the battlefield or in concentration camps. In August 1940, Stalin was finally able to kill Trotsky. A GPU agent plunged a pickaxe into the back of his head, as he sat working at his desk. These deaths, especially Trotsky’s, while they did not succeed in their objective of "cutting off the head and killing" the FI, couldn’t help but weaken and demoralize the new International.

The post-War restabilization and Pabloism

The Fourth Internationalists, like Trotsky before he was killed, expected to see a social explosion coming out of World War II that would at least equal the one that came out of World War I. They thought the explosion would bring them to leadership of the working class. They did not expect imperialism or Stalinism to survive. The explosion happened: a worldwide strike wave, including in the US, partial revolutions in Greece and Italy, the impetus for the welfare state in Western Europe, lesser concessions to the US working class, the overturn of capitalist property in Eastern Europe, the Chinese Revolution, the victorious revolutions in the northern parts of Vietnam and Korea, Indian independence, and the beginning of decolonization worldwide. But the Trotskyists didn’t come to leadership of the working class. And the explosion didn’t destroy imperialism and Stalinism. They survived and strengthened and stabilized each other. The Fourth International grew. In Vietnam, Bolivia, and Sri Lanka, its sections became organizations with considerable influence in the masses and led important but, in the end, losing battles. The Chinese and Vietnamese sections, two of the strongest of the FI, were virtually annihilated by the Stalinists. Until very recently Chinese Trotskyists were still in Chinese prisons from that period!

In response to the unforeseen restabilization of imperialism and Stalinism, some Fourth Internationalists began to question the possibility and necessity of independent Trotskyist organizations. They began to believe that other, nonrevolutionary parties, especially the Stalinists, would be in the forefront of the anticapitalist struggle. This current, led by Michel Pablo, proposed that the Trotskyists join the Stalinist parties with the aim of a long-term intervention to slowly win these groups and their counterrevolutionary leaderships to revolutionary positions. As this idea began to gain ground in the FI, those who were opposed to it opted out of a fight with the revisionists. In 1953 they simply walked away, creating their own Fourth International. Thus began the long descent into organizational fragmentation and political confusion that plagues the Fourth International today.

The situation today

The Fourth International, as it was before 1953, does not exist today. Trotskyists have played major roles in many important class battles around the world. They have contributed to the collective consciousness of the workers and the oppressed, especially in the colonial and neocolonial world. As a result of the general radicalization of the late 1960s and early 1970s, there are many more people now who identify themselves as Trotskyists than there were when Trotsky was alive. But without an authoritative and defining experience, such as the Russian Revolution, to unite the Trotskyist movement, the organizational fragmentation and political confusion have increased exponentially. Some Trotskyists have sought authoritative and defining experiences outside of revolutionary Marxism, for example, in the Cuban and Nicaraguan revolutions or the student movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. They have abandoned key elements of the Trotskyist program to fit these frameworks. Others have retreated into defending their own "unique," sectarian positions. They hold these positions only in their heads and on paper, being too cut off from the working class to test them in action. Still, for the most part, the Fourth International has not followed the Second and Third Internationals in betraying the working class in action. In part, this is because Trotskyists have remained at the periphery of the working class and have not had the opportunity for such betrayals. But the fact remains: They have not betrayed, as the social democrats and Stalinists have.

The crises of the workers’ movement and the left since the collapse of the Soviet Union have had an enormous impact on Trotskyists. They have both intensified the crisis of Trotskyism and presented Trotskyists with new opportunities. In the US, organized Trotskyism is in its worst shape ever. At the same time, Trotskyism in other places is experiencing its greatest influence ever, as workers come to realize that the "collapse of communism" in the East does not mean that capitalism is history’s only path. In the 1995 presidential election in France, Arlette Laguiller, the candidate of the Trotskyist group Lutte Ouvrière, got 1.6 million votes, foreshadowing the discontent that erupted into a partial general strike in December of that year. In the 1997 legislative elections in Argentina, the Trotskyist group Partido Obrero received 150,000 votes, its highest total ever. In Italy over the past few weeks, the Revolutionary Marxist Association Proposta, cothinkers of the Trotskyist League, have grabbed international headlines, as they helped push the Party for a Communist Refounding to break with the center-left government in a political battle over the government’s austerity budget proposals. This is their greatest level of influence ever. Rebuild the Fourth International!

No Trotskyist organization today is the Fourth International or can grow linearly into the Fourth International. The United Secretariat of the Fourth International (USFI) is the largest international Trotskyist current and claims to be the Fourth International. But it is nowhere near large enough or hegemonic enough to be the Fourth International. Its assertion confuses and complicates the struggle to rebuild the Fourth International. Having "rejected the pretension, born in other times, of being the ‘World Party of Socialist Revolution,’" as the USFI said in its last World Congress, it should also give up the pretense of being the Fourth International. Most other international tendencies don’t claim to be the Fourth International, but they conduct themselves as if they thought they were the FI. Rebuilding the Fourth International remains a vital necessity. The world revolution needs a World Party of Socialist Revolution, as the Fourth International called itself in 1938. Trotskyism cannot be an effective political force in a situation of small, disparate, competing tendencies and widespread political confusion. Rebuilding the Fourth International must combine political regeneration and organizational reconstruction. Some of the fragments of the FI act in a Trotskyist manner most of the time, but they are too small to lead the working class to victory. Most of the fragments act in a Trotskyist manner some of the time. But they are too inconsistent to lead the working class to victory. Both problems must be solved.

The International Trotskyist Opposition (ITO), the international grouping with which the Trotskyist League is affiliated, is actively engaged in the class struggle in countries where we have supporters: Britain, Denmark, Germany, India, Italy, and the US. We are also engaged the struggle for Trotskyist regroupment nationally and internationally. The Trotskyist League and our cothinkers in the ITO do not see ourselves as the Fourth International or the nucleus of the Fourth International. We’re much too small. We need to unite with others. Naturally, we would prefer to unite with others with whom we fully agree. But, unfortunately, there are not enough such people to rebuild much of anything. So instead, we propose uniting as much of the Trotskyist movement as possible, on the basis of the key elements of the Trotskyist program we all say we agree with. The Trotskyist movement could take a big step forward, if several of the larger and many of the smaller Trotskyist organizations joined together, despite their important political differences.