In October 1957 the Fifth Congress of the Fourth International met in Italy; there were over a hundred delegates and fraternal observers, representing more than 25 countries from all the continents. It was far-and-away the most representative Congress, and the richest in discussions and amplifications, in the entire history of the International.
We have collected in this volume the principal documents of this Congress, whose general line, after a broad and most democratic discussion, was voted unanimously.
These documents are: the theses on international economic and political perspectives, accompanied by the report made thereon to the Congress by Comrade Pablo; the introduction to the study on the evolution of the colonial revolution since the Second World War, accompanied by the report made thereon to the Congress by Comrade P. Frank; the theses on the rise, decline, and conditions for the fall, of Stalinism, accompanied by the report made thereon to the Congress by Comrade E. Germain; extracts from the report on the activity of the International by Comrade Pablo; and the Manifesto of the Fifth World Congress.
The text on the evolution of the colonial revolution since the Second World War is in reality only a preamble to a more detailed document on the question, whose preparation the Fifth World Congress entrusted to the new International Executive Committee for adoption at one of its coming plenums.
As for the theses on Stalinism, they include both those voted at the time of the Fourth World Congress of the International in 1954 on the rise and decline of Stalinism, and those voted at the Fifth World Congress on the decline and fall of Stalinism.
Taken together, the documents assembled in this volume give a quite complete idea both of the present positions of the Fourth International on all the great political problems of the hour, and even of our whole epoch, and also of its own theoretical and political level. They are unquestionably a living proof of the reality of the existence of an authentic international revolutionary Marxist movement, the direct heir to the traditions, the ideas, and the method of thought of the Bolshevism of lenin and the first years of the Third International, as well as of the Soviet and international left tendency that Leon Trotsky was able to inspire and lead.
The richness, vigor, and revolutionary substance of the present thought of the Fourth International on all the great poli. tical problems of the moment strongly stands out from these documents. The realities, problems, and prospects-both of the capitalist world and of those states called « workers' » because of their economic and social bases—are freely and deeply analyzed in the light of the dialecties of revolutionary Marxism, in order to derive therefrom a clear line of fruitful revolutionary action. This is the best demonstration of the correctness of the road on which the movement of the Fourth International set out some years ago, in order to take its stand not as a critical negation of Stalinism but as a positively alternative communist line, in every fieid of our fantastically extraordinary and dynamic mid-century.
This characteristic of the thought of the Fourth International is both the cause and the effect of its practical line of systematically and patiently sinking the roots of its organizations and militants into the real mass movement of each country.
The Fifth World Congress had the proof of this both in the reports of practical activity, successes, and progress of the sections of the Fourth International, and in the high qualifications of the militants, the atmosphere of the discussions, and the thoroughly free and democratic climate of the organization.
The unanimity which ratified the vote on the general line of the documents, far from being the sign of the uniformity of a bureaucratic organization which strancritical thought, gies or sterilizes was in reality the demonstration of the high degree of political homogeneity reached by the movement of the Fourth International through its free and broad experience.
In many ways the Fifth World Congress capitalized upon, systematized, and rendered fruitful the achievements of all preceding congresses of the Fourth International, particularly the Third 1951) and Fourth (1954) Congresses.
The Third World Congress had drawn attention ta the change in the global relationship of forces in the world in favor of the Revolution. This recognition was a starting-point for the development of a whole series of political and tactical consequences: an understanding of war as a form of resistance by imperialism to the forward drive of the Revolution, 10 the irreversible advance of the colonial revolution; a change in the relationship of forces between the Soviet bureaucracy and the Soviet and international masses; the decline and crisis of Stalinism; the decline and crisis of the traditional mass organizations. The Third World Congress furthermore began the tactical turn toward entrist policy in Socialist or Communist mass organizations.
The Fourth World Congress completed this tactical turn and gave more thorough analysis of the conditions of the rise and decline of Stalinism. It furthermore proclaimed again, in the teeth of attacks by centrifugal and liquidationist, sectarian or demoralized currents,l that the essence, the grounds for existence, and the strength of the international Trotskyist movement lay in the existence of a world democratic. centralist organization: the Fourth International.
The Fifth World Congress renewed and advanced, in a synthesis at a higher level, all these fundamental gains of the Fourth Internationai, deepening its analysis in a whole series of new directions: the economic conjuncture of post-war capitaiism, and of possible economic perspectives both for capital. for the coming decade, sm and for the workers' states; problems
FOURTH İNTERNATIONAL resulting from the loss of colonies and from the industrialization of colonial and dependent countries; the political problems of the colonial revolution; the conditions •and perspectives for the decline and fall of Stalinism; a programme for the political revolution in degenerate or deformed workers' states, taking into account the concrete experience of Stalinism and the revolutionary action of the masses; new problems of the entrist tactic in mass organizations, etc.
Strengthened by these gains, the fourth International is more than ever convinced that the coming years will see the inevitable triumph of its fundamental ideas and will completely justify the long, tenacious, unequalled struggles of the Trotskyist movement for now more than 30 years. The future belongs to the authentic communism of Mar: Lenin, and Trotsky, that frees the inuividual from all social exploitation, from all constraint, and aims to create the material conditions for a full flowering of the faculties of man as a social being.
The errors, the crimes, and the monstrous deformations which accompanied the beginnings of the world socialist revolution, as incarnated above all in the Stalinist regime in the USSR, have nowise mortgaged the sure future of communism and of humanity. The fact that, parallel with Stalinism, the movement of the Fourth International exists, shows that the factually monstrous degeneration the first workers' state must be imputed, not to Marxism, but to its deformatión and profanation in a concrete case, under the pressure of specific and temporarily unfavorable historic conditions.
But we have already arrived at the stage of the inevitable liquidation of Stalinism, of the triumph of the Revolution, and consequently of a new dawn of the creative ideas and action of revolutionary Marxism, bringing freedom to man.
That is, in essence, the most profound message of the Fifth World Congress of the Fourth International.