THE 25th ANNIVERSARY OF THE
FOUNDING OF THE FOURTH
INTERNATIONAL
By PIERRE FRANK
TWENTY-five International ears ago the Fourth was founded. This decision was taken on the insistence of Leon Trotsky after a struggle of almost a decade to reform the Communist International and its sections, during which he vigourously opposed those who wished to create a new International earlier. He made the decisive turn after Hitler came to power; that is, after a decisive defeat of the German working class which then constituted the main centre of the international proletariat in the advanced capitalist countries. From 1933 on, Trotsky worked with all his strength for the creation of a new international leadership... The foundation of the Fourth International in 1938 is without doubt a decision of Trotsky's that has been much disputed. The Trotskyist movement itself hesitated for some time; thus in 1936, an international Conference of the Trotskyists did not accept the proposal of Trotsky to found the Fourth International. Even in 1938 resistance had not died and the echo can be found in a passage of the Transitional Programme:
"Sceptics ask: but has the moment for the creation of the Fourth International yet arrived? It is impossible, they say, to create an International 'artificially'; it can arise only out of great events, etc., etc....The Fourth International has already arisen out of great events: the greatest defeats of the proletariat in history. The cause for these defeats is to be found in the degeneration and perfidy of the old leadership. The class struggle does not tolerate an interruption. The
Third International, following upon the
Second, is dead for purposes of revolution. Long live the Fourth International! "But has the time yet arrived to proclaim its creation?....the sceptics are not quieted down. The Fourth International, we answer, has no need of being "proclaimed', It exists and it fights.
Trotsky, recognising that it still consisted only of cadres, emphasised that its strength lay in its doctrine, its programme, its tradition, the temper of its cadres.
It is by no means pointless to recall the epoch in which this decision was taken. The working class movement was suffering defeat after defeat. Europe was increasingly, covered by Fascism. Stalinism ruled in totalitarian fashion in the U.S.S.R and in the Communist parties. World war loomed the horizon. Demoralisation ferocious adversaries of the formation of a formation spreading in vanguard circles; showed themselves the centrist the most new revolutionary International.
The creation of the Fourth International, undertaken above all under the inspiration of Trotsky, went really against the current. Of what use was it? What have you achieved? Such are the questions which we hear often enough and which an anniversary such as this gives the opportunity to deal with.
Let us agree that at the time, the Trotskyists and Trotsky himself had illusions, not with regard to the immediate difficulties (these incited the creation of the Fourth International) but about the time needed by the Fourth International to become a mass organisation. But important though the rate of development be, it is not by this that Marxists judge the historical correctness of a position. The vitality of the organisation, the historical setting, theoretical and political contributions, these are the real criteria for judging the decision to found the Fourth International.
Despite enormous material difficulties, the gigantic pressures to which it was subjected, the Fourth International, unlike all the national centrist organisations and the London Bureau, has not disappeared; on the contrary, it alone has continued to strug-
15 gle for its ideas and its programme. Against the scale of the fifty years which separate us from the unleashing of the First World Warand it is this historic scale which alone does not deceive-it can be said that, in this epoch packed with wars, revolutions and counter-revolutions, only the organisations adhering to the Socialist International, the official Communist parties and the Fourth International have had any continuity. It was so because these three organisations are not arbitrary or conjunctural creations, but formations which have powerful historic and social roots. The Socialist parties, going back to the beginnings of the European working class movement, have social roots in reformism, the Communist parties are connected with the Soviet Union; the Fourth International is connected with the Bolshevik Party and the Third International through the Russian and International Left Opposition, and it represents the fundamental historic interests of the international proletariat.
If the Communist parties have maintained themselves (although they have been practically eliminated in some countries in the course of events as in Cuba and Algeria where the national revolutionary leadership was assumed by others) the Communist International was liquidated with few words by Stalin, and since the end of the war, the Communist parties have found themselves caught between their need to constitute a united international organisation and the discords which developed among them along national lines due to their bureaucratisation and their exercise of power in a series of countries. The gigantic crisis of Stalinism, in the form at present of the Sino-Soviet conflict, indicates at the same time the definitive end of the memories of the Third International in its Stalinist period, and the need for the revolutionary currents : breaking from Stalinism to find an outlet internationally.
The Fourth International has not only defended the theoretical heritage of Bolshevism and maintained the concept of a revolutionary Marxist international, it has also in the course of these twenty-five years enriched
Marxism in the light of the grandiose struggles of this period, and participated in all these struggles.
The militants of the Fourth International have participated in the struggles of the European masses against Nazism, in the Spanish Revolution, in the uprisings in Asia, in the struggles of the Latin-American masses. They have participated in the Algerian. Revolution and in the struggles which are presently developing on the African conti-
The American Trotskyists are involved nent. in the struggles of the Negroes, connecting the colonial revolution to the North American revolution. And the Trotskyists, quite naturally, are coming in touch with the new generation in the workers' states who oppose the bureaucracy-including "liberal' form-and are trying to discover their historic connection with October.
To summarise the ideological contributions of the Fourth International to the understanding of the phenomena of the richest of revolutionary epochs is not easy. By its origins, by its connections with Opposition, it owed it to itself to pursue the study of developrr.ents in the U.S.S.R and in the workers' states, of the problems of planning, of agriculture, of the efforts of the bureaucracy to adapt to altogether new situations; above all, it had to explain "deStalinisation", this self-defence of the bureaucracy faced with the demands of Soviet society.
The Fourth International has also been led to consider the problems posed in the economically developed capitalist states, where an unforseen and prolonged economic boom has been witnessed. explained the causes of such a conjuncture, its temporary character, the new problems which it placed before the working-class movement, also new phenomena such as the formation of the European Common
It did this while faced with an extraordinary strengthening of formist and revisionist tendencies in the working-class movement, not only in the form of centrist groupings, unimportant in the long range, but open rejection of Marxist traditions by the Social Democracy the shameless adoption by the Communist parties of the 'democratic' conceptions opposed by the Bolsheviks in the earliest years of the Russian Revolution.
The Fourth International has above all not failed to make its contribution to the colonial revolutions which have developed uninterruptedly since the end of the Second
World War. It was prepared for this by its untiring defence of the theory of the Permanent Revolution against Stalinism. Without this theory it is impossible to achieve a correct over-all view of these revolutions, to place them in the world march towards socialism. The Fourth International has not failed to explain the importance of factors which were not given extensive consideration in classical Marxism, such as the peasantry, guerilla wars, revolutionary leaderships influenced by the great examples of the Russian and Chinese Revolutions. It endeavoured to disentangle the specific roads of these revolutions, so different from the traditional working-class movements of the old capitalist countries.
It would not have been possible to produce such a theoretical and political contribution without the creation of the Fourth International, without precisely the existence of an organisation which unites on an international scale revolutionary thought and action. Specialists in their specific spheres have made contributions which are very valuable for Marxist theory and for the working-class movement, and the Fourth International has been the first to recognise these services to the cause of socialism. But it is neither egoistic nor smug to say that the Fourth International alone has made the most complete and rounded contribution, that it has fulfilled as far as its forces permitted, the task for which it was in the first instance founded. It has done this in spite of extraordinary difficulties, not least being the ruling bureaucracies of the workers' states, disposing of material forces incomparably greater in all respects than the old reformist bureaucracies so often denounced in the past.
Nobody knows the political strength of the Fourth International better than these bureaucracies, the Soviet bureaucracy the first place. It has an infallible nose for its own interests and is completely empiricist. This generally appreciated, yet even specialists wonder why the bureaucracy has not given up seeing Trotskyism as a danger to be destroyed at all costs; why it has in fighting Trotskyism and the Fourth International, devoted money and forces which appear incommensurate with our numerically weak organisations, with this movement so often buried, but which never dies.
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Better than anyone else, the bureaucracy knows the extraordinary importance of the Fourth International, it knows it not as a result of theoretical understanding, but through a keen instinct of self-preservation.
The crisis of international Stalinism is in process of becoming very acute. The Sino-Soviet dispute has given rise to a big debate on the most important political problems of our epoch, including the road to socialism in all sectors of the present-day world (colonial countries, workers' states, developed capitalist countries). Connected with these problems, with their discussion in the Communist parties, is the question of the political instrument, of a new leadership, of a mass revolutionary International capable of unifying and leading the struggles on such a vast scale, in such diversified conditions. It is precisely because of this that antagonists, suddenly frightened, accuse each other of playing the game of the Trotskyists, of the Fourth International. It was due to force of circumstances that IzVESTIA celebrated in its own way the Twenty-fifth anniversary of the Fourth International, by publishing an article which, for the critical public that is not lacking in the USSR, was an involuntary eulogy.
It would not be right to celebrate this twenty-fifth anniversary without taking up an argument often invoked against the Fourth International, i.e. its numerous internal difficulties, the many crises and splits which it has been subjected. obviously no need to reply to the idiotic giggles of people belonging to centrist formations hostile to Trotskyism, who are incapable of either formulating a programme or of building an organisation. It is to the numerous militants attracted by Trotskyist ideas but repelled by the organisational weakness and discords among Trotskyists that we owe an explanation for the pheno-
Let us add that they will understand this situation better in future as the crisis of international Stalinism widens in objective causes-above alParte weight of official Communist the Stalinised Soviet State on the one hand and the capitalist state power on the other in the working class movement-explains the difficulty which the organisations of the Fourth International have had to face in breaking through as mass organisations.
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