Intended as the first of a series of volumes documenting the history of the Fourth International, this book covers the first four international conferences of the Trotskyist movement: the 1933 preconference of the International Left Opposition (ILO), the 1936 International Conference for the Fourth International, the founding conference of the Fourth International in 1938, and the FI's emergency conference in 1940. A fifth section includes selected documents from the years 1933-35.
During this period the central political question placed before the world working class was the struggle against fascism. The inability of the Social Democracy and the Stalinized Communist International to understand fascism, much less lead a fight against it, led the European proletariat from defeat to defeat, culminating in the imperialist slaughter of the second world war.
The 1933 preconference of the ILO met in February, only a week after Hitler had been installed as chancellor of Germany. At that time it was still not imagined that the German Stalinists and Social Democrats would simply lie down before Hitler without offering the slightest resistance. The preconference addressed an appeal to the German working class, stressing that the situation could still be saved by a united front to fight the fascists before they consolidated their power:
"The victory over fascism is still possible. Whoever tells you that all is lost, that the struggle is now in vain, is betraying you. You can still conquer. But in order to achieve victory, to avoid defeat, the whole working class must unite in the struggle against the reaction.
"This is possible on one condition: that all the organizations of the German proletariat— the Communist Party, the Social Democratic Party, the trade union organizations, the factory councils, etc. - undertake the joint struggle against fascism."
But with the failure of the German CP to put up any fight against Hit- 750
ler's consolidation of power, and the ratification of its line by the Third International, the Trotskyists concluded that it was no longer possible to
Documents of the Fourth International: The Formative Years
(1933-40) New York: Pathfinder
Press, 1973. 448 pp. $3.95, £1.65.
reform the Stalinized parties. New parties and a new international were needed.
The second section of Documents of the Fourth International provides important texts from this period, beginning with the July 1933 call for a new German Communist party and concluding with the July 1935 "Open Letter to All Revolutionary Proletarian Organizations and Groupings," signed by representatives of future sections of the new international in Canada, France, the Netherlands, the Soviet
Union, and the United
States.
Also included in this section are examples of the tactical orientations adopted as part of the strategy of constructing the Fourth International. Perhaps the best known are "The Declaration of the Four," which represented an attempt to win to revolutionary socialism several European centrist groupings then moving away from Stalinism; and "Resolution on the French Turn, "which approved the tactic of entering those Social Democratic parties in which there existed a left wing that could be won for the Fourth International.
Trotsky had hoped that the July 1936 conference of the International Communist League, as the ILO was called after it ceased to operate as a faction of the Third International, would be the founding conference of the new international. The participants, however, were reluctant to take the step, and they dubbed the meeting "for the Fourth International" rather than "of the Fourth International."
Trotsky, then in Norway, was unable to attend, but he wrote three of the documents adopted, including the major resolution, "The New Revolutionary Upsurge and the Tasks of the Fourth International."
This conference was sandwiched between the revolutionary upsurge of the French and Belgian workers in June and the infamous Moscow frameup trials, the first of which opened in August. In the period leading up to the founding conference of the Fourth International in September 1938, Stalin's agents carried out against Trotsky's followers the sentence of death passed against him in Moscow. Among the victims was Leon Sedov, Trotsky's son.
Two months before the founding conference opened, Rudolph Klement, who was responsible for its organization, was murdered in Paris, and documents in his possession were stolen. Because of this situation, the participants met under tight security conditions and the conference proceedings were limited to a single day.
Despite these handicaps, the thirty delegates from eleven countries accomplished the tasks before them, proclaiming the foundation of the international and adopting the Transitional Program, which has remained the basic programmatic document of the Fourth International to the present day. In addition to this document and many other resolutions that were adopted the minutes of the meeting, never previously published, are included in Part 4, devoted to the founding conference.
Seeing the imminence of the new imperialist war, the founding conference provided that the International Executive Committee of the international would be transferred to the Western Hemisphere when war broke out in Europe.
Following this transfer, an emergency conference was held in New York in May 1940. The emergency concerned not only the new world war, but also the internal life of the international. It was necessary for the conference to beat back attempts on the part of a minority in the Socialist Workers party in the United States to revise the international movement's analysis of the class nature of the Soviet Union.
Among the documents in Part 5 is the conference manifesto, the last programmatic statement by drafted
Trotsky before his assassination only three months later.
The seven years covered by this volume were a period of historic events, abrupt shifts in the political situation, and enormous opportunities and challenges for all tendencies in the working-class movement. The doc-
DUUUMEN d uments in this book - many of which have never before been printed in English, except in internal bulletins — provide an invaluable record of the response of the Fourth International.
-Allen Myers in custody and stop police harassment and re-arrests of those released.
4. Compensate all persons who have suffered injury or loss of property at the hands of the police or the military, and the dependants of those who have been killed by those forces.
5. Restore the fundamental rights of workers to strike.
Reinstate all persons who have been
Reinstate all persons who have been deprived of their employment by reason of "essential services" orders or other Emergency regulations.