I.
The founding conference of the Fourth International was held forty years ago, in a small apartment in the Paris region. It brought together about thirty representatives from eleven sections, mainly from Europe and North America. A single comrade from a colonial country managed to overcome the obstacles of extreme poverty and severe repression that prevented participation by other activists from the southern hemisphere.
This conference was the culmination of five years of efforts on the part of activists belonging to the former Left Opposition in the Communist parties to get the international working-class vanguard to draw the necessary conclusions from the collapse of the German workers movement before Hitler in 1933. The Second and Third Internationals had been transformed into giant bureaucratic obstacles to the world socialist revolution. A new instrument essential to the victory of the revolution had to be forged-a new revolutionary international of the proletariat.
What was involved was not an impressionistic reaction by an embittered handful or by people who were overreacting to the historic defeat that Hitler's coming to power represented for the working class of Europe. What was involved was the outcome of a long process in which the consciousness of a whole generation of clearthinking Communists matured.
The Hitler phenomenon could not be separated from the phenomenon of the degeneration of the first workers state, the USSR. Heavy blame lay with Stalin for having transformed the Communist International into a docile instrument of Soviet diplomacy, for having contributed in a decisive way to the Nazis' seizure of power, and for having thus created a mortal danger to the very existence of the Soviet Union. His counterrevolutionary policy was to culminate tragically in the massacre of a million Bolsheviks in the USSR itself, and in the smothering of the Spanish and French revolutions with the Popular Front policy in 1936 and 1937.
Among those who had realized at what turning-point world history and the destiny of the international workers movement stood were some of the most prominent Communist leaders in their respective countries, including many founders of their parties, members of the Executive Committee of the Communist International, members of central committees, even members of political bureaus or secretariats of those parties. We need only mention Leon Trotsky, Christian Rakovsky, and Evgeny Preobrazhensky (the first general secretary of the CPSU) from the Soviet Union; Ch'en Tu-hsiu from China; James P. Cannon from the United States; Edouard van Overstraeten and Léon Lesoil from Belgium; Sneevliet from the Netherlands; Nin and Andrade from Spain; Rosmer from France; Blasco (Tresso) from Italy; Josef Frey from Austria; Pantelis Pouliopoulos from Greece; and Ta Thu Thau from Vietnam.
Not all of them had the strength to pursue the task (which seemed all but superhuman) to completion, to begin again to patiently build a new international after having devoted a decade of their lives to building the Third. Nearly all were killed by the fascist, Stalinist, or imperialist terror. Those who unwaveringly maintained the continuity of Leninist thought and action by participating in the founding of the Fourth International will appear before history as the true pioneers of the socialist world of the future, like the internationalists of 1914 or the leaders of the October socialist revolution.
The founding conference of the Fourth International met under extremely difficult conditions. The international proletariat had been crippled by a series of defeats, each one heavier than the last. The defeat in Spain, where the proletariat had shown so much heroism and revolutionary ardor, was particularly tragic. Humanity was on the eve of a new war that would inflict on it suffering beyond all comparison, even with the previous one. A more and more marked pessimism gripped people's minds. Wasn't it "midnight in the century," as Victor Serge called it in the title of one of his novels? Wouldn't that night last for centuries?
We must understand this historical context in order to grasp the importance that Trotsky and his comrades attributed to the seemingly formal question of "proclaiming" the Fourth International (which was opposed only by the Polish section, represented at the founding conference by Comrade Isaac Deutscher). In practice, the "Movement for the Fourth International" had already been functioning for many years as an international organization based on démocratic centralism.
But the "proclamation" was an expression of faith in the destiny of the international proletariat and the socialist revolution. Its goal was to declare, if not before the world, at least before the vanguard and the members and activists of the movement itself: "Yes, despite the apparent victory of Stalinism and fascism, and of imperialist barbarism in the colonies, the nightmare we are living through will last for only a moment in the history of our century. Yes, in the course of and at the end of this war that is inevitably approaching, the revolution will rise again from its ashes. The toiling masses and oppressed peoples will rebel by the millions and tens of millions. Yes, the future belongs to socialism, to communism, despite all appearances to the contrary. And to forge that future it is necessary to build a world party of socialist revolution, a new revolutionary socialist international."
Today we are more than ever convinced that without this "proclamation," the political survival and cohesiveness of the revolutionary Marxist cadres scattered around the world, more or less divided into different geographic sectors by the successive ups and downs of the Second World War, subjected to savage persecution that, in some sectors, amounted to outright annihilation, would have been infinitely more difficult, if not impossible. In this sense, the tiny handful of congress participants in 1938, and their main inspiration, Leon Trotsky, made a decisive contribution to salvaging the historical continuity of Leninism at the most difficult time in its history.
II.
Nevertheless, ten years after the founding conference, in 1948, in the wake of the Second World Congress of the Fourth International, on the threshold of the cold war, it might have seemed that the revolutionary optimism of Trotsky and his comrades in 1938 had been unfounded. The huge growth of a new revolutionary vanguard, comparable to that which had occurred after 1917-18, did not take place. Ten years after its founding, the Fourth International was hardly any stronger than in the dark hours of 1938-40, except in two semicolonial countries, Ceylon and Bolivia, where it had made a breakthrough in the workers movement. Stalinism appeared triumphant. It was spreading to a growing number of countries. Imperialism, now firmly centralized internationally by the power of the United States, seemed on the point of unleashing a third world war. The manufacture of terrifying new weapons-above all nuclear weaponsgave this possibility proportions that were even more barbaric and heavier with consequences for the future of the human race than those of World War II.
It is now clear that, contrary to the mood which prevailed in 1938, the no less marked pessimism afflicting quite a few vanguard sectors in 1948 was much less warranted. The downturn in the world revolution was finished, and it was finished for a good long period. One by one, the working-class and peasant masses of Yugoslavia, China, and Vietnam were to inflict decisive defeats on capitalism and imperialism in their countries. The capitalist encirclement of the USSR would be broken. The revolution was to shake up the colonial empires, a chain reaction extending the victory of the Chinese revolution into Southeast Asia, the Arab world, North Africa, Latin America (Cuba), and Black Africa.
But the cumulative effects of twenty years of defeats for the working classdefeats that were neither "programmed" nor inevitable in 1923 or even in 1933, but that had become a fact by the end of that period-had caused the class consciousness of the proletariat to recede, so that the revolutionary upsurge that began in 1943- 44 could, on the whole, be contained by the traditional bureaucratic apparatuses or by centrist forces, unlike what had happened at the end of World War I.
The result was the smothering of this upsurge in Western Europe by the bureaucracies of the Social Democracy and of Stalinism, both of which strove with all their might to shore up the capitalist state and restore the capitalist economy. They were never outflanked by a wave of working-class militancy capable of giving rise to a new vanguard, one that would be broad enough to keep this counterrevolutionary scheme from being put into effect for years and years. This would have created much more favorable conditions for building much more powerful revolutionary parties.
At the point where the counterrevolutionary policy of the bureaucracies in the workers movement, wedded to an internationally centralized imperialist offensive, permitted the relative stabilization of capitalism in the West and in Japan, the center of gravity of the world revolution shifted to the colonial and semicolonial countries for two decades. This fact, which necessarily reduced the relative weight of the industrial proletariat within the worldwide revolutionary process, could not help but imply in turn a much slower growth than anticipated of the Fourth International, whose program reflects proletarian class consciousness at its highest level, a level that is most easily attainable by the proletariat in big industry, which is the most conscious vanguard of all the wage-earners and oppressed.
With the expected "breakthrough" having failed to occur in the immediate postwar period, the Fourth International experienced a series of difficulties in growth and internal crises that lasted for fifteen years. This was reflected in a succession of splits, the most painful of which occurred in 1953 and was not healed until the reunification of 1963. The immediate cause of these splits was probably the different questions, feelings, and reactions elicited from various sectors of the movement by the new, partly unforeseen developments in the objective world situation. But that was not where their fundamental causes, and especially their justification, lay. In fact, none of these international splits was programmatically justified, that is, not one reflected the historically demonstrable fact that one or another current in the Fourth International had crossed class lines or adopted positions that constituted a betrayal of the proletariat.*
The fundamental cause of all these splits was that under the conditions of extreme isolation that the Trotskyist movement still faced, and the obligation to swim against the stream, organizational sectarianism and factionalism multiplied. This was true not only because weak and relatively stagnating organizations do not produce any centripetal force that can neutralize the centrifugal tendencies inevitably radiating from the social environment. It resulted above all from the fact that, under such conditions, the temptation to "try out" each new tactical panacea, hoping that it would provide a rapid way out of isolation, and for that reason to provoke splits on purely tactical and conjunctural grounds, that is, on nonprogrammatic and unprincipled grounds, became irresistible for all who were gripped by impatience and the search for a shortcut to the difficult problem of reconstructing a revolutionary vanguard within the class and for the class, against the stream.
We should add that groups that carry out mainly propaganda activities have a tendency to lose their sense of proportion, to think that saying something makes it so, to identify a scratch with gangrene, and the beginning of a theoretical revision (or simply different interpretations of new objective phenomena) with practical political conduct that can lead to working-class defeats. They forget that Lenin and Luxemburg did not break with the Second International in 1898, when Bernstein's revisionist book came out, but in 1914, when the Second International went over to the side of imperialism and put a decisive brake on the proletarian class struggle. To put an equal sign labeled "treason" between a wrong formulation in an article or resolution and collaboration with the bourgeoisie to smother or crush mass strikes and revolutions amounts in the end to rehabilitating the bureaucratic misleaders and greatly reducing their responsibility for the real (and not just ideological) defeats suffered by the proletariat.
Premature and unjustified predictions ("since" someone makes this or that theoretical error, he will "inevitably" go over to the side of the class enemy) are substituted for both a concrete analysis of a current, and the ability to bring the fruitful dialectic of internal debate and democratic centralism into play, enhancing the selfeducation and development of the entire organization. Only the evolution and subsequent practice of a current can determine whether what was involved were temporary, limited deviations, or definitive and practical breaks with the cause of the proletarian revolution. Those who lack the patience to wait for the verdict of history are doing themselves a disservice, not to mention the additional obstacles that they place in the way of building the Fourth International.
III.
In the mid-1960s, and especially after May 1968, the conditions for building the Fourth International began to change radically. Finally, after two decades of development (albeit deformed) of the world revolution, there appeared on the political scene a new mass vanguard with a more and more proletarian composition, which was less and less capable of being controlled, to say nothing of co-opted, by the traditional bureaucracies of the workers movement. The emergence of this vanguard, in the final analysis, reflects the growth in class consciousness ascribable to the revolutionary gains of the two previous decades, just as the ebb in class consciousness in the 1940s reflected the cumulative effects of earlier defeats for the revolution.
True, this basically working-class vanguard is still far from being politically homogeneous and capable of counterposing an overall strategic alternative to the SP and CP leaderships' reformist strategy of class collaboration. It outflanks them only occasionally, in action, around a few key questions in the class struggle. It is true, too, that the bureaucratic apparatuses remain dominant in the organized workers movement, and that they can even make organizational and electoral gains, especially in times of mass radicalization, when previously unpoliticized layers of the proletariat go into motion. Finally, it is true that by virtue of these very factors, the generalized social crisis that has struck imperialist society since 1968 will be a long one, and will thus inevitably involve conjunctural upturns and downturns in the mass movement. This means that we do not yet have favorable conditions at all times for building our organizations.
Nonetheless, the overall balance sheet of this decade is clear. A new era of rapid growth for the Fourth International has opened up on a world scale, relative to the previous period, albeit in an uneven way in various sectors of the international proletariat and the world revolution. The Fourth International is ten times stronger today than on the eve of May 1968 or at the time of its founding conference in numbers of members. As for its political and trade-union influence, the growth is even more emphatic in that respect.
The geographic spread of the movement is just as impressive. We now have nuclei or organized groups in more than sixty countries, on all the continents. Many of them sprang up only in the last year, and this trend is continuing for the moment. There we have a phenomenon of more than just symbolic importance, even if some of these new nuclei are still quite small. For such expansion is only rarely the result of directly oriented propaganda, or indeed, precise initiatives on the part of the international organization or a geographically adjacent section. It results most often from a process of "spontaneous generation," that is, personal initiative on the part of activists or organizations in a particular country. They come to the conclusion of joining the Fourth International on the basis of their own experience in the mass movement in their own country. There can be no better confirmation of the character of our movement as a reflection of the interests of the world proletariat, as a current that has already been histori cally confirmed as a universal current of the revolutionary movement, and not a tendency narrowly limited to a definite combination of circumstances in one or a few limited countries.
There are three reasons for this universality and confirmation.
First, the general validity of our program. An objective rereading of the Transitional Program adopted at the founding conference of the Fourth International, the manifesto "Imperialist War and the Proletarian World Revolution" of the Emergency Conference of May 1940 (the last programmatic document written by Trotsky), not to mention The Revolution Betrayed and The Permanent Revolution, is sufficient to perceive that in all of its fundamental statements, the program has victoriously withstood the test of forty years-and what years they were, with what tumultuous developments! The main strategic axes that the proletariat must follow in the three sectors of the world revolution to arrive at victory-the axis of transitional demands and selforganization leading to dual power in the imperialist countries; the axis of permanent revolution in the semicolonial countries; the axis of political revolution in the bureaucratized workers states—were essentially laid down by the Fourth International at is founding, and then refined by the rich theoretical and political contributions of the successive world congresses.
Second, our total identification with the proletariat and workers power. The Fourth International is the only current in the worldwide workers and revolutionary movement that clearly declares itself for the direct exercise of power by democratically elected and democratically centralized workers councils in all countries in the world. Many currents and individuals, on the "left" or on the "right," may sound off about "authoritarianism" and "oppression," which is sometimes justified and sometimes confused. But take this clear and simple question: "Must those who produce all the wealth, whose labor runs this whole marvelous intermeshing of scientific, technical, and cultural achievements, by providing everyone with both finished goods and the tools of production, must they submit to someone else's authority in organizing their work and lives? Shall they be condemned to remain at someone else's orders, for whatever reason?" Only the Fourth International answers "no," without the slightest hesitation or reluctance.
Finally, there is the uncompromising internationalism that we alone represent, both with respect to program and organization. For us, the interests of the proletarians, the exploited and the oppressed of all countries, are as one. No one sector among them should be sacrificed or neglected. Those who are most oppressed and exploited deserve a special effort of solidarity and support. We have not inherited any bacteria of "national communism" produced by the theory of "socialism in one country." We are immunized against the poison of petty-bourgeois nationalism, chauvinism, racism, and xenophobia in all their forms, and we make no concessions to them for opportunist reasons. This is the only reason why we are today literally the only organization that exists as such on a world scale, while the Third International has in effect disappeared under the pressure of centrifugal "nationalist" forces, and the Second International does not even aspire to coordinate and unify the struggles of workers in all countries. The importance of this fact cannot escape anyone who has understood that we live in an age where everything has been internationalized, and where none of the key problems facing humanity-life-and-death problems, in literal terms-can any longer be solved except on a world scale.
Admittedly, our growth, while impressive if we look at the handicap we had to overcome in 1948 as well as in 1938, is still quite modest in light of the historic tasks we have set ourselves. Nowhere have we yet reached the stage of mass revolutionary parties. In several countries, other farleft organizations have harvested more of the main fruits of the growth of the vanguard in the last decade than our sections have. But they have generally done so at the cost of a programmatic and political eclecticism that has already taken cruel revenge in Portugal and Italy, and that makes a crisis of their own inevitable as the political consciousness of the workingclass vanguard ripens.
We will still have to go through many regroupments and unifications, both with currents coming out of the traditional organizations and with those that have developed on their left, before being able to say that sufficient forces have been gathered to enable us to launch the battle to win control of the workers movement away from the traditional apparatuses. We will be able to do this by combining a maximum of tactical and organizational flexibility with a maximum of programmatic rigor. But what seemed a wild hope in 1938, a wistful dream in 1948, is beginning to take on sharper and sharper outlines in a number of countries, and not the least of them. If we can maintain our rate of growth, continue to proletarianize our organizations, build collective leadership teams at the national and international levels, and maintain our unity, then, by the time of our fiftieth anniversary, there will be few revolutionists around who will still doubt the correctness of Leon Trotsky's prophecy. The future belongs to the Fourth International because the future belongs to the world socialist revolution.
Notes
*Except for the betrayal by the majority of the LSSP (Lanka Sama Samaja Party, the former Ceylonese section of the Fourth International), that went over to the side of the bourgeoisie by participating in a coalition government with the bourgeoisie.