Displaying items by tag: the founding of the fourth international

83 years since the founding of the Fourth International

On September 3, 1938, in Paris, the founding conference of the Fourth International was held, where twenty-six delegates represented 11 sections out of 29 affiliated (according to the report of the International Secretariat). Trotsky was unable to attend as he was in exile in Mexico. Several delegations were unable to travel due to various inconveniences, such as persecutions or economic problems. Let us remember that Stalinism sought to prevent the formation of the International. One of the organizers, Klement, was assassinated by their agents before the conference and many important documents were lost. Erwin Wolf and Leon Sedov, Trotsky's son, were also assassinated by the GPU shortly before the conference.

Trotsky sustained the need for the formation of the Fourth International, with the aim of regenerating a revolutionary leadership in the face of the debacle of the Third.  He proposed to recover internationalism against the reactionary theory of socialism in a single country upheld by Stalinism. He stated: "internationalism is not an abstract principle, it is the expression of an economic fact". He wanted to demonstrate that the program raised by the revolutionaries was to fight against a world system and not for particularisms. "The proletarian revolution rises as much against the private property of the means of production as against the national fragmentation of the world economy," he said.

The creation of the new International took place in a world scenario that was heading towards the Second World War, after several defeats in revolutionary processes, such as the Spanish or the German, where Stalinism proved to be a counterrevolutionary leadership. The task was to recover a theoretical and political continuity of revolutionary Marxism, so battered at that time.

The Fourth International tried to form a new revolutionary leadership, with a transitional program, which was the expression of the generalized conclusions of the Russian revolution for a whole process. It posed the historical tasks of the proletariat, to destroy the capitalist system.

83 years after its formation, the historic tasks are still in force, but the crisis of revolutionary leadership, that delays the world revolution and gives a survival to this rotten capitalist system, still persists. To draw the programmatic lessons of the different centrist tendencies that led the IV International until its virtual disappearance is a necessary task to recover the transitional program from the statist, syndicalist and reformist influence that led many currents to degenerate and adapt to the capitalist system.

To rebuild the IV International is to try to settle the crisis of revolutionary leadership and prepare the struggle for power, to recover the transitional program and to deploy revolutionary action in the face of a world crisis that continues its course.  From the TRFI we continue to maintain the need for an International Conference with the currents that still raise the dictatorship of the proletariat to advance in the task of providing a revolutionary leadership to the processes of class struggle that are taking place.

We revolutionaries are facing unprecedented historical events, such as those we are living in the midst of a pandemic, that accelerated the processes of world crisis we had been suffering: the decomposition of imperialism and the assimilation of the former workers' states. We have theoretical and political tools bequeathed by Marxism. The theory of Marx and Engels, the theory of the Permanent Revolution, the theory of imperialism, the theory of the revolutionary party, the program of the Internationals in their revolutionary phases, the Transitional Program and so many programmatic lessons of living processes of class struggle.

83 years after the formation of the Fourth International, we make our own the programmatic definition of the Fourth that Trotsky put forward: The Fourth International can be defined in three words: For the dictatorship of the proletariat!

COR Chile - LOI Brasil - COR Argentina