On the Revolutionary Party

(Quote of the Week)

In greetings to a public meeting of the then-revolutionary Socialist Workers Party in 1938, Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky stressed the need for an international, revolutionary, proletarian party forged in opposition to the reformist parties that had betrayed the working class. Today, the Marxist program of the International Communist League represents the continuity of Trotskyism as we fight to reforge the Fourth International, the necessary instrument to lead the working class to power worldwide.

Dear friends, we are not a party like other parties. Our ambition is not only to have more members, more papers, more money in the treasury, more deputies. All that is necessary, but only as a means. Our aim is the full material and spiritual liberation of the toilers and exploited through the socialist revolution. Nobody will prepare it and nobody will guide it but ourselves. The old Internationals—the Second, the Third, that of Amsterdam, we will add to them also the London Bureau—are rotten through and through.

The great events which rush upon mankind will not leave of these outlived organizations one stone upon another. Only the Fourth International looks with confidence at the future. It is the World Party of Socialist Revolution! There never was a greater task on the earth. Upon every one of us rests a tremendous historical responsibility.

Our party demands each of us, totally and completely. Let the philistines hunt their own individuality in empty space. For a revolutionary to give himself entirely to the party signifies finding himself.

—Leon Trotsky, “The Founding of the Fourth International” (October 1938)