70th Anniversary of Founding of Trotsky’s Fourth International

September 3 marked the 70th anniversary of the founding of the Fourth International, world party of socialist revolution. The founding of the Fourth International was a culmination of the fight led by Leon Trotsky to defend the program of Bolshevism (i.e., genuine Marxism). We print below “A Great Achievement,” by Trotsky, co-leader with V.I. Lenin of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, announcing the Fourth International’s founding. The piece originally appeared in the October 1938 issue of New International; it is reprinted from the Writings of Leon Trotsky (1937-38).

Trotsky was instrumental, along with Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders, in the founding of the Third (Communist) International in 1919. World War I had exposed the complete bankruptcy of the Second International, whose sections—with such notable exceptions as the Russian, Serbian and Bulgarian parties—betrayed Marxism by supporting their own bourgeoisies in the war. Meanwhile, the October Revolution was met with a bloody civil war, where the forces of counterrevolution were allied with 14 invading capitalist powers. Trotsky led the Red Army to victory in the Civil War. But the Soviet workers state was bled white, many of its best proletarian fighters having fallen in the struggle to defend the Revolution. By 1923, the Bolsheviks were also faced with the failure of socialist revolutions in the West, especially in Germany. It was under these dire conditions that a conservative, nationalist bureaucratic caste emerged, effecting a political counterrevolution in 1923-24 and consolidating power in the Soviet Union.

Against the Stalinist dogma put forward in late 1924 of “socialism in one country,” which liquidated the program of the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat, Trotsky and the Left Opposition fought for Leninist internationalism. In retaliation, a series of Stalinist bureaucratic measures would lead, by 1928, to Trotsky’s exile to Alma-Ata and his expulsion from the Soviet Union in February 1929.

But at the 1928 Sixth World Congress of the Comintern held in Moscow, American delegate James P. Cannon and Canadian delegate Maurice Spector read copies of Trotsky’s Critique of the Congress’ draft program, published later in The Third International After Lenin. It was a searing indictment not only of the policies of the Stalinist bureaucracy within the USSR, but also of its disastrous policies internationally. It dealt in particular with the lessons of the Chinese Revolution of 1925-27, with Stalin & Co.’s policy of liquidation of the Chinese Communist Party into the bourgeois-nationalist Guomindang, which in turn resulted in the slaughter of tens of thousands of Communists and trade unionists.

Trotsky’s Critique won Cannon and his allies to the Left Opposition, for which they were expelled from the American Communist Party in October 1928. The direct corollary to “socialism in one country” was the transformation of the Comintern from an instrument of world revolution into an instrument of the nationalist policies of the Kremlin Stalinist bureaucracy. In 1930, the International Left Opposition was founded in order to wage a factional struggle to restore the Third International to its revolutionary purpose. But by 1933, Stalin’s Comintern could not be awakened by what Trotsky called “the thunder of fascism”—the victory of Hitler’s Nazis without a shot being fired by the powerful, pro-socialist German workers movement.

When this catastrophe did not give rise to outrage, or even significant dissent, within the ranks of the Third International, Trotsky concluded that that body had proved itself utterly dead as a force for revolution. He called for the building of a new, Fourth International. In 1935, the Third International at its Seventh Congress explicitly codified its program of class collaboration with the policy of the “People’s Front.” The Stalinized Comintern went on to play an aggressive counterrevolutionary role in the Spanish Civil War, slaughtering revolutionary fighters in order to appease the “democratic” imperialists and head off proletarian revolution in Spain.

The founding conference of the Fourth International was held in Périgny, France, on the eve of the interimperialist Second World War, as the Trotskyist movement faced murderous repression internationally at the hands of capitalist regimes of all stripes, from fascist to bourgeois-democratic, and the Stalinists. The conference adopted as its basic programmatic document Trotsky’s “The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International,” popularly known as the Transitional Program. Trotsky considered the founding of the Fourth International the most important work of his political life. Writing in 1935 (printed in Trotsky’s Diary in Exile—1935), he noted:

“Had I not been present in 1917 in Petersburg, the October Revolution would still have taken place—on the condition that Lenin was present and in command…. The same could by and large be said of the Civil War….

“But now my work is ‘indispensable’ in the full sense of the word. There is no arrogance in this claim at all. The collapse of the two Internationals has posed a problem which none of the leaders of these Internationals is at all equipped to solve.”

In 1940, the dirty work of a Stalinist assassin would finally silence this great revolutionary. But it could not obliterate his massive volume of revolutionary work, including the construction of the Fourth International. Indeed, Trotsky’s final fight was against a petty-bourgeois minority in the then-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP) that, as the Second World War got under way, wanted to jettison the program of unconditional military defense of the Soviet degenerated workers state.

Unlike the Second and Third Internationals, the Fourth International never betrayed; it was destroyed in the early 1950s by the liquidationist forces led by Michel Pablo. Faced with the onset of the imperialist Cold War and the creation of Stalinist-ruled deformed workers states in East and Central Europe, the Pabloites denied the need for a Trotskyist vanguard. The Pabloites looked to the Stalinists, social democrats and, eventually, Third World nationalists, arguing that they could be pressured to outline a “roughly” revolutionary course. The struggle against Pabloism in the Fourth International was led by Cannon, albeit partially, belatedly and on the SWP’s own national terrain. The SWP would later take quite another tack, that of seeking “convergence” with the Pabloites in the 1963 “reunification,” which formed the “United Secretariat” (USec). It is beyond the scope of this introduction to deal in a substantive or thorough fashion with the post-World War II Pabloite degeneration of the Fourth International. We refer readers to “Genesis of Pabloism” (Spartacist No. 21, Fall 1972), Prometheus Research Series No. 4, “Yugoslavia, East Europe and the Fourth International: The Evolution of Pabloist Liquidationism” (March 1993).

The forebears of the Spartacist League, the Revolutionary Tendency (RT), waged a fight within the SWP against, among other things, its perversion of revolutionary Trotskyism in order to unify with Pablo and his ilk. For this, the RT was bureaucratically expelled from the SWP, which quickly degenerated from centrism into outright reformism (see our 1984 pamphlet The Socialist Workers Party: An Obituary).

Comrade Trotsky insisted that revolutionaries must swim against the stream, as indeed he did and as we strive to do in order to reforge a Fourth International that Trotsky would recognize as his own.

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When these lines appear in the press, the conference of the Fourth International will probably have concluded its labors. The calling of this conference is a major achievement. The irreconcilable revolutionary tendency, subjected to persecutions as no other political tendency in world history has in all likelihood suffered, has again given proof of its power. Surmounting all obstacles, it has under the blows of its mighty enemies convened its International Conference. This fact constitutes unimpeachable evidence of the profound viability and unwavering perseverance of the international Bolshevik-Leninists. The very possibility of a successful conference was first of all assured by the spirit of revolutionary internationalism which imbues all our sections. As a matter of fact, it is necessary to place extremely great value upon the international ties of the proletarian vanguard in order to gather together the international revolutionary staff at the present time, when Europe and the entire world live in the expectation of the approaching war. The fumes of national hatreds and racial persecutions today compose the political atmosphere of our planet. Fascism and racism are merely the most extreme expressions of the bacchanalia of chauvinism which seeks to overcome or stifle the intolerable class contradictions. The resurgence of social patriotism in France and other countries, or, rather, its new open and shameless manifestation, pertains to the same category as fascism, but with an adaptation to democratic ideology or its vestiges.

Also pertaining to the same circle of events is the open fostering of nationalism in the USSR at meetings, in the press, and in the schools. It is not at all a question of the so-called “socialist patriotism,” i.e., defense of the conquests of the October Revolution against imperialism. No, it is a question of restoring preeminence to the patriotic traditions of old Russia. And here the task is likewise one of creating suprasocial, supraclass values, so as thereby more successfully to discipline the toilers and subject them to the greedy bureaucratic vermin. The official ideology of the present Kremlin appeals to the exploits of Prince Alexander Nevsky, to the heroism of the army of Suvorov-Rymniksky or Kutuzov-Smolensky, while it shuts its eyes to the fact that this “heroism” was based on the enslavement and benightedness of the popular masses, and that for this very reason the old Russian army was victorious only in struggles against the still more backward Asiatic peoples, or the weak and disintegrating states on the Western border. On the other hand, in conflicts with advanced countries of Europe the valiant czarist soldiery always proved bankrupt. Obviously, the experience of the last imperialist war has already been buried in the Kremlin, just as it has forgotten the not unimportant fact that the October Revolution grew directly from defeatism. What do Thermidorians and Bonapartists care about all this? They require nationalistic fetishes. Alexander Nevsky must come to the aid of Nikolai Yezhov.

The theory of socialism in one country, which liquidated the program of the international revolutionary struggle of the proletariat, could not fail to terminate in a wave of nationalism in the USSR and could not but engender a responsive wave of the same nature in the “Communist” parties of other countries. Only two or three years ago it was maintained that the sections of the Comintern were obliged to support their governments only in the so-called “democratic” states that were prepared to support the USSR in the struggle against fascism. The task of defending the workers’ state was intended to serve as a justification for social patriotism. Today, Browder, who has been no more and no less prostituted than other “leaders” of the Stalintern, declares before a Congressional investigating committee that in the event of a war between the U.S. and the USSR, he, Browder, and his party will be on the side of their own democratic fatherland. In all probability this answer was prompted by Stalin. But the case is not altered thereby. Betrayal has a logic of its own. Entering the path of social patriotism, the Third International is now being clearly torn from the hands of the Kremlin clique. “Communists” have become social imperialists and they differ from their “Social Democratic” allies and competitors only in that their cynicism is greater.

Betrayal has a logic of its own. The Third International following the Second has completely perished as an International. It is no longer capable of displaying any kind of initiative in the sphere of world proletarian politics. It is, of course, no accident that after 15 years of progressive demoralization, the Comintern revealed its complete internal rottenness at the moment of the approaching world war, i.e., precisely at a time when the proletariat is most urgently in need of its international revolutionary unification.

History has piled up monstrous obstacles before the Fourth International. Moribund tradition is being aimed against the living revolution. For a century and a half, the radiations of the Great French Revolution have served the bourgeoisie and its petty bourgeois agency—the Second International—as a means of shattering and paralyzing the revolutionary will of the proletariat. The Third International is now exploiting the incomparably more fresh and more powerful traditions of the October Revolution to the same end. The memory of the first victorious uprising of the proletariat against bourgeois democracy serves the usurpers to save bourgeois democracy from the proletarian uprising. Confronted with the approach of the new imperialist war, the social patriotic organizations have joined forces with the left wing of the bourgeoisie under the label of the People’s Front, which represents nothing else but an attempt on the part of the bourgeoisie, in its death agony, once again to subject the proletariat to its rule just as the revolutionary bourgeoisie had subjected it at the dawn of capitalism. What was once a progressive historical manifestation now appears before us as a revolting reactionary farce. But while the “People’s Fronts” are impotent to cure a capitalism that is rotten to the core, while they are incapable of even checking the military aggression of fascism—the example of Spain is full of symbolic meaning!—they nevertheless still prove sufficiently powerful to sow illusions among the ranks of the toilers, to paralyze and shatter their will to fight, and thereby create the greatest difficulties in the path of the Fourth International.

The working class, especially in Europe, is still in retreat, or at best, in a state of hesitation. Defeats are still too fresh, and their number far from exhausted. They have assumed their sharpest form in Spain. Such are the conditions in which the Fourth International is developing. Is it any wonder that its growth proceeds more slowly than we should like? Dilettantes, charlatans, or blockheads, incapable of probing into the dialectic of historic ebbs and flows, have more than once brought in their verdict: “The ideas of the Bolshevik-Leninists may perhaps be correct but they are incapable of building a mass organization.” As if a mass organization can be built under any and all conditions! As if a revolutionary program does not render it obligatory for us to remain in the minority and swim against the stream in an epoch of reaction! The revolutionist who uses his own impatience as a measuring stick for the tempo of an epoch is worthless. Never before has the path of the world revolutionary movement been blocked with such monstrous obstacles as today, on the eve of a new epoch of greatest revolutionary convulsions. A correct Marxist appraisal of the situation prompts the conclusion that we have achieved inestimable successes in recent years, despite everything.

The Russian “Left Opposition” originated 15 years ago. Correct work on the international arena does not add up as yet even to a complete decade. The prehistory of the Fourth International properly falls into three stages. In the course of the first period, the “Left Opposition” still placed hopes on the possibility of regenerating the Comintern, and viewed itself as its Marxist faction. The revolting capitulation of the Comintern in Germany, tacitly accepted by all its sections, posed openly the question of the necessity of building the Fourth International. However, our small organizations, which grew through individual selection in the process of theoretical criticism practically outside of the labor movement itself, proved as yet unprepared for independent activity. The second period is characterized by the efforts to find a real political milieu for these isolated propagandist groups, even if at the price of a temporary renunciation of formal independence. Entry into the Socialist parties immediately increased our ranks, although in respect to quantity the gains were not as great as they could have been. But this entry signified an extremely important stage in the political education of our sections, which tested themselves and their ideas for the first time face to face with the realities of the political struggle and its living requirements. As a result of the experience acquired our cadres grew a head taller. A not unimportant conquest was also the fact that we parted company with incorrigible sectarians, muddlers, and tricksters who are wont to join every new movement in the beginning only to do everything in their power to compromise and paralyze it.

The stages of development of our sections in various countries cannot of course coincide chronologically. Nevertheless, the creation of the American Socialist Workers Party can be recognized as the termination of the second period. Henceforth the Fourth International stands face to face with the tasks of the mass movement. The transitional program is a reflection of this important turn. Its significance lies in this, that instead of providing an a priori theoretical plan, it draws the balance of the already accumulated experience of our national sections and on the basis of this experience opens up broader international perspectives.

The acceptance of this program, prepared and assured by a lengthy previous discussion—or rather, a whole series of discussions—represents our most important conquest. The Fourth International is now the only international organization which not only takes clearly into account the driving forces of the imperialist epoch, but is armed with a system of transitional demands capable of uniting the masses for a revolutionary struggle for power. We do not need any self-deceptions. The discrepancy between our forces today and the tasks on the morrow is much more clearly perceived by us than by our critics. But the harsh and tragic dialectic of our epoch is working in our favor. Brought to the extreme pitch of exasperation and indignation, the masses will find no other leadership than that offered them by the Fourth International.