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1938 anniversary: founding the Fourth International
Just over 70 years ago, on 3 September 1938, the
founding conference of the Fourth International was held near Paris. The
main inspiration and organiser behind the declaration of the new
international was the Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky, who, however,
could not attend the inaugural meeting because he was in exile in
Mexico. NIALL MULHOLLAND looks at the developments which led up to the
conference and the significance of the Fourth International.
TROTSKY CONSIDERED HIS efforts in creating the
Fourth International his most important work. To him, it was more
important than the development of his theory of the permanent
revolution, which brilliantly foretold the general outlines of the 1917
Russian revolution. More important than his key role, second only to
Vladimir Lenin, in leading the successful October socialist revolution.
And more important than his leadership of the Red Army, which defended
the young Soviet Union against invading armies of counter-revolution.
Although founded in 1938, the Fourth International
emerged out of a struggle that began in the Soviet Union in 1923,
shortly before the death of Lenin, and then spread throughout the world.
This was a struggle for genuine Bolshevism, initiated by Lenin and
continued by the Left Opposition and later the International Left
Opposition, led by Trotsky, against the privileged, Soviet bureaucracy
led by Joseph Stalin.
In the major congress document of the Fourth
International, The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth
International, Trotsky declared: "The Fourth International… is
deservedly hated by the Stalinists, Social Democrats, bourgeois liberals
and fascists… Its task – the abolition of capitalism’s domination. Its
aim – socialism. Its method – the proletarian revolution..."
Today, when the capitalist press or
pro-establishment politicians refer to the Fourth International, it is
usually to pour scorn on Trotsky’s attempts to lay the basis for a mass
international. These representatives of the profit system, along with
numerous former lefts, sneer that the fate of the Fourth International
is further proof that all attempts to forge a socialist international to
challenge capitalism are doomed to failure.
This cynical, impressionistic argument ignores
Trotsky’s conception of the Fourth International as primarily concerned
with preserving, defending and developing the priceless heritage of
genuine Marxism, in a time of big defeats and betrayals for the
international working class, and preparing its young leaders – "pledges
for the future" – for the big class struggles to come.
Its origins were not just rooted in the struggle
against Stalinism, but also in the previous workers’ internationals. The
First International (the International Working Men’s Association – IWMA),
was established in 1864 by the founders of scientific socialism, Karl
Marx and Friedrich Engels. This was a great step forward for the
international working class, bringing together socialists, trade
unionists, radicals and other militants. Its ideas and influence grew
across Europe and North America, including among leaders of the
short-lived 1871 Paris Commune, the first example of a workers’
government. However, worsening difficulties with the anarchist Mikhail
Bakunin and his supporters led to splits and to the dissolution of the
IWMA, after the transfer of its headquarters to the United States in
1872.
The Second International, founded by Engels in 1889,
was an association of national, social-democratic parties, including
both revolutionary and reformist elements. Its strongest and most
authoritative section was the German Social Democratic Party (SPD).
However, decades of capitalist economic growth had the effect of
creating a conservative bureaucracy in the unions and social
democracies, despite their formal adherence to Marxism. The Second
International was torn apart in 1914, when most its sections supported
‘their side’ in the imperialist war.
The Third (or Communist) International was organised
under Lenin’s leadership and with the authority of the 1917 Russian
revolution, as an attempt to create an international of workers’ parties
with an anti-imperialist and revolutionary character. During its first
years (1919-24), the Third International (also called the Comintern) was
a genuine internationalist body and it held congresses each year,
despite the enormous difficulties of civil war and famine faced by the
young Soviet Union.
Emerging bureaucratic rule
THE OVERTHROW OF tsarism, landlordism and capitalism
by the working class, led by the Bolshevik party (which later became the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union, CPSU), was a beacon to the working
masses and poor around the world. It inspired revolutionary movements
throughout Europe. But after the failure of those revolutions, including
in Germany (1918) and Hungary (1919), mainly due to the inexperience of
the leaders of the young communist parties and the counter-revolutionary
role of the social democrats, the Soviet Union remained isolated.
Degeneration appeared in the apparatus of the new regime in economically
and culturally backward Russia. After years of war, revolution, civil
war and severe privations, the mass of workers became exhausted and
apathetic.
Stalin emerged as the leading representative of
those layers in the apparatus who had become concerned with the
advancement of their own increasingly distinct interests at the expense
of the international working class. Keenly aware of the dangers to the
revolution, Lenin, in 1923, called for the removal of Stalin from the
post of general secretary of the CPSU because he was using it to
bureaucratise the party and state apparatus. Lenin prepared a fight
against the bureaucratisation of the Russian Communist Party and the
Soviet state, "a workers’ state with bureaucratic deformations", but he
died before he could carry it out. With Lenin out of the way, Stalin
gradually eliminated his main opponents, starting with Trotsky (who was
marginalised before being driven into exile in 1929), until he became
virtual dictator of the party and state by the 1930s. In tandem, the
Third International became increasingly transformed under the leadership
of the Stalinist bureaucracy into an instrument of Russian foreign
policy.
But none of this happened without a struggle between
living social forces. In 1923, Trotsky’s Left Opposition
(Bolshevik-Leninists or ‘Trotskyists’) was established as a faction of
the CPSU and proposed the ‘New Course’ in October: to campaign against
the bureaucratisation of the party, for young proven working-class
elements to take leading positions in the party, for elections for party
positions, and a plan for industrialisation and pro-poor peasant
policies.
A struggle erupted over Stalin’s so-called theory of
‘socialism in one country’, introduced in 1924, which postulated that a
socialist society could be achieved inside the borders of a single
country. Stalin’s theory was anathema to genuine Marxists but reflected
the interests of the privileged tops. In reply, Trotsky pointed out
that, while the Soviet Union must industrialise and modernise,
generally, this was a long way from socialism: a society with higher
labour productivity and standards of living than in the most advanced
capitalist societies. This presupposes the working class taking power
internationally and establishing a world socialist planned economy.
Disastrous policies
STALIN’S SOCIALISM IN one country, Trotsky correctly
warned, would lead to disastrous policies within Russia (including the
forced collectivisation of agriculture) and transform the Communist
International (Comintern) into a counter-revolutionary tool of Stalin’s
foreign policy. Eventually, in 1943, at the request of his allies,
Winston Churchill and Franklin D Roosevelt, Stalin dissolved the
Communist International.
Comintern policy in the 1920s and 1930s resulted in
disasters for the international and Soviet working class. Trotsky’s
warnings were proved correct but, paradoxically, the mood of isolation
and despair among the Russian masses resulting from these international
defeats strengthened the Stalinist bureaucracy.
A revolutionary opportunity again developed in
Germany in 1923, due to a severe economic crisis and the French invasion
of the Ruhr. A majority of the German working class turned towards the
Communist Party. But the party leaders vacillated and missed an
exceptionally favourable opportunity to struggle for power, allowing the
German ruling class time to recover. Comintern leaders, Stalin and
Grigori Zinoviev, also had responsibility for this wasted opportunity,
as they had no confidence in the German party taking power and urged it
to hold back.
Another blow to the working class came when the
British general strike of May 1926 was betrayed by the reformist leaders
of the TUC. The Comintern, under the leadership of Stalin, was complicit
in this betrayal, as it had allied itself with the ‘lefts’ in the TUC
officialdom through the Anglo-Russian Trade Union Unity Committee.
Trotsky had warned that the Anglo-Russian Committee was acting to
protect the reformists against criticism of the left.
In China, Stalinist policy led to bloody defeat. A
revolutionary situation developed from 1925-27, which the merchant and
industrial bourgeoisie in the nationalist Kuomintang sought to exploit
for their own class interests. The Russian bureaucracy was hostile to
the development of an independent workers’ and poor peasants’ movement
in China, in which they had no faith. To serve the needs of its narrow
nationalist policy, the Comintern instructed the Chinese Communists to
enter the Kuomintang. This renunciation of an independent class policy
meant opposing the creation of soviets (councils of workers and
peasants) during the rising tide of revolution and an agrarian
revolution. As the Kuomintang army marched on Shanghai, workers
instinctively realised the danger and rose up and seized the city, only
to be told by the Comintern to allow Chiang Kai-shek’s forces to enter
in April 1927. The Kuomintang then set about massacring the communist
workers.
The disastrous Comintern policies led Zinoviev and
Lev Kamenev, two ‘old Bolshevik’ leaders, to break from Stalin. Along
with Stalin, these two veteran leaders had made up the triumvirate which
arrayed itself against Trotsky and the Left Opposition from 1923-25. In
July 1926, Zinoviev stated at a plenary of the Central Committee of the
CPSU that "on the question of the apparatus-bureaucratic repression
Trotsky was correct against us". From July-October 1926, the Left
Opposition temporarily joined Kamenev and Zinoviev to form the United
Opposition. They opposed the right-wing, pro-kulak (rich peasant)
trajectory of Stalin and Bukharin, calling for a return to workers’
democracy and for industrialisation.
However, after the bureaucracy counter-attacked,
expelling the Left Opposition leaders from the party, Kamenev and
Zinoviev capitulated to Stalin. By the end of 1927, the dominant Stalin
faction had decisively defeated the Left Opposition, imprisoning or
exiling its leaders. Alarmed at the danger posed by the kulaks, who had
become increasingly powerful as a result of Stalin’s policies, Stalin
broke with Nikolai Bukharin, and decreed brutal five-year plans which
brought untold human misery and the country close to catastrophe.
Assembling the forces
IN FEBRUARY 1929, Trotsky was deported to Turkey. By
then a considerable number of dissidents in Europe and the Americas had
been expelled from the communist parties and the Communist
International. Some of them created small groups that proclaimed
sympathy or solidarity with the Left Opposition. During this period, the
major programmatic statements of the Left Opposition were formulated by
Trotsky.
By 1930, the Left Opposition groups in a number of
countries had advanced to a position where they felt they needed to
coordinate their activities in a more organised form. On 6 April 1930,
national representatives met in Paris and declared the first
international conference of the Left Opposition. Ideological
clarification developed through the International Bulletin, theses,
resolutions and manifestos. But an international meeting, a
‘pre-conference’, was not held until February 1933.
Until 1933, Trotsky opposed calls for a new
international made by some oppositional trends to Stalinism. He argued
that the communist parties still represented the most militant sections
of the working class, despite their Stalinist leaderships. Although
Stalin did not allow any real opposition within the Third International,
if the Left Opposition turned its back on those workers, it would be
further isolated as Stalin wished. Trotsky believed that big events,
inside and outside the Soviet Union, could stir the masses and give the
Left Opposition the chance to grow rapidly.
However, Trotsky changed his position when Adolf
Hitler took power in 1933 and smashed the mighty organisations of the
German working class. As the Nazi menace had grown, Trotsky advocated a
united front of the mass workers’ organisations – the social democrats
and communists. But, under the leadership of the Comintern, the German
communists followed an ultra-left policy of denouncing social democrats
as ‘social fascists’ and kept the working class divided, thus allowing
Hitler to come to power.
The February 1933 pre-conference of the
International Left Opposition took place just one week after Hitler’s
appointment as chancellor of Germany, before he consolidated his victory
and when the Left Opposition still expected the German working class to
resist the Nazis, even leading to civil war. But the German Stalinists
showed complete political bankruptcy, and Hitler soon crushed the
workers’ movement with ease.
For Trotsky, the destruction of the German working
class without a struggle signalled the collapse of the Third
International and the adoption of the Stalinist leadership of a policy
of conscious counter-revolution. When the leaders of the Comintern
declared its policy in Germany had been flawless and banned any
communist party debating the issue, which they docilely followed,
Trotsky declared: "An organisation which has not been wakened up by the
thunderbolt of fascism… is dead and cannot be revived".
For the rest of his life, Trotsky set about the
difficult task of assembling the forces of a new international. He was
in no doubt of the historical issues at stake and his role: "I think the
work on which I am engaged now, despite its extremely insufficient and
fragmentary nature, is the most important work of my life… now my work
is the most ‘indispensable’ in the full sense of the word… to carry out
the mission of arming a new generation with the revolutionary method".
(Diary in Exile)
The break with the Comintern
AFTER HITLER’S VICTORY, the Left Opposition
concluded in August 1933 that further efforts to regenerate or reform
the Comintern were futile. The Left Opposition ceased to be a faction of
the Comintern and became an independent movement towards the creation of
a new international and new revolutionary parties throughout the world.
To express this change, it changed its name to the International
Communist League (Bolshevik-Leninists). The ICL also came to the
conclusion that a ‘political revolution’ would be necessary in the
Soviet Union to overthrow the Stalinist bureaucracy and to restore real
workers’ democracy.
To assemble the forces necessary to launch a new
international in extremely difficult circumstances, Trotsky looked
towards various left centrist parties that had been repelled by the
Stalinist policy in Germany and had drawn some lessons. The Declaration
of the Four, signed in August 1933, between the International Left
Opposition and other left organisations (the German SAP, and the Dutch
parties, the OSP and RSP), was an example of this orientation. It
proclaimed the need for a new international and new revolutionary
parties. The results of the declaration for the ICL were minimal. The
German SAP moved to the right and denounced the declaration. The Dutch
parties merged to become the RSAP and joined the ICL, but later split
over the civil war in Spain, although opposition youth in the RSAP came
out for the Fourth International.
Growing radicalisation in Western Europe in the
1930s led to the growth of the social-democratic parties, especially to
the growth of their youth wings and the leftwing. The ICL called on its
sections to orientate towards these leftward moving elements to win them
to a revolutionary position. In October 1934, a resolution was passed at
an ICL meeting which pressed the French comrades to enter the French
Socialist Party. The ‘French turn’ was subsequently carried out by other
sections, as well.
The three years following the 1933 pre-conference
were spent gathering leading cadres for the Fourth International and
developing its programmatic positions. In July 1936, the ICL sponsored
an international conference for the Fourth International. Trotsky, then
in Norway, wanted this to be the founding conference of the Fourth
International, but the delegates disagreed, arguing that the time had
not yet come. They were only prepared to go as far as to rename the ICL
the Movement for the Fourth International.
The possibilities for advancing the emerging new
international were dealt a severe blow when the Spanish section, one of
the largest, broke with Trotsky and merged with the centrist workers’
and peasants’ bloc to form the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification (POUM)
in 1935. Eventually the POUM joined the Spanish Popular Front
government.
The Comintern policy of popular fronts or people’s
fronts called for alliances between the workers’ parties and the liberal
wing of the bourgeoisie, in the name of a struggle against war and
fascism. Popular front governments came to power in Spain and France in
1936. By subordinating the independent interests of the working class to
the so-called ‘democratic capitalists’, popular frontism led the working
class to historic and bloody defeats, opening the path for fascism and
world war.
The founding conference
IN 1936, FEARING that the heroic example of the
Spanish revolution could inspire a resurgence of class militancy in the
Soviet Union, Stalin unleashed the Moscow show trials and the mass
extermination of Left Opposition supporters and ‘old Bolsheviks’ in the
Soviet Union. "A river of blood" separated Bolshevism and Stalinism,
Trotsky remarked.
It was with the background of these historic defeats
for the working class that the founding congress of the Fourth
International (the ‘World Party of Socialist Revolution’) was held on 3
September 1938 in France. Just 21 delegates, representing eleven
countries, met in conditions of extremely tight security, with plenary
sessions limited to a single day. Many sections and sympathisers could
not attend for security reasons. The long arm of Stalinist repression
nevertheless found its way into the congress, as it was later revealed
that the de facto Russian delegate was a GPU (secret police) agent.
As well as the physical liquidation of the biggest
section (the Russian Opposition) in the months running up to the
meeting, the movement also lost leading figures at the hands of
Stalinist agents, including Rudolph Klement, responsible for the
preparation of the founding conference. A personal tragedy hit Trotsky,
when his son, Leon Sedov, a leading Left Opposition figure in his own
right, died in a Paris hospital in circumstances that pointed to a GPU
assassination.
The two Polish delegates to the congress presented a
resolution opposing founding a new international, arguing that it was
premature. In the major congress document, The Death Agony of Capitalism
and the Tasks of the Fourth International (also known as the
Transitional Programme), Trotsky replied directly to the doubters:
"Sceptics ask: But has the moment for the creation of the Fourth
International yet arrived? It is impossible, they say, to create an
international ‘artificially’; it can arise only out of great events etc,
etc. The Fourth International has already arisen out of great events:
the greatest defeats of the proletariat in history…"
The signing of the Hitler-Stalin pact, in August
1939, led to political crisis in the US section (SWP) of the Fourth
International, with a faction, led by James Burnham and Max Shachtman,
arguing to change the SWP’s position of defence of the Soviet Union.
This minority, reflecting the pressure of bourgeois public opinion,
questioned the characterisation of the Soviet Union as a workers’ state
which must be defended against imperialism despite the bureaucratic
caste that had usurped power. The majority of the executive centre of
the Fourth International, which was transferred to New York at the start
of the war in Europe, proved to be supporters of the Shachtman-Burnham
group.
An emergency conference of the international was
called to discuss the political issues debated following the
Stalin-Hitler pact, to assess the nature and development of the war and
to establish a cohesive and functioning leadership. Trotsky wrote the
Manifesto of the Fourth International on the Imperialist War for the May
1940 emergency conference, his last programmatic document.
A new international
TROTSKY PREDICTED THE coming world war would provoke
mass revolutionary movements, which would transform the fortunes of the
Fourth International. Its small forces, however, were hit hard by
wartime conditions, with many of its young militants killed either at
the hands of fascism or of Stalinism. The greatest blow the young
international suffered, an inestimable loss, was the assassination of
Trotsky, at the hands of a Stalinist agent in Mexico, August 1940.
Nevertheless, Trotsky’s political prognosis was
generally correct. Europe was swept by revolutionary movements after the
second world war and the working class could have come to power in a
number of countries, if it had a leadership worthy of the name. A
successful revolution in any one European country would have marked the
start of a European and world socialist revolution, which would have
also swept away Stalinism and reintroduced workers’ democracy in the
Soviet Union. But the social-democratic and communist parties, which had
a mass base and influence among the working class in Europe, at the
time, diverted a socialist transformation and, thereby, saved
capitalism.
The Fourth International was unable to play a
decisive role. Moreover, in the post-war period, it did not succeed in
becoming a mass force because of a combination of unfavourable objective
factors and difficulties, together with the mistakes made by its
leaders. In some cases, Trotskyism had a powerful effect on the workers’
movement, such as in Sri Lanka, Latin America, Vietnam, France and, in
Britain in the 1970s and 1980s, under the banner of the Militant
(forerunner of the Socialist Party). The ‘Militant tendency’ led the
1983-86 Liverpool council struggle against the Thatcher government and
the successful mass anti-poll tax campaign of 1989-90.
The Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI),
established in 1974, developed rapidly in the 1970s and 1980s and now
has sections and groups in around 40 countries, on four continents.
(See: A Socialist World is Possible – History of the CWI, by Peter
Taaffe, available on
www.socialistworld.net, for more on why Trotsky’s original
conception of the Fourth International did not take off, and for details
of the origins and development of the CWI.)
Today, as world capitalism enters its gravest crisis
since the 1930s, there is a crying need for a mass political alternative
of the working class. The task of the CWI is to help to create the
conditions for the formation of such an international. However, this is
only possible on the basis of learning from the lessons of the past and,
particularly, from the failings of previous internationals. The creation
of mass parties, on a national scale, will be giant steps towards a new
mass international. But we cannot wait for the emergence of such parties
before developing the scaffolding of such an international in the new
explosive period ahead. The CWI can play a vital role in this process.
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