Fourth International

Why 'Fourth'?

The number is a claim about lineage. The Second International died in 1914 and the Third in 1933: that was Trotsky's judgement. When the Comintern, having failed to stop Hitler with its social fascism line, offered no self-criticism at all, Trotsky abandoned the course of reforming it from within and turned to building a new International. The small national groups descended from the International Left Opposition held the founding congress near Paris in September 1938, after five years of preparation. The gathering was small, and many of its participants were assassinated or died in camps within a few years.

What did it stand for?

The Transitional Programme adopted at the founding congress proceeded from the judgement that the crisis of capitalism was ripe and the leaderships were betraying, and proposed transitional demands bridging the minimum programme and the maximum. Two theories underlay it. One was permanent revolution: even the democratic tasks of backward countries can only be completed by working-class power, and the revolution can only be finished internationally. The other was the analysis of the USSR as a degenerated workers' state, neither capitalist nor socialist, from which followed a double position: political revolution to remove the bureaucracy, and defence of the USSR against imperialism. That double position became the permanent powder keg of internal Trotskyist debate.

What became of it?

Trotsky's assassination in Mexico in 1940 took the founder. The European sections were driven underground in the war, and postwar reconstruction ran into an unforeseen problem: how to understand the expansion of the Soviet bloc and the Yugoslav and Chinese revolutions. In 1953 the movement split into the International Secretariat and the International Committee over Pablo's course, and after the partial reunification of 1963 several organisations have each carried the name and claimed the legitimacy of the Fourth International; the entry on the splits and reunification of the Fourth International follows the details. That none of the lines ever built a mass party is the common verdict, but even critics grant its role as a school that supplied the theoretical resources of anti-Stalinism and cadres for the left in many countries.