A 82 years of the foundation of the IV International

We reproduce the report made by Alejandro Bodart on the founding of the IV International.

It was made by our partner on Thursday's broadcast 3 International Panorama September, the weekly program of the International Socialist League.

A day like today, he 3 September 1938, the Fourth International was founded in a clandestine and hasty meeting on the outskirts of Paris. Delegates from organizations from eleven countries gathered at the home of left-wing opposition activist Alfred Rosmer, and organizations of others 17 countries could not arrive but adhered to the new organization and its program.

The world was in an acute crisis.: the rise of Nazism in Germany, the civil war in Spain was being led to a dead end by Stalinism and the accumulation of contradictions would lead to World War II in a short time... But the founding congress of the Fourth could not discuss any of that. Reunited under the intense persecution of Stalinism, she limited herself to approving a program and voting for a secretariat to conclude the meeting before being discovered and attacked. Trotsky's son, main leader of the left opposition in Europe and in charge of the preparations for the congress, Leon Sedov, he had been assassinated in Paris a few months earlier. And days before the event, Rudolf Klement's body, another of the main organizers who had been disappeared a month before, was found in the Seine River, for which the congress was almost canceled.

In fact, various sectors of the regroupment of communists who had broken with Stalinism and were part of the international left-wing opposition, they were of the opinion that it was not the right time to launch a new international.

The First International was founded in 1864 by Marx and Engels in the midst of the first rise of the working class fueled by the European industrial revolution.

the second international, marx already dead, but with the participation of Engels, was founded in 1889. It arose based on the capitalist expansion of the end of the 19th century., the industrialization of Germany and the growth of mass trade unions and workers' parties.

Third, founded in 1919 by Lenin and Trotsky, it was built impelled by the triumph of the Russian revolution and the global rise that it generated.

When Trotsky proposed launching the Fourth, there was no promotion. Fascism came from defeating the working class, with the help of the betrayals of Stalinism, in Italy, in Germany and was about to achieve the same in Spain. Nevertheless, It was precisely Hitler's triumph in Germany that convinced Trotsky, on the one hand, that the Third International was already irretrievable, and on the other, that the foundation of a new International was necessary and urgent.

Since his expulsion from the USSR in 1929, Trotsky began to organize the left opposition on an international scale. The following year a first international conference of the current was held, voted by a secretariat made up of Alfred Rosmer and León Sedov.

In 1932 a new conference was held in Denmark, in which Trotsky himself could participate. Next year, another conference established the resolutions of the first four congresses of the Third International as the programmatic basis. Untill there, although they were expelled and excluded from the parties of the Third, and persecuted by Stalinism, They acted as an opposition current and maintained the orientation of recovering the Communist Parties and the Third International.

Only after Hitler's victory, no active resistance from the German Communist Party, that he had rejected any policy of a united front against fascism, the formation of a new international was resolved.

Trotsky characterized that the world was heading towards a Second World War, that stalinism, with the policy that he had been using, would play the same treacherous role that the Second International played before the First World War, and that therefore, the revolutionaries needed their own parties and their own international organization to influence the revolutions that would come.

In this context, a new conference met in Paris in August 1933, in which various currents opposed to Stalinism participated. The document that emerged from that meeting expressed the desire to move towards a new international organization, but the initiative was delayed by the persecution of Stalinism and the fascists, and due to the vacillations of the sectors that were not convinced of advancing.

The first Conference for the Fourth International met in Geneva in July 1936, and the founding congress finally took place two years later, when the outbreak of the Second World War loomed.

Trotsky's text that approved the meeting as the program basis for the new organization is known by the international revolutionary movement as the Transition Program. your title, "The agony of capitalism and the tasks of the IV International" presented a characterization of where the world was headed that would be confirmed in its fundamental features..

He asserted that the productive forces had ceased to develop, that the economic crisis with no way out would lead to a new humanitarian catastrophe by leading to a new world war, and that if the triumph of socialism did not take place, human civilization itself would be in question. Both World War which broke out the following year, as the current crisis validate this forecast.

But the Transition Program also asserted that, although the objective conditions for the triumph of the revolution, they were more than ripe, are not enough if there is no subjective factor,  the revolutionary organization and the action of the proletariat. The experience of the Russian revolution had imposed the decisive conclusion that without a revolutionary party at the head, the socialist revolution fails and retreats.

Trotsky took this as the central axis, burying forever the division that social democracy made between the minimum program of immediate reforms and the maximum program, of abstract socialist goals for an indeterminate future. And it replaces it with a new method of elaboration and political intervention that, starting from the immediate needs of the proletariat, lead him to the global confrontation with capitalism. This method has proven its usefulness to develop the class struggle and build revolutionary parties up to the present day..

tragically, Trotsky would be assassinated by Stalinism just two years after founding the Fourth, and the gap between their experience and ability, and that of the paintings that continued his work, it turned out giant. for worse, many of them would perish during the war at the hands of Hitler's Gestapo or Stalin's GPU. The Fourth was decimated and effectively crippled during the war. And when he rearranged at the end of it, its leaders turned out not to be up to the difficult circumstances.

Due to the lack of an organized revolutionary alternative, the revolutions that swept through Europe and the world after the war did not take away the Stalinist bureaucracy. Conversely, This one came out strengthened and prestigious for having defeated Hitler. He was thus able to put himself at the head of the revolutions, stop them, divert them, betray them, and fulfill its pact with imperialism to rebuild the bourgeois states in Western Europe after the war.

To these difficult circumstances, added a series of tremendous errors on the part of the leadership of the Fourth, that ended up dividing and dispersing the Trotskyist movement. Some fell into opportunism, following the variants of Stalinism that were emerging. Others retreated into sectarianism, marginalizing oneself from mass processes. Others were abandoning the strategy of building a revolutionary party, or they stayed in the construction of national parties, abandoning the indispensable task of building the international.

Those of us who continue to fight to build a world revolutionary party did so separately, building international currents centered on a more developed party with similar groups in other countries.

The founding of the fourth had the enormous merit of having preserved the conclusions and tradition of revolutionary Marxism.. Those of us who have kept this practice alive have the same merit. But it's not enough. Today, in the face of the catastrophic crisis of world capitalism, only comparable to the one that the world was going through when the Fourth World War was founded., recovering its legacy requires us to overcome the limitations we have had.

This is the challenge that the LIS is facing in trying to regroup revolutionaries who come from different experiences and traditions., of different currents of Trotskyism, based on a principled program for socialist revolution.

To the strategy of building Leninist parties and a revolutionary international.

And to the commitment to carry out a militant internationalism, asset, of campaigns and intervention in the class struggle. Knowing that on these bases, we can have partial divergences that can be debated, That way we can learn from each other, and that only in this way, we will be able to build a true world revolutionary organization that aspires to lead the socialist revolution.