I. Conjuncture and structure
It has been alleged that the
founding of the Fourth International had been determined by two
predictions of Trotsky which turned out to be wrong. First, that
the Second World War which was then imminent, would lead to a
huge revolutionary upsurge by the international working class
which would be greater than the one after the First World War
and would largely bypass the traditional working class
organisations and give a genuinely revolutionary current the
historical opportunity for a decisive breakthrough. Second, that
the Stalinist bureaucracy would come out of the war greatly
weakened, if not overthrown, thereby losing its political
stranglehold over the more militant sections of the
international working class and anti-imperialist movement.
Undoubtedly these perspectives
kept different groups of Trotskyist cadres in various countries
motivated in the late 1930s and early 1940s. When they turned
out to be wrong it had important consequences. Many of them
broke with the Fourth International and often even with the
workers’ movement.
Others tried to adjust their
continuing commitment to world revolution to a world which
looked quite different from the way they had expected it to look
a few years earlier. In order to still achieve that
revolutionary goal, they thought it essential to revise
essential parts of the Fourth International’s program, both
with respect to capitalism’s further perspectives and the
nature of the Soviet Union.
In any case the 1949-1953
period saw the biggest crisis in the history of the Fourth
International which led to a disastrous split. It took the
movement 10-15 years to overcome the negative results of the
crisis, first through the 1962-63 reunification and then through
May 68 and the subsequent radicalisation. Today the Fourth
International, while still much too weak, is much stronger than
it was in 1938, 1949-53 or in 1963.
This fact alone would already
be sufficient to prove that all those who believe that the
founding of the Fourth International was somehow connected to
the short-term perspectives mentioned above are very much
mistaken. History has proved again and again that any working
class or revolutionary organisation, be it national or
international, is built on quicksand if it comes out of a
judgement on conjunctural circumstances or any other sort of
analytical idiosyncrasies. Only those organisations with a
program and activities corresponding to the historical needs of
the proletariat, as expressed in many struggles for decades if
not generations, are built on firm foundations. Such
organisations will ultimately have a real influence if they also
learn how to exploit opportunities and avoid disastrous
mistakes.
The First and Second
Internationals corresponded to the need for wage earners’
class independence. This remains a key task of the class
struggle as long as capitalism exists, as vital today as it was
125 or 90 years ago. The Third International combined that need
with the aim of a revolutionary overthrow of international
capitalism in the imperialist epoch. Today this is as burning a
task as it was in 1914 or 1919.
The founding of the Fourth
International corresponds to historical reality on an
international scale of similar nature. We have to examine in a
scientific way, without personal or “generational”
impatience, disappointment or discouragement, whether these
historic needs are as real today as they were 50 years ago.
Trotsky’s conjunctural
articles – especially the more polemic ones – contain
incomplete, imprecise or even mistaken short-term perspectives
– just like similar writings by Marx, Engels and Lenin, not to
speak of their later co-thinkers, even the most gifted ones.
However, such errors are by and large absent from his main
programmatic writings of that period, especially they three key
ones: The Transitional Programme, The
Manifesto of the Emergency Conference of the Fourth
International of May 1940 (his political testament),
and The Revolution Betrayed. The same is true
of his three previous key programmatic works: his Critique
of the Comintern Programme, Permanent
Revolution, and his thesis The Fourth
International and the War, which is too little read and
studied today. [1]
This point can be easily
confirmed by the following paragraph of the 1940 Manifesto
regarding the historical schedule for Trotskyist perspectives:
“The capitalist world has no
way out, unless a prolonged death agony is so considered. It is
necessary to prepare for long years, if not decades of war,
uprisings, brief interludes of truce, new wars and new
uprisings. A young revolutionary party must base itself on this
perspective ... The question of tempos and time intervals is of
enormous importance; but it alters neither the general
historical perspective nor the direction of our policy.” [2]
The same remark applies to the
use of the world “period” throughout the initial chapter of The
Transitional Programme.
But even stronger confirmation
of the non-conjunctural reasons for founding the Fourth
International, established by George Breitman, is that Trotsky
and his main followers had already decided to found the Fourth
International in 1936. [3]
At that time war was not imminent and the European revolution
had not suffered major defeats (with the exception of the Nazi
victory in Germany). In fact, revolutionary victory was still
possible in Spain and France. It would probably have prevented
the outbreak of the Second World War. The huge Stalinist purges
of 1936-38 could also have been prevented.
We also have reliable
information that the decision to found the Fourth International
was taken as early as 1933, with the Comintern’s final demise
as a revolutionary organisation, in the same way as Lenin’s
call for the Third International was made as early as 1914 when
the Social Democratic parties capitulated. [4]
Footnotes
1.
This document is especially important because it projected a
dual tactic (combined tactic) in the event of world war in the
imperialist countries allied to the USSR and then in the
imperialist countries attacking the USSR. The realism and
necessity of this combined tactic was largely confirmed by the
experience of the Second World War. Trotsky was practically the
only one who thought through this tactic in such a way as to
avoid any renunciation of the class interests and political
independence of the proletariat in the imperialist countries
allied to the USSR.
2.
Writings of Leon Trotsky 1939-40, Pathfinder
Press, New York, p. 218.
3.
See The Rocky Road to the Fourth International, by
George Breitman, BIDOM, New York 1988.
4.
See Lenin’s article of November 1, 1914: Situation and
Tasks of the Socialist International.
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