Click on the headline to link to the Toward A History Of The Fourth International website for the article listed above.
Markin comment (repost from September 2010):
Recently, when the question of an international, a new workers international, a fifth international, was broached by the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), faintly echoing the call by Venezuelan caudillo, Hugo Chavez, I got to thinking a little bit more on the subject. Moreover, it must be something in the air (maybe caused by these global climatic changes) because I have also seen recent commentary on the need to go back to something that looks very much like Karl Marx’s one-size-fits-all First International. Of course, just what the doctor by all means, be my guest, but only if the shades of Proudhon and Bakunin can join. Boys and girls that First International was disbanded in the wake of the demise of the Paris Commune for a reason, okay. Mixing political banners (Marxism and fifty-seven varieties of anarchism) is appropriate to a united front, not a hell-bent revolutionary International fighting, and fighting hard, for our communist future. Forward
The Second International, for those six, no seven, people who might care, is still alive and well (at least for periodic international conferences) as a mail-drop for homeless social democrats who want to maintain a fig leaf of internationalism without having to do much about it. Needless to say, one Joseph Stalin and his cohorts liquidated the Communist (Third) International in 1943, long after it turned from a revolutionary headquarters into an outpost of Soviet foreign policy. By then no revolutionary missed its demise, nor shed a tear goodbye. And of course there are always a million commentaries by groups, cults, leagues, tendencies, etc. claiming to stand in the tradition (although, rarely, the program) of the Leon Trotsky-inspired Fourth International that, logically and programmatically, is the starting point of any discussion of the modern struggle for a new communist international.
With that caveat in mind this month, the September American Labor Day month, but more importantly the month in 1938 that the ill-fated Fourth International was founded I am posting some documents around the history of that formation, and its program, the program known by the shorthand, Transitional Program. If you want to call for a fifth, sixth, seventh, what have you, revolutionary international, and you are serious about it beyond the "mail-drop" potential, then you have to look seriously into that organization's origins, and the world-class Bolshevik revolutionary who inspired it. Forward.
*******
Markin comment on this document:
Many, including Leon Trotsky’s definitive biographer Isaac Deutscher, have argued that 1938 was not the time to inaugurate a new, communist international, the Fourth International. As this Foreword to the documentation on the founding conference notes, however, 1938 was exactly the time (if not previously) to start gathering in the cadre to fight for the next round of the socialist revolutionary wave that was sure to come with the new imperialist war staring them straight in the face. Certainly the 1930s with the rise and victory of Nazism in Central Europe, the final unraveling of the Bolshevik Party revolutionary cadre under the gun in the Moscow Trials by a triumphant Stalin, and the increasing apparent defeat of the republican forces in Spain did not portend an immediate rising tide of victorious working class struggle. But in the end, strong or weak, what other forces were available, and under what circumstances were those cadre to be gathered. The summary of the “activities” of the right-communists (Brandler-Lovestoneites) and of the centrist London Bureau put paid to that notion. Finally, revolutionaries do not always get the optimium conditions to do what is necessary under the circumstances but they still need to find organized programmatic expressions for what they stand for. If only to serve as the memory of the international working class for the future forces to gather.
No comments:
Post a Comment