“Workers of The World Unite, You Have Nothing To Lose But Your Chains”-The Struggle For Trotsky's Fourth (Communist) International-From The Archives-Founding Conference of the Fourth International-1938

 

 
Markin comment (repost from September 2010 slightly edited):

Several years ago, 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 issued during the presidency of the late Venezuelan caudillo, Hugo Chavez, I got to thinking a little bit more on the subject. Moreover, it must have been something in the air at the time (maybe caused by these global climatic changes that are hazarding our collective future) because I had  also seen a spade of then recent commentary on the need to go back to something that looked very much like Karl Marx’s one-size-fits-all First International. Of course in the 21^st century, after over one hundred and fifty years of attempts to create adequate international working-class organizations, 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) was 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. 
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Founding Conference of the

Fourth International

1938

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Salute to Our Living Martyrs And Our Heroic Dead

At the moment when representatives of the Bolshevik-Leninists of all countries, gathered together in an international conference are formally constituting the Fourth International (World Party of the Socialist Revolution) their thoughts and their revolutionary greetings go first of all to their comrades who everywhere in the world are victims of the repressions of capitalism and of totalitarian dictatorships.
Our cadres are as yet few and young; but already numerous are those of our comrades who lie in prisons or concentration camps established throughout the world by rotting bourgeois regimes and reactionary governments. From an Indochina oppressed by French imperialism, through the bars of his prison, there comes to us the unconquerable voice of Ta Tu Thau, weak, paralyzed, but as intransigent and loyal as ever.
In Brazil, a young worker and militant Bolshevik Leninist, Hilcar Leite, sick, tortured, already sentenced to four and a half years of prison and threatened with an even more ferocious additional sentence, far from weakening, reaffirms, together with his prison comrades, his unshakable faith in the victory of our cause, and expects his freedom only as a result of the triumphs of the Fourth International.
Our heroic Greek comrades, dozens and dozens of whom languish on the prison islands of Metaxas, hold aloft with magnificent valor the banner of the Socialist Revolution, ranged around Stinas, sentenced to five years of prison and perpetual exile, and Polioupoulos, whose fate is unknown, and swear to revenge their comrade Scalaios, who died in the concentration camp of Acronauplia.
The concentration camps of Germany and Austria are full of devoted militants, implacable “Trotskyite” revolutionaries, who are standing up against the executioners unleashed by Hitler.
The Polish Bolshevik-Leninists are not spared by the Bonapartist dictatorship there, but in the jails of Poland continue the fight for the cause of Socialism.
But it is not only to the fascist and Bonapartist dictatorships that the Trotskyists fall victim. The so-called democratic governments also rabidly attack our movement and our comrades: in Morocco, in China, in Latin America, in France, in the United States, everywhere, our comrades are the object of persecution by the police. In Spain, while the mercenary gangs of Franco murder, without distinction of party, the best fighters in the republican trenches, the Negrin government hunts down the most militant and tested revolutionaries when, indeed, it does not simply abandon them to the paid agents of Stalin.
To the heroic Spanish Bolshevik-Leninists who in the republican lines fight against the fascist bandits, or who in the prisons of Negrin and the G.P.U. hold unflinchingly to the program of socialist revolution—the sole guarantee of victory over Franco!—to Grandizo and his companions, greetings from the first international conference of the Fourth International!
In China, the situation is the same as in Spain: our comrades, even while in the first ranks of the Chinese armies facing the Japanese invader, are stabbed in the back by the agents of Chiang Kai-shek and Stalin, who thus prepare the ground for a treacherous compromise with the Japanese imperialist bandits.
The Fourth International dips its stainless flag in salute over the still fresh graves of our heroic comrades who during the last two years have fallen under the bullets of Franco in Spain: under the axe or in the concentration camps of Hitler, in Germany and in Austria; in the prisons and prison islands of Metaxas and Vargas, in Greece and Brazil; under the blows of the Bonapartist dictatorships in Poland, in China, etc.; under the Stalinist bullets and tortures in the U.S.S.R., in Spain, in China, Switzerland, and in France.
Fauconnet, Pasque, Medeiros, Scalaios, Hans Freund, Isidor Fassner, Erwin Wolf, Reiss, Rossini, Sedoff, Klement! Your names are written across our banner! We salute also those young unknown revolutionaries who in Russia fall under the executions of the G.P.U. still crying “Long live Trotsky!”
None of these repressions, these tortures, these assassinations, shall stop us, for our task is laid out for us by history, and not by the activities of police or of state terror machines, no matter how powerful and totalitarian.
The first international conference of the World Party of the Socialist Revolution sends its greetings and its solidarity to all revolutionary militants thrown into bourgeois prisons, fascist prisons, and Stalinist prisons. It calls on all comrades, sympathizers, and conscious proletarians to put into practice their feelings of solidarity with all militants who have fallen victim to capitalist oppression and fascist and Stalinist terror. The very salvation of the socialist revolution requires that those militants who are being so sorely tried should feel that they are supported by an international solidarity which is active and effective.
Today’s sacrifice is tomorrow’s guarantee of triumph. The proletarian revolution, victorious under the banner of the Fourth International, will avenge the comrades who have fallen, and snatch from their prisons those who languish there.