On
The 80th Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Leon Trotsky- Fourth
International-We Need A Socialist International More Than Ever
By
Harry Sims
Usually
I am a behind the scenes guy dishing out anniversary dates and other facts and
figures to site manager Greg Green and/or the recently created Editorial Board
but I felt compelled to write a little something about the anniversary, the 80th
anniversary this month of September, of the Fourth International that will be
forever linked to the name of the great Russian Bolshevik revolutionary Leon
Trotsky. In accordance with the seemingly obligatory notice of transparency
that accompanies anything today greater that what you had for breakfast at one
time I was close to those who were carrying on the wilted tradition of the
Fourth International after Trotsky was assassinated by a Stalinist agent down
in Mexico in the summer of 1940. Aside from that though, as the headline to
this introduction telegraphs, we are still in need of an international that
will lead the way forward for humankind’s hopefully more equitable future. Such
progress as we are now painfully aware does not happen automatically but must
be planned and led by people committed to such aims. The same is true for those
who want to revive the night of the long knives that was the hallmark of the 20th
century and now the first couple of decades of the 21st century. So
the die is cast.
Here
is a short primer for those legions who do not have the foggiest notion of a
what an International, Fourth or otherwise, is or was. These institutions are
associated with various historical epochs of the socialist movement in all its
struggles-victories and defeats. The first short-lived International was
associated directly with the personages of the socialist revolutionaries Karl
Marx and Friedrich Engels, the founders of the Marxist wing of socialism back
in the middle of the 19th century. The two important events beyond
the fact of creating the first international devoted to the struggle for
socialism were the support for the Northern side led by Abraham Lincoln in the
American Civil War and the stalwart defense of the Paris Commune, the first
workers republic, of 1871 which was drowned in blood by Thiers and his
mercenaries. The Second International before it became a “mail drop,” before it
dropped the ball in not opposing World War I on any side, an event we are
commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Armistice this year as
well, was the first mass organization of international socialism toward the end
of the 19th century. With the rapid rise of industrialization under
late capitalism working people swarmed to this organization to defend them. In
1914 with the aforementioned failure to oppose the bloody war which decimated
the flower of the working classes of all European nations its historic
important as a serious force for social change much less socialism was finished
even if the shell lingered, still lingers on today.
The
Third International, Communist International, Comintern, and the Fourth share
not only the personage of Leon Trotsky but purported to have the same aims at
various points up to World War II. The Comintern was created as a direct result
of the Russian Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917 by leaders Vladimir Lenin
and Trotsky among others for the direct purpose of leading the world socialist
revolution. When that task was abandoned in practice under the Stalin regime in
Russia Trotsky in exile and with not enough resources called for and
established the Fourth International we are commemorating.
Traces
of that Fourth International like the Second still exist but unlike the first
three Internationals it was essentially still-born in a time of defeats,
serious defeats for the working classes especially with the rise of Hitler in
Germany. So why beside nostalgia for an old International associated with the
name of an honest revolutionary do I write this short piece today. Like I said
the headline has telegraphed what is needed, what I think is needed
today-another International, a fifth International if you like to lead the
fight against the one-sided class struggle that is being waged by the
international capitalist classes. While Trotsky’s organization for many reasons
including the decimation of its cadre in Europe during World War II never got
off the ground some of its programmatic points in the key document that came
out of the conference which established the organization-the Transitional
Program- read like they could have been written today.
Beyond
the program though cadre, new cadre are needed to continue the forlorn fight
against the greedy vultures who control the means of production and finance and
that is where Leon Trotsky’s desperate and usually lonely fight to bring the 4th
International to the light of day can still serve as a model going forward. He,
Trotsky, a man who has led the Russian Revolution of 1905, has subsequently been
exiled and escaped the Czarist prisons when that revolution was crushed, had
been central to the seizure of power in the October Revolution in Russia in
1917, had been Commissar of War during the bloody civil war against the
counter-revolutionary Whites and their international imperialist allies, and
had led the fight to save the revolution when the dark hand of Stalin and his
henchmen pulled the hammer down stated unequivocally at the time in 1938 that
establishing a new international to fight the dark clouds coming over Europe
was the most important task he had done in his life. In our own epoch we are
looking for such men and women to continue the task. They will have to read
about and look at these 1938 documents and that very uneven struggle along the
way.
Workers Vanguard No. 1139
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7 September 2018
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TROTSKY
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LENIN
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Reforge the Fourth International!
(Quote of the Week)
Eighty years ago, on 3 September 1938, the Fourth International was established under the leadership of Leon Trotsky. In opposition to the reformism of the social-democratic Second International and the Stalinized Communist International (Comintern), its founding document, excerpted below, provided the framework for building a new world party of socialist revolution. It is the task of the International Communist League to reforge the Fourth International, which was destroyed by a revisionist current under Michel Pablo in the early 1950s that renounced the need to build Trotskyist parties.
It is necessary to help the masses in the process of the daily struggle to find the bridge between present demands and the socialist program of the revolution. This bridge should include a system of transitional demands, stemming from today’s conditions and from today’s consciousness of wide layers of the working class and unalterably leading to one final conclusion: the conquest of power by the proletariat.
Classical Social Democracy, functioning in an epoch of progressive capitalism, divided its program into two parts independent of each other: the minimum program, which limited itself to reforms within the framework of bourgeois society, and the maximum program, which promised substitution of socialism for capitalism in the indefinite future. Between the minimum and the maximum program no bridge existed. And indeed Social Democracy has no need of such a bridge, since the word socialism is used only for holiday speechifying. The Comintern has set out to follow the path of Social Democracy in an epoch of decaying capitalism: when, in general, there can be no discussion of systematic social reforms and the raising of the masses’ living standards; when every serious demand of the proletariat and even every serious demand of the petty bourgeoisie inevitably reaches beyond the limits of capitalist property relations and of the bourgeois state.
The strategical task of the Fourth International lies not in reforming capitalism but in its overthrow. Its political aim is the conquest of power by the proletariat for the purpose of expropriating the bourgeoisie.
—Leon Trotsky, “The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the
Fourth International,” commonly known as the Transitional Program (1938)
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