Click on the headline to link to the Toward A History Of The Fourth International website for the article listed below:
How the Fourth International Was Conceived
by Jean van Heijenoort
This article was first published in the August 1944 issue of Fourth International.
[Jean van Heijenoort (1912-1986) was Trotsky's secretary in 1932 in Prinkipo, and followed him to France, Norway and Mexico. As a leader of the Fourth International he headed a provisional international centre in the United States during World War Two and left politics shortly thereafter.]
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Markin comment:
As a devotee of founding father Karl Marx’s communist work and writings started in the 1840s, especially the founding document, The Communist Manifesto, I know that the slogan-“Workers of The World Unite, You Have Nothing To Lose But Your Chains”- has been honored more in the breech than in the observance for more historical reasons than I want to go into in this commentary. Nevertheless the idea behind that slogan has, rightly, animated generations of revolutionaries in the search, the necessary search, for some kind of international configuration of workers' parties and workers' republics that would give weight and meaning to the slogan and lead, at some point, to that communist future that we so fervently desire, and given just a quick look at this old benighted world today, desperately need.
The idea of some kind of workers international has animated my political work for most of my life, even before I learned idea number one in the Marxist catechism. Hell, when I was nothing but scared rabbit, wet behind the ears, wonky little know-it-all little sophomore or sometime around that period, in high school I was trying to create such an organization (or, better, a youth auxiliary to such an organization) with a now preposterous sounding little name, Student Union For World Goals. That youth organization was, besides being mildly anti-communist, programmatically, a left-center rehash of the (adult) Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) program, that I took as my political model in those days. The folly of that activity is neither here nor there today, but what remains in that from very early on I sensed that if the oppressed of the world (although I would not have used such a term at that time) were to get a fair shake in this wicked old world then they would have to make up for the political weaknesses and not having ruled previously stemming from a feeling of powerlessness by being organized massively on an international basis.
So, 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 got 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.
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