“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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Greetings to the Fighters in Spain

The Conference of the Fourth International proclaims its complete solidarity with the fighters in Spain whatever their parties, who with arms in hand are struggling against the criminal gangs of Franco-Hitler-Mussolini.

It proclaims its firm will to set to work in every way to break the blockade established on August 6, 1936, by the French Popular Front Government, the English Government, and the Russian Government.
It recalls with pride that the first effective practical aid in the form of volunteers, while the Popular Front parties were still babbling away about neutrality, was given by the sections of the Fourth International, particularly the French and Belgian sections. It salutes its members who fell in the first days of the fight against Franco: Robert de Fauconnet, member of the P.O.I., killed at Huesca; Pasqué, of the Belgian P.S.R., killed at Irun; as well as many other comrades wounded or crippled.
In those days, the revolutionary workers, in the militias, in the factories, in the rear and at the front, were the masters. That is why they won the first decisive victories. Today they, the winners of the first victories, have been imprisoned and are hunted down. Stalin's bureaucracy, allied with the socialist tops, the “anarchist” leaders, and the bourgeoisie, has, in return for very precarious material aid, forced repressions against the “Trotskyites” and against the anarchist rank and file fighters. The end sought by this Stalin bourgeois terror was the restoration of bourgeois property relations and the recapture from the workers of their July, 1936 conquests. It is in this repression, which decapitates the republican army, that one can find the principal cause of the defeat.
Free the best fighters! Free the members of the P.O.U.M., of the F.A.I.! Free Munis and Carlini, former militiamen, members of the Fourth International! All they ask is to go back to their posts at the front, in the vanguard of the republican armies. Working class fighters, force Negrin-Stalin to put an end to their frame-ups and persecutions, direct importations from Moscow!
All the time that they are slandering and persecuting revolutionaries throughout the entire world, the leaders of the Popular Front, who are responsible for the blockade, confine themselves to mere phrases intended to lull the fighting spirit of the workers.
The Fourth International, all the while that it is trying to organize solidarity in every domain, has been proclaiming ever since the beginning that the best and most effective aid that the workers of the whole world can give to their Spanish brothers lies in direct action, organized especially by trade unions in the war industries, in transportation, and in seaports, in boycotting all shipments to the fascists, and in the general strike to overthrow the governments that support the blockade.
The Fourth International proclaims that only victory over Franco can reopen the perspective of a proletarian revolution. That is the reason why, despite the frame-ups and persecutions of the Negrin-Stalin government, and while fighting against that government of defeat and reaction, advanced workers must strive with all their strength for the victory of the republican armies.

 

The EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE OF THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL