“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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Resolution On The Situation In Poland

1. The dissolution of the Polish Communist Party will dissipate the last illusions kept by the workers toward the party which in their eyes personified the heroic past of Bolshevism. The traditions of internationalism, born with the party of Louis Varynski; the resultant traditions of class struggle, linked to the names of Rosa Luxemburg and Tyschko these inheritances now pass to the Bolshevik-Leninists.

Although we must take into account a temporary deepening of depression and discouragement in Polish working class quarters, and although we must also take into account the Stalinist efforts to rebuild an apparatus under the control of the Kremlin bureaucracy, there is no doubt of the renewal of the revolutionary movement. The new revolutionary generation will flock together under the banner and on the foundation of the Bolshevik-Leninist program.
2. The entry of our Bolshevik-Leninist comrades in the Bund could produce positive results only in the event of the success of our work within the Polish Socialist Party (PPS). The special character of the Bund, which is a Jewish workers’ organization, and hence limited to small scale industries; the atmosphere of ideological petrification and nationalist limitation; the purely indirect contact of the Bund with the political problems of the country, upon the solution of which the Bund has only a minimum of influence all this renders impossible an ideological differentiation within the Bund and assured the failure of the Bolshevik-Leninists.
The conference considers the principal tasks of the Polish section to be:
a) to give up fruitless membership in the Bund;
b) to form an independent organization;
c) to develop a political platform containing the slogans and the tasks which the Polish Bolshevik-Leninists propose for their work in Poland.
3. Considering that the collaboration of the International Secretariat with the Polish section has been inadequate, the conference calls for the tightening up of the organizational links with it.