“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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Victor Serge 1939

Victor Serge and the IVth International

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Source: Victor Serge & Leon Trotsky, La Lutte Contre le Stalinisme. Maspero, Paris, 1977
Translated for marxists.org by Mitch Abidor in 2005
Authors: The Editors of the Bulletin of the Russian Opposition, in “Quatrième Internationale,” April 1939

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Certain of our comrades ask us what Victor Serge's relations are with the IVth International. We are forced to answer that they are adversarial. Since arriving overseas, Victor Serge has not ceased to agitate; his attitude can only be defined as one of "agitation". On not one single question has he exposed a clear, well-defined position, either as a proposal or a refutation. On the contrary, he has at all times supported those who have left the IVth International in whatever direction, right or left.

He abruptly announced his membership in POUM in a letter, while having made no attempt to respond to our criticism of POUM as a centrist organization that was playing a sad role. Victor Serge flirted with the Spanish anarcho-syndicalists despite the treasonous role they played in the Spanish Revolution. Behind the scenes he supported the pitiful hero of "left” trade unionism Sneevliet, while all the while having decided not to openly defend the policies of Dutch opportunism. At the same time, Victor Serge on several occasions repeated that his divergences with us were only of a “secondary” character. To the question openly posed as to why in this case he collaborated, not with the IVth international, but with its worst enemies, Victor Serge was not able to give an answer. All of this has removed all logic from his personal “politics” and has transformed it into a series of personal schemes, if not intrigues.
If Victor Serge now still speaks of his sympathy for the IVth International it’s in exactly in the same way as Vereeken, Molinier, Sneevliet, Maslow, etc, who have in view not the real International, but an International in accordance with their imagination, in their image and resembling them, and which is necessary to them in order to hide their opportunistic or adventurist policies. Our International truly acts, and has nothing in common with this imaginary International. And neither the Russian Section nor the IVth International as a whole take the least responsibility for the politics of Victor Serge.