Thomas Bias writes: > The Fourth International was launched to combat Stalinism and social > democracy in the working class, with the belief that without doing so > socialist revolution was not possible. ==================================== It's a little more complicated than that. The Trotskyists had been combatting social democracy and Stalinism within the international working class for more than a decade prior to the formation of the Fourth International, but as open or closed factions within these parties and the organizations they controlled. They chose not to pronounce themselves an independent party under their own banner because they understood they did not have the forces to warrant that status and that appeals to the working class to consider their small band as an alternative to the CP's and SP's would be met with derision, further contributing to their isolation.
However, when it became clear that they could not reform these parties from within, they decided in 1938 to proclaim the Fourth International, justifying the decision mostly on the basis of future expectations - that the coming world war was certain to produce the conditions for the triumph of the infant international "party" over both capitalism and Stalinism. As the FI's founding document put it: "At the beginning of the war the sections of the Fourth International will inevitably feel themselves isolated...However, the devastation and misery brought about by the new war, which in the first months will far outstrip the bloody horrors of 1914-18 will quickly prove sobering. The discontents of the masses and their revolt will grow by leaps and bounds. The sections of the Fourth International will be found at the head of the revolutionary tide. The program of transitional demands will gain burning actuality. The problem of the conquest of power by the proletariat will loom in full stature." (The death agony of capitalism and the tasks of the Fourth International" http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/tp/tp-text.htm#op) Trotsky was even more emphatic at an SWP meeting to celebrate the founding of the FI. "During the next ten years", he forecast, "the program of the Fourth International will become the guide of millions and these revolutionary millions will know how to storm earth and heaven." ("On the Founding of the Fourth International" http://www.marx.org/archive/trotsky/1938/10/foundfi.htm) That he well understood the contingent basis for the formation of the new party was evident in his remarks a year later, at the outbreak of WWII in September, 1939, and less than a year before his assassination in Mexico, when he ruminated on "the present war and the fate of modern society": "By the very march of events this question is now posed very concretely. The second world war has begun. It attests incontrovertibly to the fact that society can no longer live on the basis of capitalism. Thereby it subjects the proletariat to a new and perhaps decisive test. "If this war provokes, as we firmly believe, a proletarian revolution, it must inevitably lead to the overthrow of the bureaucracy in the USSR and regeneration of Soviet democracy on a far higher economic and cultural basis than in 1918...If, however, it is conceded that the present war will provoke not revolution but a decline of the proletariat, then there remains another alternative: the further decay of monopoly capitalism, its further fusion with the state and the replacement of democracy wherever it still remained by a totalitarian regime..An analogous result might occur in the event that the proletariat of advanced capitalist countries, having conquered power, should prove incapable of holding it and surrender it, as in the USSR, to a privileged bureaucracy. Then we would be compelled to acknowledge that the reason for the bureaucratic relapse is rooted not in the backwardness of the country and not in the imperialist environment but in the congenital incapacity of the proletariat to become a ruling class. Then it would be necessary in retrospect to establish that in its fundamental traits the present USSR was the precursor of a new exploiting régime on an international scale. "...The historic alternative, carried to the end, is as follows: either the Stalin régime is an abhorrent relapse in the process of transforming bourgeois society into a socialist society, or the Stalin régime is the first stage of a new exploiting society. If the second prognosis proves to be correct, then, of course, the bureaucracy will become a new exploiting class. However onerous the second perspective may be, if the world proletariat should actually prove incapable of fulfilling the mission placed upon it by the course of development, nothing else would remain except openly to recognize that the socialist program based on the internal contradictions of capitalist society, ended as a Utopia." ("The USSR in War" http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1939/09/ussr-war.htm) We'll never know whether and how Trotsky might have revised his shattered perspectives and the tiny movement's pretense of being an international party (or thinly-disguised versions of same) had he lived to see the outcome of the war, but his followers chose to ignore the faulty premises which had given birth to the FI and in their various rising and falling incarnations have all largely operated as on the margins of political life ever since. ________________________________________________ YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. Send list submissions to: [email protected] Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
