Leslie Goonewardene

Rise And Fall Of The Comintern

The Fourth International

Chapter Eleven

THE FOUNDATION OF THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL

The historical roots of the Fourth International we have already traced to the Opposition which arose at the end of 1923 in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union under the leadership of Leon Trotsky. But the growth of the Left Opposition in the Communist Parties outside the Soviet Union had been much hampered in the years following, due to the strict censorship maintained by the bureaucratised Comintern as well as to the tissue of falsehoods and misrepresentations by which it had confused the real issues. The deportation, however, of Trotsky to Turkey in 1929, and the relative freedom he enjoyed there, enabled large numbers of Oppositionists and militant communists outside the Soviet Union to learn the truth for the first time and to benefit from the theoretical and practical guidance of Trotsky. In 1930 the International Left Opposition was established at a world conference held in Paris. When the capitulation of Stalinism to Hitler in 1933 made it clear that there was no prospect of regenerating the Comintern, the International Left Opposition boldly proclaimed the need of organising a new, communist, Fourth International. Increasing in strength, and joined by new parties in Germany and Holland, the International Left Opposition, renamed the International Communist League, took the initiative in calling the first international Conference for the Fourth International, which was held at Geneva in July 1936. This conference served the purpose of bringing together the international forces of the 4th International in a new organisation, equipping them ideologically, and creating an authentic international guiding centre. The Conference appointed a General Council, an International Secretariat and a Bureau, and decided that a draft programme be produced, after the discussion of which arrangements should be made for the calling of a regular constituent (first) congress of the 4th International.

The 4th International movement now entered on a period in which its still small national parties and groups entered the sections of the 2nd International in various countries for the purpose of taking advantage of the leftward move taking place among the socialist workers in order to draw them into the revolutionary current of the 4th International. This policy led to an increase in strength, particularly of the sections in France, Belgium and the U.S.A. In this same period the movement shed sectarians and ultra-leftists who had joined it in the beginning. These, together with nearly all the groups of centrists have since then disappeared into oblivion. Certainly, the only revolutionary internationalist current which has survived and expanded has been that of the 4th International.

The 4th International (World Party of the Socialist Revolution) was formally founded at a World Congress held in September 1938 in Switzerland. Shortly before the Conference the G.P.U. kidnapped and brutally murdered Rudolf Klement, secretary of the 4th International Bureau. But despite all difficulties, created by the bourgeois police and the G.P.U., the Conference met in secret and successfully concluded its labours. 30 delegates, representing organisations in the United States, France, Great Britain, Germany, the Soviet Union, Italy, Latin America, Poland, Belgium, Holland and Greece were present. Organisations affiliated to the 4th International in Spain, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Indo-China, China, French Morocco, South Africa, Canada, several Latin American countries, Australia, New Zealand, Denmark, Norway, Lithuania, Palestine and Rumania, were unable to send delegates because of conditions of distance, illegality and other difficulties.

The Transitional Programme adopted at the Conference pointed out that the old social-democratic practice (followed by the Comintern) of dividing its programme into “maximum” and “minimum” programmes having no bridge between them, had no reality today. For, in the present era of the decline of capitalism, no serious demand of the masses is capable of solution within the framework of capitalist property relations and of the bourgeois state. “The present epoch,” it declared, “is distinguished not for the fact that it frees the revolutionary party from day to day work, but because it permits this work to be carried on indissolubly with the tasks of the revolution ... The task of the transitional programme lies in the systematic mobilisation of the masses for the proletarian revolution.” This programme, based on the experience of the sections of the 4th International, provided the international working class with the bridge between its demands today and the programme of proletarian revolution. Not the least significance of the Conference lay in the fact that at the most critical time, with the entire world already under the shadow of the approaching war, of all political tendencies in the workers’ movement, the only organisation to convene its international congress was the 4th International.

Roughly coinciding with the holding of its conference and the adoption of the programme of transitional demands, the 4th International entered a new period, in which its sections began to evolve into parties with a mass base. This was clearly so in the case of the Socialist Workers’ Party in America, and was also true of the sections of the 4th International in French Indo-China and Latin America. With the advent of the imperialist war, everywhere the inevitable repression naturally fell with the most severity on the intransigent revolutionaries of the 4th International. But they worked everywhere, swimming against the current in some places, helping to direct the stream in others; enjoying comparative freedom as in America, and secretly printing and publishing their organ under penalty of death as in France. The sections of the 4th International entered the war welded together by a common doctrine and armed with a revolutionary Marxist programme, confident that it is they and they alone who can lead humanity out of its impasse.

The Bolshevik-Leninists have always stood for the unconditional defence of the Soviet Union. The thesis on “The Fourth International and the Soviet Union”, passed at the 1936 Conference declared: "The proletarian vanguard of the entire world will support the U.S.S.R. in war, in spite of the parasitic bureaucracy and of the uncrowned Negus in the Kremlin, because the social regime of the U.S.S.R., despite all its deformations and ulcers represents an enormous historical step forward in comparison with putrified capitalism ... The defeat of the Soviet Union would not only signify the collapse of the Soviet bureaucracy but also the replacement of the state and collective property by capitalist chaos”.

It is a noteworthy fact that their hostility to the Stalin regime did not prevent the German Trotskyists from informing the Soviet Government through the Soviet embassy in Berlin, several weeks in advance of the intended attack on the Soviet Union, including the names of the divisions to be used—information that was no doubt taken into account in the plans of defence adopted. (Nation , New York.)

The parties of the 4th International are the staunchest defenders of the Soviet Union, even though that defence may be led by the bureaucracy. But they make it clear that even while defending the Soviet Union they do not give up the struggle against the bureaucratic apparatus. Nor can considerations of the defence of the Soviet Union ever justify the abandonment of the path of international revolution. “We must formulate our slogans in such a way that the workers see clearly just what we are defending in the U.S.S.R. (state property and planned economy), and against whom we are conducting a ruthless struggle (the parasitic bureaucracy and their Comintern). We must not lose sight for a single moment of the fact that the question of overthrowing the Soviet bureaucracy is for us subordinate to the question of preserving state property in the means of production of the U.S.S.R.; that the question of preserving state property in the means of production in the Soviet Union is subordinate for us to the question of the world proletarian revolution”. (Trotsky, “The U.S.S.R. in the War,” Socialist Appeal , October 10, 1939).

The Trotskyists were not taken unawares by events. They had carefully worked out well in advance the policies, which the proletariat in countries allied to the Soviet Union, as well as in countries fighting against the Soviet Union, should follow in wartime. The theses of the 4th International on war, adopted by the International Secretariat as far back as May 1934, declared: “Remaining the determined and devoted defender of the workers’ state in the struggle with imperialism, the proletarian will not, however, become an ally of the imperialist allies of the U.S.S.R. The proletariat of a capitalist country which finds itself in alliance with the U.S.S.R. must retain fully and completely its irreconcilable hostility to the imperialist government of its own country” (“The 4th International and War”).

But this does not mean that the proletariat opposes every action of the imperialist ally of the Soviet Union. “For instance, it would be absurd and criminal in case of war between the U.S.S.R. and Japan for the American proletariat to sabotage the sending of American munitions to the U.S.S.R.” (Ibid ). The parties of the 4th International in countries allied to the Soviet Union give tacit support to the sending of military supplies by their own imperialist governments to the USSR, but at the same time they fight for independent working class aid to the Soviet Union, that is, for effective direct support (including military support) controlled by the proletariat.

The parties of the 4th international in countries fighting the Soviet Union are pledged not only to struggle for the revolutionary overthrow of the bourgeoisie in their own countries, but also to resort to all actions (including sabotage) calculated to disrupt the military operations against the Soviet Union. “However during an imperialist war there may be cases where a revolutionary party will be forced to resort to military-technical means, though they do not as yet follow directly from the revolutionary movement in their own country. Thus, if it is a question of sending arms or troops against a workers’ government or a rebellious colony, not only such methods as boycott and strike, but direct military sabotage may become entirely practical and obligatory. Resorting or not resorting to such measures will be a matter of practical possibilities”. (Trotsky, “Learn to Think”, New International , July 1938.)

The situation that has arisen after the conclusion of the war has re-affirmed the correctness of the Trotskyist position that the only real defence of the Soviet Union lies in international revolution. The echoes of the guns of war had hardly died away before the diplomatic guns of the imperialists were trained on the Soviet Union. Despite Stalin’s war-time dreams of a lengthy period of peace-time collaboration of the Soviet Union with imperialism, reality is demonstrating that the two different and contradictory social systems cannot exist side by side indefinitely. American imperialism, the big winner of World War II has constituted itself the organiser and spearhead of the united capitalist war of intervention that it is preparing against the Soviet Union. Today more than ever before it is international revolution alone that can save the first workers’ state.

THE IMPERIALIST WAR

The 4th International had its line in relation to the imperialist war laid down well in advance. It declared that the war that was approaching was not a war between Democracy and Fascism, but an imperialist war fought for colonies and world domination. “A new partition of the world is on the order of the day,” wrote Trotsky in an article entitled “On the Character of the Coming War” in the New International of December 1938. “The first step in the revolutionary education of the workers must be to develop the ability to perceive beneath the official formulae, slogans and hypocritical phrases, the real imperialist appetites, plans and calculations.” “Imperialism is inevitably and irresistibly heading to a redivision of the world, corresponding to the changed relation of forces. To prevent the catastrophe, imperialism must be strangled. All other methods are fictions, illusions, lies.” “At present, after the fresh experience of Czechoslovakia, there is no necessity, it seems, to demonstrate that the imperialists are fighting one another not for political principles but for domination over the world under the cover of any principles that will serve their purpose ... To substitute political or moral abstractions for the actual aims of the warring imperialist camps is not to fight for democracy, but to help the brigands disguise their robbery, pillage and violence. This is now precisely the main function of the Second and Third Internationals.”

The 4th International stood for the application of the Leninist policy of revolutionary defeatism in relation to the imperialist war. That is to say, its parties stood for the full utilisation of the difficulties of the government due to the war, the intensified prosecution of the class struggle and its orientation towards the proletarian seizure of power, all in complete disregard of the adverse military consequences that result to one’s own imperialist government in the prosecution of the war.

THE FUTURE

No political tendency in world history has been subjected to the persecution which the movement represented by the 4th International has suffered. Lies, calumny, imprisonment, torture, execution and assassination have been the methods used by the despotic bureaucrats, in their frantic effort to destroy the irreconcilable proletarian revolutionary tendency. And it has been not only a question of the terror in the Soviet Union. In the capitalist countries of the world the Bolshevik-Leninists have been forced, in increasing measure, to meet not only the repression of the imperialist bourgeoisie and the opposition of the Social Democrats, but also the ruthless vindictiveness of the agents of Stalin abroad. Gigantic campaign of distortion and lies, backed by unlimited financial resources, diplomatic pressure brought to bear by the Kremlin on capitalist governments to hide the truth and to increase still further the obstacles in the path of the Bolshevik-Leninists, and even the commissioning of G.P.U. gangsters to assassinate prominent 4th Internationalists, have been among the measures adopted by Stalin to fight the movement of the 4th International outside the boundaries of the Soviet Union.

The persecution of Leon Trotsky and his family serves to illustrate the bitter personal tragedy and heroic martyrdom suffered at the hands of the Stalinist Inquisition alone in the effort to build the 4th International. Of Trotsky’s four children, Nina died of pulmonary tuberculosis in 1928, after her husband had been arrested as an oppositionist and she had consequently been deprived of all opportunity of adequate treatment; Zinaida was driven to suicide in Berlin in 1933 after she had been arbitrarily deprived of her Soviet citizenship by the Soviet Government, and had become homeless and destitute; Sergei, Trotsky’s son, who had not participated in political activity of any kind, was arrested in the Soviet Union in 1935, was charged of planning the mass poisoning of workers, and has not been heard of since; Leon Sedov, Trotsky’s other son, close collaborator of his father, intransigent revolutionist and fearless fighter in the cause of the 4th International, died under suspicious circumstances in Paris in 1938.

Trotsky himself, driven from Turkey to France, and France to Norway; consequent on the diplomatic pressure brought to bear by the Soviet Government on the governments of these countries; was finally ordered in 1936 to leave Norway by the Norwegian Government for the same reason. Where could he go? Residence in Germany, Italy or any Fascist country was of course impossible. Czechoslovakia and England had refused him visas, and America had shown it would do the same. There was only one government that would readily accept him, and that was the Government of the Soviet Union, in order to kill him. Stalin, who had committed the mistake of deporting him to Turkey in 1929, was now trying to get him back to the Soviet Union and remedy that error. Trotsky was finally able to find asylum in Mexico. The G.P.U. now set about in earnest to assassinate Trotsky. Several plans were made. The attempt of an armed gang to machine-gun him together with his wife and grandson in their home in Mexico in May 1939 failed due to the presence of mind of Trotsky. Three months later the Stalinist agent Jackson alias Jacques Monard succeeded in his attempt and the international proletarian movement lost its greatest living leader.

In the past under the combined blows of the imperialist police and the gangsters of Stalin, the movement of the 4th International has shown that it possessed tremendous reserves of strength. Today, despite the irreparable loss of its founder and guide, it is proving this anew. If Stalin hoped by the brutal murder of Trotsky to crush the 4th International, he has failed. For the movement of the 4th International, its roots springing from the life problems of modern society in travail, is the revolutionary tendency representing the historical interests of the international proletariat.

The persecution of the international Bolshevik-Leninists and the gigantic campaign of falsehood levelled against them by the Stalintern is no doubt one of the causes for the comparatively slow growth of the 4th International movement in the past. It is not an easy task for a revolutionary group, weak in numbers, and still weaker in financial means, to compete successfully against a vast organisation backed by the resources of an entire state, particularly when that organisation is exploiting the revolutionary traditions of the October revolution. But much more important than all this has been the general decay of the workers’ movement in the past fifteen years, deepened in turn by each fresh betrayal of the Comintern.

The revolutionary party gains strength and grows in a period of rise, and it shrinks, sometimes to a mere handful, in a period of defeats and decline. The Bolsheviks in Russia rose to a commanding position in 1905, but in the period of reaction from 1908 to 1913 they were reduced to scattered groups. In the first period of the war of 1914-18, when a wave of patriotism carried everything before it, they were reduced to the illegal existence of a hunted sect. But this did not prevent them from leading the victorious revolution in October 1917. And the obstacles in the path of the international Bolshevik-Leninists have been much greater. It is true, their analyses and predictions had been borne out by events over and over again. Nevertheless the disastrous defeats to which the Stalintern has led the workers, and the resulting disillusionment and apathy of the masses have adversely affected, not least of all, the revolutionary movement of international Bolshevism. The Bolshevik-Leninists have been forced to wait patiently for a turn in the tide.

As Trotsky says , “I remember some discussion in 1927 in Moscow after Chiang Kai Shek stifled the Chinese workers. We predicted this ten days before and Stalin opposed us with the argument that Borodin was vigilant, that Chiang Kai Shek would not have the possibility to betray us, etc. I believe that it was eight or ten days later that the tragedy occurred and our comrades expressed optimism because our analysis was so clear that everyone would see it and we would be sure to win the party. I answered that the strangulation of the Chinese revolution is a thousand times more important for the masses than our predictions. Our predictions can win some few intellectuals who take an interest in such things but not the masses. The military victory of Chiang Kai Shek will inevitably provoke a depression and this is not conducive to the growth of a revolutionary fraction”. (“Fighting against the Stream”, Fourth International , May 1941).

And again, “Dilettantes, Charlatans, or blockheads incapable of probing into the dialectic of historic ebbs and flows have more than once brought in their verdict “The ideas of the Bolshevik-Leninists may, perhaps, be correct but they are incapable of building a mass organisation.” As if a mass organisation can be built under any and all conditions! As if a revolutionary programme does not render it obligatory for us to remain in the minority and swim against the stream in an epoch of reaction! That revolutionist is worthless who uses his own impatience as a measuring rod for the tempo of an epoch. Never before has the path of the world revolutionary movement been blocked with such monstrous obstacles as it is today on the eve of a new epoch of greatest revolutionary convulsion. (“A Great Achievement”, New International , October 1938).

With the conclusion of the Second Imperialist World War there has opened up a new period of revolutionary upheaval. The question is, will the workers of the world succeed in overthrowing capitalism and ushering in the socialist society, or will the capitalist monster succeed in defeating these struggles and move on to an atomic war a thousand times more destructive than the last? On the answer to this question hangs the fate of humanity. We recollect that Marx, while considering socialism to be historically inevitable as the next stage in the evolution of human society, at the same time went on to add that there was another alternative—namely, a return to barbarism. It must be admitted that never did this dread alternative assume before a reality as it has done today. But we, who have faith in the masses and their capacity to achieve, reject the perspective of decline and defeat. Driven to desperation by capitalism, and betrayed by the social reformists and Stalinists, the masses will find no other leadership than that offered by the Trotskyists. The coming world revolution will unfold under the banner of the Fourth International.