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From Fourth International, Vol.11 No.3, May-June 1950, p.66.
Transcription & mark-up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
If this is the first copy of Fourth International you’ve ever read, we’d like to tell you something about our aims and policy.
This issue is a special one, devoted entirely to the struggle of the Negro people for full equality. It is one of a series dealing with crucial economic, social and political problems facing the American people.
Our August issue, featuring The American Empire, assessed Wall Street’s drive for world domination and the resistance it is generating at home and abroad. A previous issue, Political Trends in the US, brought the Marxist view of the American political scene up to date. Future issues will single out other subjects of similar general interest for special attention.
Fourth International is the only genuine Marxist magazine in the United States. It defends Marxism against the publicists of capitalism and the propagandists of the counter-revolutionary Stalinist regime in the USSR. It is the American voice of Trotskyism, that international revolutionary socialist movement which carries on the tradition of Marx, Engels and Lenin and which in other countries is organized in the Fourth International, the World Party of Socialist Revolution.
We believe that capitalism has reached the end of its usefulness for the great mass of working people and that it must be replaced by the modern economic system of socialism. Capitalism, in our opinion, offers only a grim perspective of continual depressions, new waves of fascism and more catastrophic world wars with the very real possibility in the not distant future of atomic annihilation.
As the evidence assembled in this issue of Fourth International demonstrates, American capitalism, the richest and most powerful on earth, cannot even assure the Negro people the exercise of their democratic rights. Indeed, it has powered a barbarous drive against all civil liberties in America. As Big Business proceeds with its plans for domination of the world, the danger of totalitarianism in the USA grows more and more menacing. Fourth International is, consequently, a partisan magazine and has been since its inception. It stands for no compromise with the billionaire plutocrats and their retinue of racial bigots, careerists and fascist-minded reactionaries. It voices the aspirations of the overwhelming mass of humanity who want a world of enduring peace, the boundless plenty
modern industry can obviously produce and the fulfillment of the great promise of limitless progress which science holds forth.
In this ideological war, Fourth International performs a special function. Its principal aim is to provide the basic theory needed to solve the difficult problems facing the people in moving toward the transformation of society. From the great body of Marxist thought it presents out-of-print hitherto untranslated articles that shed a revealing light on current events. The January-February issue, for instance, carried a remarkable letter by Leon Trotsky on the peasant war in China which sounds as if it were written about the current situation although it was actually penned in 1932 by this master of the dialectics of revolutionary struggles.
Most articles in Fourth International, like those of this issue, are written by the outstanding Marxists of the day and deal with issues of immediate concern. They present the straight, unvarnished facts about the trends in politics, economics and sociology of vital importance to every thinking worker and student. Many of these articles constitute significant and lasting contributions to the living and growing body of Marxist theory.
The influence of Fourth International extends far beyond the confines of the United States. Outside of fascist Spain and the Stalinist-dominated lands where its possession could mean the firing squad, it is read by the vanguard of informed workers in virtually every country. Here at home it enjoys a solid reputation among the politically alert sections of the labor movement for the reliability of its articles and the accuracy of its forecasts.
If you liked this issue and found it stimulating and educational, you belong among the ranks of these regular readers. We invite you to join them by filling out the coupon on this page and sending in your subscription.
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Last updated on: 19 March 2009