Fourth International

FOURTH INTERNATIONAL. On 3 September 1938 delegates from eleven nations voted to adopt the founding document of the Fourth International (FI), entitled “The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International,” more popularly known as “The Transitional Program.” The chief author of the document was Leon Trotsky. At the Founding Conference, US Marxists played an unprecedentedly important role. The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) was among the larger groups to participate. (Because of legal restrictions in the United States, the SWP had never been a formal member of the FI, but had been in fraternal solidarity with it.)

The FI was established in the wake of what was perceived as a retreat from international revolutionary struggle on the part of the Soviet Union under Stalin (now defined as a degenerated workers’ state) and the parties of the Third International that were in broad agreement with the Soviet line. Its strategy is summed up in the opening sentence of the Transitional Program: “The world political situation as a whole is chiefly characterized by a historical crisis of the leadership of the proletariat.”

The parties associated with the FI faced an immediate test in the outbreak of the World War II and the pact between Stalin and Hitler, which was the basis for a series of splits within the Trotskyist movement, including the SWP. After the war, when Trotsky’s expectation of political revolution in the Soviet Union failed to be fulfilled, and in the wake of the Sovietization of states in Eastern Europe, the main body of the FI, with its Secretariat located in Paris, adopted the thesis developed by Michel Pablo that deformed workers’ states might last for centuries, with the concomitant strategy of deep entry into the parties of the Third International. In 1951 the Secretariat expelled the majority section of the French party, which opposed Pablo’s doctrine, and in 1953 the SWP openly joined the opposition, along with an important group in Great Britain, forming a public faction of the FI known as the International Committee for the Fourth International (ICFI).

The FI subsequently abandoned the Pabloist position, and relations between the SWP and the Secretariat improved during the 1960s. The British section became the dominant group within the ICFI, and two tendencies sympathetic to it were expelled from the SWP in 1963. In the 1990s three groups in the United States were recognized by the FI as sympathizing organizations, but the SWP severed all relations with the FI.

Documents of the Fourth International. New York: Merit Publishers, 1970.