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60 yrs. of the fourth international
Sixty years of the Fourth International
By Charlie van Gelderen
"Men make their own history but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past." Karl Marx: The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon.
In September 1938, I was privileged to attend the Founding Conference of the Fourth International as an observer from the Fourth International Organization of South Africa.
It was not accidental that the conference took place at that historical moment. The beginning of the second world war was a year ahead but its threat was looming over Europe.
The international labor movement was in total disarray, its Stalinist and social democratic leaderships unable and unwilling to organize working class resistance to the coming catastrophe. Far from resisting the war, they were, in fact, vigorously at work mobilizing the masses for enthusiastic support of the war.
It was against this background that the thirty delegates met in Paris that September. (It is often stated that the founded conference took place in Switzerland. This was for security reasons.)
We had very real reasons to fear the activities of both the police of the bourgeois states and the secret agents of the Stalinist regime, the GPU. Rudolf Kiement, the secretary of the organizing committee was, in fact, abducted and assassinated on the eve of the conference.
The conference itself was penetrated by a GPU agent, known to us as Etienne, who attended as the Russian delegate. His real name was Mark Zborowski, who had wormed his way into the confidences of Trotsky’s son, Sedov.
When I look back, I am appalled at the almost complete lack of security. Paris seemed to be swarming with members of the youth organization of the American section. They were all aware that the conference was taking place and were frequenting cafes with delegates.
It was in this atmosphere that the man who was to drive an ice pick into the brain of Leon Trotsky years later, known to us then as Jacson, a Belgian sports journalist, was able to enter into a relationship with Sylvia Ageloff, one of the young American comrades who were in Paris simply to have a good time.
He was, of course, a GPU agent, a Spaniard, Ramon Mercader. I saw a great deal of him and he was, apparently, not at all interested in politics. He seemed to have plenty of money, which he spent freely.
The conduct of the leaderships of the Second and Third (Communist) Internationals in those fateful months leading up to World War II, was even more craven than that of the Second International in 1914. All the important parties of the Second International - the German, the French, the British Labor Party formed a ‘civil peace’ with their respective capitalist class, once war actually broke out.
But, before hostilities began in August 1914, they at least made noises, deceiving the masses that they were trying to stop the threatening catastrophe. They met in Brussels, to discuss what could be done to mobilize the workers, half-heartedly, it is true, and completely without conviction.
The Noskes and Eberts were waiting breathlessly to join their compatriots in singing "Deutschland, Deutschland Uber Alles." In Britain Henderson was waiting to join the War Cabinet.
But even these hypocritical gestures were missing in September 1938. There was no meeting of the Bureau of the Socialist International to discuss possible action. When British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, departed for his meeting with Hitler, Mussolini and Daladier to sign the Munich Agreement, the Labor leader, Major Clement Atlee, wished him ‘God speed.’
The leadership of the Third International differed from that of the Second only in their more rabid patriotic zeal. They called for an immediate holy war of the Democracies against the Dictatorships.
In Britain, the Communist Party organized demonstrations condemning Chamberlain for not immediately declaring war against Hitler. Even in Ireland, the so-called Communists were calling on all good Irishmen to rally in defense of British democracy.
It is in these circumstances, with the complete absence of revolutionary internationalist leadership from the two existing Internationals - leaderships which had become, in fact, counter-revolutionary that the Trotskyists called for a new International, the Fourth International.
Trotsky had already condemned the Comintern as dead in 1933 when the German Communist Party, the strongest section of the Third International, which had won 6 million votes in the last general elections, failed to organize any working class resistance to Hitler’s seizure of power.
The Social Democrats, with the support of more than 12 million votes, like the CP, surrendered without firing a shot. Together, in a United Front, they could have stopped Hitler. There would have been no war, no concentration camps, no holocaust.
The historic conditions of the day were crying out for a new international, a new revolutionary general command for the workers and the oppressed people of the world. It was in these conditions that, urged on by Trotsky, we launched the Fourth International.
Now, sixty years later, we can look back and ask ourselves, were we right? Or were people like Isaac Deutscher, who thought it was premature and that there were still possibilities to work inside the Comintern right? These questions have returned to us throughout our history, and I will return to them later.
The main task of the Founding Conference was to adopt the program `The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International’, perhaps better known as the Transitional Program.
Trotsky, exiled in Mexico, was unable to attend the Founding Conference, but in the Spring of 1938, he prepared the draft of the Transitional Program, which was discussed in all sections of the International Communist League, the precursor of the Fl. He considered its adoption the "most capital conquest" of the revolutionary movement since Lenin’s time, perhaps a rather exaggerated claim, but its importance must not be underestimated.
The significance of the Transitional Program must not be judged by a pedantic study of its texts. Many of its demands are no longer relevant but this is also true, of course, of the last section of the Communist Manifesto. It in no way diminishes its historic importance. Those who come fresh to the document will probably be surprised how fresh and modern much of it still is.
The Program made a thorough and rounded analysis of the period in which it was launched. It presented to the international working class, to the peasants, the poor and oppressed in the colonial countries and to the revolutionary core of Bolsheviks fighting the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union, a program for immediate action on all the pressing problem of life and struggle which confronted them.
It differed from previous programs because of its transitional approach. The program of the Second International was divided into two parts, independent of each other. The minimum program ‘ limited itself to reforms within bourgeois society’ and the maximum program which promised `socialism in the indefinite future’. There was no bridge between the minimum and the maximum programs, socialism was for the Greek calends, mentioned only in passing at May Day rallies.
The same approach lay behind the Stalinist revisionist theory of a ‘two-stage revolution’ - first the struggle for democracy then - but when? - on to socialism. The latest example of this is South Africa.
The Transitional Program takes the struggle from where it is, from the concrete consciousness of the working class today to the conquest of power and socialism.
It lived up to the prescription laid down by Rosa Luxemburg:
"…our whole program would be a miserable scrap of paper if it were not capable of serving us for all eventualities and in every moment of the struggle, and to serve us by virtue of it being practiced and not by its being shelved.
If our program is the historical formulation of the historical development of society from capitalism to socialism, then obviously it must formulate also the transitional phases of this development. It must contain them in their fundamental features and therefore also be able to indicate to the proletariat the corresponding attitude in the sense of approaching closer to socialism in every given moment. From this it follows that for the proletariat there cannot be, in general, a single moment when it would be compelled to leave its program in the lurch, or in which it could be left in the lurch by its program."
Rosa Luxemburg would have approved Trotsky’s Transitional Program.
In Britain we have the Labor Party in power with the biggest majority a government party has ever enjoyed. In France we have a so-called Socialist government but, far from advancing toward socialism, they are busy dismantling even the nationalized enterprises still extant and embracing the ‘free market’ with even greater enthusiasm than their right-wing predecessors in office. They have even left large chunks of their own reformist programs in the lurch.
The Stalinized Communist Parties of China and Vietnam are traveling at breakneck speed in the same direction. The Stalinist distortion of the workers’ state has been overcome by its own contradictions and the utopian illusion of socialism in one country.
The starting point of the Transitional Program is that the economic prerequisites for a socialist revolution have already, in general, been achieved. True, capitalism is still turning out new inventions and higher levels of technology. It has spread its tentacles into every corner of the globe, as Marx and Engels predicted in the Communist Manifesto, 150 years ago. But this has not filled the bellies of the starving masses in the so-called developing world (formerly Third World).
Many of you will have watched the World Cup football in France. (If Marx was writing the Communist Manifesto today, he might describe football as the opium of the people and not religion). The brand name footwear worn by the players; the stitching of the balls, like the tennis balls in Wimbledon, is the work of child labor. Children are compelled to go to work because there is no work for their parents.
In the so-called advanced capitalist countries of the West and Japan, millions of unemployed mock the claim that the market is the salvation for the world’s ills. Health and social services are deteriorating everywhere.
Financial crisis is still an unavoidable feature of capitalism. There really is no way out for the capitalist class.
This was true in 1938, when the Fourth International was founded, as it is today. The historical conditions for socialism have not only ripened but, in the words of the Transitional Program, they ‘have begun to get somewhat rotten.’
As I said earlier, people who come fresh to the Transitional Program will find that many of its prescriptions for the ills which afflict society are still valid. What the Program describes as the two basic economic afflictions which summarize the increasing absurdity of the capitalist system; unemployment and high prices, are still very much with us.
As then, so today, we demand the right to work and decent living conditions for every one, not only in the industrialized countries but also in the deprived underdeveloped lands. We want to see an end to the pictures of children starving in famine conditions while in Europe and America the cold storages are overfilled with carcasses of meat and farmers are encouraged not to produce with heavy subsidies.
To combat the ever rising prices, the 1938 program raised the slogan of a sliding scale of wages. This means that collective agreements should assure an automatic rise in wages, in relation to the increase in consumer goods. This is a slogan which we could well use today and to which we would add that state pensions also should be pegged to the rising cost of living.
Today we have millions of working class families where no one has been in a job for years. The working class cannot permit an increase of chronically unemployed paupers. In Europe we have over 20 million unemployed and the weekly hours for those still at work is rising.
In the United States, where in 1950 corporation executives were 30 to 40 times higher paid than the average of their employees, by 1990 this had increased to 140 times higher.
In the so-called developing countries, the workless total uncountable millions, forcing the youth into prostitution and making families dependent on child labor. These basic facts make some of the demands of the Transitional Program very relevant.
As in 1938, the demand for a program of public works and a sliding scale of working hours should be in the program of demands of every trade union. The bosses vote themselves fat cat salary increases and bonus shares.
In Britain, the directors of the privatized Yorkshire Water, despite the droughts of the last years and record complaints from the consumers, have voted themselves pay increases of 40 per cent. The workers, who make the flow of water possible, are limited to pay increases of 5 per cent. The merchant bankers, Goldman Sachs have voted to sell off the company. Each of the 190 full partners will make at least £50 million from the deal - without putting in any extra hours of work.
Yet they insist that giving in to the demands of the workers for a bigger share of the wealth which they produce with their labor would not be possible; that it would lead to increased unemployment and bankruptcies. To this the workers must raise again the demand put forward in the Transitional Program: Let us have a look at the books!
Of course, the Transitional Program, valid in 1938, must be brought up-to-date, to meet the conditions of today and related to the current consciousness of the workers and the oppressed. But its methodology is as relevant as ever.
I refer you again to the quotation from Marx with which I began. While we make our own history we can only do so ‘under circumstances directly encountered...’
In 1938, the most immediate dangers facing the world were imperialism, fascism and war. While these will remain dangers as long as capitalism lasts, a revised Transitional Program would embrace the issues of women and gay rights and the environment.
We must demand the abolition of the international debts of the impoverished countries of Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and Latin America.
Capital, in its mad rush for profit is fast destroying the earth’s resources, regardless of the cost in human life which this entails.
It will be asked, I am sure it will be asked: Why, if the program adopted at the Founding Conference was so correct why did the Fourth International not develop into a powerful organization? Why did it not succeed in planting itself deep into the working class movement? What has been its role and its influence in the 60 years since it was founded?
Of course, we do not claim infallibility, we were certainly not always right - We have to admit that in the sixty years since it was founded, the Fourth International has not succeeded in implanting itself deeply in the mass movement. It is impossible, in the time available, to go into all the reasons for this and others will find different explanations.
We knew war was coming but it came, less than a year later before we could make any real impact. The working class had experienced a series of defeats - Germany, Spain, and Austria. In the Soviet Union, what remained of the Bolshevik cadres who made the October revolution had been physically annihilated.
Thanks to the revisionist Marxism of the Stalinists and the social-patriotic doctrines of the reformists the struggle against fascism was transformed into support for war against Germany. For the Stalinist parties, of course, this changed after the signing of the Stalin-Hitler pact.
We were rowing against the stream. Our tiny forces could not effectively counter the mass produced propaganda of the Stalinist and social democratic bureaucracies.
And, of course, in a period when the working class was in retreat, there were many in our ranks and on the periphery of our movement, who could not stand up to this; who identified the years of reaction as the conclusive defeat of the revolution.
(We see the same symptoms today, with the apparent triumph of the so-called free market, which has even been described as ‘the end of history’).
The assassination of Trotsky was also a powerful blow. His leadership at that time was crucial and irreplaceable.
We expected, with Trotsky, that however it started, the Soviet Union would inevitably be involved in the war and that, whatever the outcome, the Stalinist bureaucracy would collapse. In the event, the military victory of the Red Army strengthened Stalin’s grip and gave him renewed prestige.
This led to increased despondency in our ranks and to people seeking alternative programs - even to desertions to Stalinism and to bourgeois democracy.
I again return to the question: Were we right to launch the Fourth International when we did and what has it accomplished?
Let us look at the nature of the historic period in which we took the decision. What were our targets?
The objective conditions were revolutionary but the working class, the proletariat who was to be the instrument of the revolution was ideologically backward and tethered to Stalinism and reformism. Our program, the Transitional Program, laid down a line of action which would free the working class from these chains and lead them into battle with slogans and demands that corresponded to the objective reality.
Above all it aimed to restore the class independence of the working class, to tear them away from the ideology which tied them to the bourgeoisie.
For reasons which I have already mentioned - the swift approach of the war, which transformed the anti-fascism of the workers in the bourgeois democratic countries into a patriotic war against Germany - a line vigorously endorsed by the Stalinist parties until the signing of the Hitler-Stalin pact and to which they returned with renewed enthusiasm after the invasion of the Soviet Union -we were unable to make any real impact.
But we cannot take refuge in the objective conditions. While our activities are circumscribed by the circumstances in which we find ourselves, human beings do make their own history. We believed, with Trotsky, that the collapse of the bureaucratic Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union would place the Fourth International in a favorable place to give the proletariat renewed revolutionary Marxist leadership.
Perhaps, and I emphasize perhaps, if we had a strong leadership and a united international we could have made some impact on the remaining revolutionary cadres in the Soviet Union. Many of them turned to the writings of Trotsky, as they became available. In addition to Trotsky’s works, the Fourth International had made valuable theoretical contributions to Marxism.
But, instead of being confronted with a united Fourth International, they found themselves facing a dozen disparate grouplets all claiming to be the authentic voice of Trotskyism.
Sectarian splits have been a chronic ailment in our movement. Minorities, instead of remaining inside the international and fighting for their positions, split off on the slightest pretext, believing themselves to be more Trotskyist than Trotsky, to form tiny sects, impotent and without any future.
How different to Trotsky who persisted in his adherence to the Third International till 1933 and the utter defeat of the German working class.
Our International is not dead or dying. In these dark days of defeat and betrayal we have kept aloft the banner of revolutionary Marxism. The working class, the oppressed peoples of the world will not for ever bear the crushing burdens of unemployment, poverty and repression which is their lot under capitalism. For capitalism there is no way out.
Even as I write the signs of a new economic decline are evident. The liberal economists talk of ‘down-sizing’, ‘reorganizing production’ and ‘layoffs’. These are euphemisms for the sack.
There is an ever-decreasing expenditure, in real terms, on the social and health services. The homeless are still living in the streets. The only expenditure that has increased is in preparation for the next war.
In the United States the defense bill comes to $19 million. We cannot even think what these astronomical figures really mean.
Federal spending on nuclear weapons exceeded spending on welfare payments, state medical insurance, health and education. That part of the wealth not siphoned off by the bosses is being used to create weapons with which US capitalism aims to retain its imperialist domination of the world.
Only the workers of the world and their allies in the underdeveloped countries can put an end to this madness. For that it needs international leadership and a program which will give a revolutionary impulse to the struggle. I believe the Transitional Program of the Fl, brought up-to-date, can give that leadership.
The writer of this speech, Charlie van Gelderen, was a leading comrade of the British section of the Fourth International (the International Socialist Group) until his recent passing. He gave this talk on the 60th anniversary of the founding of the Fourth International.
