Sixty years of struggle
The Fourth International
Livio Maitan looks back at 60 years of the world's largest regroupment of revolutionary
Marxist groups.
The idea behind the Fourth International was formulated for the first time by Leon Trotsky in July 1933. It was one of the most dramatic periods in the history of the workers' movement. The German proletariat had been defeated by nazism, and 16 years after the Russian revolution, the Stalinist bureaucracy had crushed the remaining revolutionaries who, since the mid-20s, had opposed the bureaucratisation of the revolution.
There are similarities with the process of foundation of the earlier, Third International. During the First World War, the major workers' parties had failed miserably. Instead of organising a revolutionary, anti-capitalist struggle, they had capitulated the warmongers in their own countries.
In the face of this terrible failure, the leaders of the Russian revolution, and militants from the socialist left and other class-struggle currents, in Europe and further afield, resolved to create new parties, and a new International.
Three years later, this International (the "Cominter") also failed. Only a few member parties had won hegemonic positions in the workers movement, displacing the social democrats. And most of the Comintern parties adopted similar analysis, orientation and method as provoked or at least contributed to the major defeats of the workers movement in Germany and China.
Trotsky's project would be hard to put into practice. There were fascist dictatorships in Italy and Germany, and the workers' movement was on the defensive in other European countries. A revolution had begun in China, only to be
Nevertheless, just as at the end of the First World War, there was a clear need for new revolutionary parties and a new international. Not because of any intellectual, "Trotskyist" frustration, but because of the concrete experiences of masses of working people.
The revolutionary Marxists who followed Trotsky's call certainly did not underestimate the size of the defeats which had taken place. Nor did they share the ("third period") analysis of the larger, Stalinist parties, which predicted that the great depression of 1929-33 would grow into a generalised crisis of the capitalist system.
Nevertheless, they recognised that new explosions were accumulating. In
1936 they were proved right, with a sharp upturn in mass activity in France and Spain. Unfortunately, the Left Opposition groups were still too young and too small to attain any critical mass which could influence these events in a decisive way. The revolutionary crises in both countries receded. In France, the Popular
Front exhausted itself. In Spain, General
Franco won the civil war.
These events pushed Trotsky and his supporters to concretise their choice of July 1933. In September 1938 they proclaimed the new International. The founding congress reflected the meagre forces participating
And the context quickly deteriorated - the Second World War erupted one year after our foundation. The war broke international contacts. In particular, it split the two main components of the International - the North American and West European wings. The Latin American, Chinese and Indochinese groups
In Europe, war and nazi repression deprived the movement of many leaders and cadres who had been somehow associated with the foundation of the International. In Greece and, to a lesser extent France, the threat of death came not only from the fascists, but also from the partisan groups and militants organised by the The post-war challenge
At the end of the second world war, the immediate task was reconstructing and reconnecting nuclei of comrades, and rebuilding at least a minimum level of co-ordination us international leadership. Only after this, people argued, would it be possible to struggle for hegemony in the wider movement.
Historians are still debating this crucial period. Why, for example, was the working class unable to provoke an anticapitalist dynamic in none of the westEuropean countries where the economic and political structures of the ruling classes had been profoundly shaken? Across western Europe, the workers and their organisations accepted and participated in the reconstruction of the pre-war
We could also ask why the Fourth International groups failed to win an influence at the mass level. After all, unlike the social democrats and the Stalinistcontrolled Communist parties, the Fourth Internationalists had understood the depth of the crisis, and rejected the instihistory * s tutionalist-reformist road.
Of course, the level of crisis varied from country to country. More importantly, perhaps, the victorious, "democratic" allies had their own, imperialist priorities, and the massive military force to impose it. The mood of the soldiers would have made repressive interventions difficult, but the threat was omni-
The working class and other popular layers of society were increasingly militant (in Italy, this mobilisation had begun as early as Spring 1943). But this did not, in itself, lead to a recomposition and reconstruction of the workers' movement as a whole. Dictatorship and war had destroyed and intimidated. The growth in anti-capitalist and socialist consciousness
The positive image of the Soviet Union also played a major role. Only a critical-minded minority were aware of the terrible damage done by the Stalinist regime. For many workers - not just those in the Communist Parties - the military victories of the USSR were proof that the country represented a real alternative to capitalism.
Nor did people realise that the reintroduction of democratic rights and liberties was actually part of a conservative restoration of the pre-war system, far short of the possibilities that could have
"One step at a time," argued the big workers' parties. Re-establish parliamentary democracy first, and, tomorrow, we will push for the necessary social transformations. The Communist Parties' long term strategic commitment to reformism was mystified, and presented as a series of short-term tactical questions. The Social Democrats had less need to mystify, since their classic perspective of a gradual transition to socialism could easily be adapted to fit the new situation.
Of course, there was some positive shift. In Britain, a series of fairly radical reforms were implemented to alleviate the basic needs of the masses. Nothing that challenged the system, but real reforms nevertheless. Swimming against the tide
The 1948 World Congress, and the meetings of the leadership of the organisation in the following years, concentrated on a redefinition of our conceptions and organisations.
One of the texts of that Congress updated our analysis of the bureaucratisation of Russia, the first Workers" State. At the same time, it point
* History contradictions which were weakening the
There were also texts on the rupture between Moscow and Belgrade June 1948), analysing the dynamic of splinters in the world Stalinist system.
These definitions and redefinitions were all the more necessary because this was a period dominated by two tendencies: the apologetic approach of the Communist Parties and their fellow travellers, and the approach of others who rejected the autocratic Stalinist regime, but thought it was inevitable that the Stalinist system dominate large parts of the world for the foreseeable future.
In 1950-52 we also tried hard to update our conception of the construction of revolutionary parties. Our starting point was the observation that the traditional parties were still dominant in the labour movement, including in most of the countries where we existed.
This led us to adopt an "entrist" orientation. We suggested that revolutionaries integrate themselves into the social democratic and Stalinist parties, so as to be able to participate directly in the experiences of the most politicised layers of the population, and participate in the process of political differentiation under way, or potential.
Obviously, this approach did not apply to those countries where the social democratic and Stalinist parties did not exist, or were not hegemonic in the labour movement: such as the United States, much of Latin America, or Sri
There was a sharp divergence of views in the international, concerning both the new orientation towards entrism and our judgement of the de-Stalinisation of the Soviet Union. This provoked major splits, particularly in the United States, Latin America and Sri Lanka.
The period from the mid-fifties to the end of the seventies was marked by the explosion of the crisis of Stalinism. The 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was a watershed. There were anti-bureaucratic struggles in Poland, and an insurrection in Hungary in 1956. There was growing tension between China and the USSR.
There were a wide range of revolutionary struggles in the colonial or semi-colonial countries, notably Algeria, Cuba, Vietnam and the Dominican Republic. Meanwhile, the industrialised countries faced a crisis of society, symbolised by the social and protest movements of 1968 and the early 70s... The three sectors of revolution
The 1963 "reunification" congress noted that, more than at any other period, there was a convergence of the dynamics in the three main sectors of the world revolution: the anti-colonial struggle in the "third world," the anti-bureaucratic struggles in the Stalinist countries, and an upturn in student and worker protests in 30 International Viewpoint #308 February 1999
Mao Zedung and Nikolai Kruschev. Their oppressive regimes discredited Communism at home and abroad. the developed capitalist countries. There were strong student movements in France, Mexico, Japan, Yugoslavia and, later, Spain and Portugal. A new, younger generation of working class militants was also entering into struggle.
For the first time since the second world war, there was a challenge to the bureaucracies which dominated the labour movement and other popular
Even in the United States of America, where the student mobilisation was smaller and lasted a shorter time than in Europe, and was not complemented by a significant increase in working-class militancy, opposition to the Vietnam war spread so wide that it became a key factor persuading Washington to pull out Anti-imperialist mobilisation
For the Fourth International the context was more favourable than ever before. As an international organisation, with several large and prestigious national sections, the Fourth International was able to appear as a reference point. There was unprecedented growth in many countries, particularly in France, Mexico and Japan.
In the United States, revolutionary Marxists played a very important role in the leadership of the anti-imperialist mobilisations. They were as influential, in their way, as the earlier generation of Marxists during the labour struggles of
The International was able to reinforce its leadership bodies, making them larger and more geographically representative. Leaders, and intellectuals associated with the International and its national sections, took part in widely-followed theoretical-political debates, linked to and developing the best traditions of the workers' movement and Marxist culture.
Things began to change in the second half of the 1970s. The complicated dynamics of this period were not initially understood, even by the protagonists.
Reversed tendencies
The world recession of 1974-75 was a key moment. In most countries, particularly those where workers had previously made the most advances, the socio-economic balance of forces began to deteriorate. Not just for the proletariat, but for all popular layers of society.
The dominant organisations of the workers did not propose any strategy for resisting this counter-attack from the employers and governments. The sovietled invasion of Czechoslovakia ended the progressive dynamic in that part of the
After a long period of sharp social conflict, dominant parties like Italy's Communist Party and Britain's Labour Party found themselves on the defensive, in more and more unfavourable conditions. They responded by watering-down the class content of their programmes, but continued to face electoral set-backs.
Far-left groups were wrong-footed by the new situation. They rapidly declined in strength and influence. Though few realised at the time, this decline has persis-
True, socialist parties won elections, in France (1981) and Spain (1982). But the tendency remained the same. There was little popular upsurge in response to these victories. and neither François Mitterand nor Felipe Gonzalez introduced fundamental reforms. It would be more accurate to say that both, in their own ways, nourished and encouraged the wave of retreat of the left and the popular
The world situation was contradictory. The USA had still not digested its defeat in Vietnam. Revolutionary, democratic and anti-imperialist movements were still growing in the under-develo ped countries. This process culminated in 1979, with the overthrow of the Shah of Iran, and the Sandinista victory in
But, as we know, the regression in Iran came quickly. Shortly afterwards, the Philippines faced a conservative empasse. The Sandinistas were caught in a trap by the imperialists, and struggled with their own contradictions.
All this had a very negative influence in most of the under-developed countries, particularly in Latin America. From now on, the decline in the fortunes of the left would not just be confined to the advanced capitalist countries. Poland's political revolution
In 1981, General Jaruzelski's coup d'état blocked the growing strength of the Polish working class. The full, international consequences of this defeat would only be realised much later. We can now recognise, in 1981, the acceleration of the fundamentally regressive dynamic in the bureaucratic societies of Eastern Europe and the USSR. The route was open for the collapse of the Berlin wall, the dissolution of the Soviet Union
and the rise, everywhere, of currents in favour of capitalist restoration.
This doesn't necessarily mean that Trotsky had been wrong to argue that the collapse of the bureaucratic regimes could lead to either the restoration of capitalism or the development of a new form of socialist democracy. The powerful mobilisations which had succeeded in Poland, the Hungarian insurrection in 1956, the Prague spring of 1968, all showed that, within the working class, among students, and in large sections of the population, there was a dynamic and a desire not for the restoration of capitalism, but in favour of the construction of a genuinely socialist society.
Even at the end of the 1980s, Eastern Germany and Czechoslovakia witnessed powerful movements with an egalitarian, revolutionary-democratic sensibility. There were similar dynamics in the Soviet Union, where sectors of the working class, particularly the minors, repeatedly mobilised in pursuit of their socio-economic and political demands. The price of Stalinism
In final analysis, however, the regressive tendencies which had dominated the 1980s, with their series of defeats and retreats of the workers' movement, and the obscuring of traditional values which had accompanied it, proved to have too heavy an influence.
We have paid a heavy price for the ravages of the Stalinist domination of countries like Poland and Russia. The organisations and structures of the workers' movement were destroyed or stripped of their contents. All those who could have maintained a collective, working class and popular social tissue were squashed without pity.
In The Revolution Betrayed (1936), Trotsky hypothesised about the final crisis of the bureaucratic system only twenty years after the Bolsheviks had taken power. The book was completed as pre-revolutionary crises erupted in France and Spain. Proletarians in many countries still saw the USSR as an alternative society which, despite all its contradictions, was engaged in the process of industrialisation while the global capitalist economy was turned upside down by the great depression.
Half a century later, the context had radically changed. Nothing is ever completely impossible, but the intervening period had created a very strong negative
The organisations of the Fourth International did not escape these strong negative pressures. This is not to ignore or under-estimate the organisation's own errors, its slowness to respond to the of the movement split off, under the leadership of Nahuel Moreno. A few years later, there was a split with the American section, the Socialist Workers'
It could have been possible, here or there, to make a qualitative leap forward, with different tactics, different policies, or different ways of work. But, in such a period of retreat, of decline in the workers' and anti-imperialist movement, it would have been almost impossible to build or rebuild revolutionary organisations which could have been any stronger or more influential than we hoped in
The same could be said about the International's response to the crisis in the bureaucratic Stalinist societies. It would have been possible to do more to help form more solid groups of revolutionaries there. The International could have done more to avoid the fragmentation and demoralisation of the groups in the Stalinist and post-Stalinist countries with which it was in contact.
Self-criticism is needed. But it seems in any case unlikely that a fundamentally different dynamic of recomposition and consciousness could have taken place at a mass level, whatever the Fourth International could have done instead or as well as what it did in Eastern Europe and A (temporary) contraction
All these elements of crisis for the workers' and socialist movements contributed to a decline in internationalist consciousness and action. Not surprisingly, the Fourth International itself also suffered from weariness, and a decline in influence in some regions of the world.
The organisation found it difficult to deal with new analytical problems quickly enough, and difficult to suggest new strategies and new models of construction of revolutionary organisations. To make matters worse, a contraction in material resources forced the organisation to reduce the size of its central
Some leaders and members of left groups have interpreted all the above phenomena as proof of the irreversible decline of the workers' movement and socialist politics. The Italian Communist Party and Britain's Labour Party are only the most extreme examples.
Almost all Europe's social democratic parties have decided that the workers' movement no longer has a particular socio-political identity which they should
Ex-Communist parties in the eastern and western parts of the continent have decided that the Marxist analysis of capitalism is obsolete, and that there is no serious possibility of building a collective or socialist alternative society. Historic defeats
This pessimism or defeatism is completely wrong. The workers' movement can be relaunched. But only if it is rebuilt from the bottom up, This will require the widest rethinking, putting aside the accumulated prejudices of the first century of
The first subject of this rethinking should be the reasons for the collapse of the bureaucratic Stalinist societies.
Contemporary society should be studied in all its supranational and specific details. And the essentia characteristics of the socialist society we struggle for should be redefined for the
All this is necessary if we are to suc ceed in finding new foundations for the much-weakened anti-capitalist con-
It is 60 years since the Fourth International was established. Its very survival, through marginalisation, war and crisis, without mass influence and without money, is surprising. Its ability to remain present in the workers movement in so many countries, around the world, and its credibility for some sectors of the avant-garde are remarkable.
The survival and continued influence of the International are the result of its analytical and theoretical contribution to the interpretation of the key phenomena of the last 70 years. The International has built on and absorbing the theoretical work of Marxists theoreticians of earlier
But more than that. Members of the International have played a greater or lesser role in so many historic struggles, from the struggle against Stalin in the 1920s and the conflictive development of the Chinese revolution in 1925-27. Not as observers and commentators, but as
Even where the supporters of the International were only a handful, they threw themselves into the actuallyexisting labour and social movements, and struggled to understand the real internal dialectics of those movements. * This text forms the first part of the introduction to the special double issue of our French sister-magazine Inprecor, /Ve Internationale 60 ans d'analyses et de combats, December 1998. Other extracts will be published in future issues of International Viewpoint..
International Institute for Research and Education changing world. Nor the numerous perverse deformations which marked the development of Trotskyism - particularly the series of national and international splits in the small ranks of the movement. In 1979 the Latin American wing
Revolutionary strategy today
Daniel Bensaid
• £2.00/53.50/2OFF. Cheque payable to P. Rousset
31 y 1999
Obituaries
India Vinod Mishra The central leader of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) (Liberation), Vinod Mishra, suddenly away on December 18 in Lucknow (Uttar Pradesh). The funeral place in Patna (Bihar) on
He will be remembered by the
Left Movement for two important achievements, writes B.
First, he reorganised the healthiest elements of the Marxist-Leninist trend in India into the "Liberation" group, when both state repression (including the assassination of its leading cadre) and sectarianism could have destroyed it after the brief flowering of the Naxalbari movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
During his leadership of the CPI-ML (Liberation), he also reoriented it away from the blind application of Mao Zedong Thought (including the strategy of protracted peoples war) in India into mass, open and legal work while forging links with groups and movements outside of the Maoist tradition including oppressed minorities through a political organisation, the Indian Peoples Front, and other coalitions. While the Party retains underground armed units, these are now deployed for purely defensive purposes against landlord armies, the police and occasionally rival Maoist groups.
Vinod Mishra joined the revolutionary movement in West Bengal in 1968, abandoning his Engineering studies shortly before graduation. He was one of "Midnight's Children', yearning for the fulfilment of the promise of independence in the year of his birth. In late 1970 he was detained under the Prevention of Violent Activities Act. He was released unconditionally in 1971 and did revolutionary work among the peasantry in Burdwan district of West Bengal. In 1975, he assumed the responsibility of leading the Party. He was elected General Secretary in the 2nd Party Congress held in 1976 and elaborated its political line at its 4th, 5th and 6th Congresses held in 1988, 1992 and 1997 respectively.
As an official communique from the CPI-ML notes, "It was Comrade Vinod Mishra who guided the Party from its underground existence when it was practically limited to pockets of struggle in the rural areas of Bihar and Bengal and brought the Party to the national mainstream politics. He championed unity of the Indian communist movement along the revolutionary Marxist orientation and was firmly against liquidation of the basic revolutionary standpoint of the
International Viewpoint #308 February 1999
Party. It was under his miraculous leadership that the Party arose from the ashes and once agaın became a powertu voice within the Left movement."
In recent years, the CPI-ML has urged the formation of a Left Confederation with the mainstream Communist Party of India and Communist Party of India (Marxist). Unfortunately, the latter two continue to be entranced by bourgeois centrist personalities and parties. However the CPI-ML persists in asserting the importance of a left pole and raising the banner of class struggle.
Despite a certain romanticisation of China under Mao especially during the Cultural Revolution, limits to its critique of Stalinism, and the dubious basis of some of the party's recent electoral and caste alliances, the CPI-ML (Liberation) remains one of the most interesting actors on the global revolutionary left in
Mishra's death which follows soon after that of another of their veteran leaders, Nagbushan Patnaik, is a "great loss for both the CPI (ML) and the cause of revolutionary Marxism in India," writes Salah Jaber, on behalf of the Parisbased Secretariat of the Fourth International. "We hope and firmly believe that Comrade Vinod Mishra's legacy will live on in the remarkable group of leaders that he contributed to educate and that you will carry forward the struggle to which he devoted his entire life." * Sri Lanka