Fourth international

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Frequent logo of the Fourth International

The Fourth International is an association of Trotskyist parties and groups that was founded in Paris on September 3, 1938. Its foundation was the consequence of the dominance of Stalinism in the Third International (Comintern) in the 1930s.

history

Foundation and early years

Leon Trotsky, ca.1929

The Fourth International was the continuation of the International Left Opposition initiated and led by Leon Trotsky in the Comintern and its sections. Its focus was on dealing with the internal regime of the Soviet Union after the waning of the revolutionary wave triggered by the First World War and the emergence of Stalinism , in the strategic direction of the Chinese revolution in the 1920s , in the fight against fascism in Germany for a class policy understood as revolutionary in the Spanish civil war from 1936 to 1939 and in the fight against the danger of war that emanated from National Socialist Germany.

With the Moscow show trials during the time of the “ Great Terror ”, the Fourth International had to deal with the defense of Trotsky and other opponents of Stalinism who had been branded and accused as “Trotskyists”. The Red Book on the Moscow trial , written by Trotsky's son Lev Sedov , and the international commission of inquiry led by John Dewey in Mexico in 1937, rejected the accusations of the prosecutors while in exile.

After the defeat of the workers' movement in Germany, which had been divided since the First World War , in 1933 and the failure of the KPD to correct course , which only long after the transfer of power to the NSDAP revised its thesis of social fascism and sought a united front , but just like the entire Comintern clung to Stalin , Trotsky declared, "You can no longer stay in one and the same 'International' with Stalin , Manuilski , Losowski and Co." and convinced his sympathizers to break organizationally with the Communist parties and to set the course for the formation of new parties and to take a new international . Trotsky had been pushing for the left to break with Stalinism since 1933 and called on both opposition communists and left socialists to found a new international. For Trotsky this represented “the only possibility to prevent the proletarianized and pauperized masses from the increasingly hopeless path of the II and III. International and away from fascism. ”The founding of the Fourth International was thus a reaction to the weakness of the global left, which neither succeeded in suppressing the spread of fascism nor in countering Stalinism and ultimately not in the Chinese revolution to give Trotskyist direction.

The Austrian delegates Karl Fischer and Georg Scheuer took part in the founding conference of the Trotskyist Fourth International on September 3, 1938 in Paris , although both of them voted against the proclamation of the International. The reasons for this were different assessments of the world situation. As a result, the Austrian Revolutionary Communists (RKÖ) also separated organizationally from the Fourth International and began to criticize the assessments of the International and Trotsky.

Together with two other Trotskyists, the former prisoners of the Buchenwald concentration camp, Karl Fischer and Ernst Federn, passed the Fourth International's "Declaration of the Internationalist Communists of Buchenwald" after the concentration camp was liberated by the United States Army on April 20, 1945 .

The front pages of two issues of Quatrième Internationale from 1946

The expectation of the Fourth International that Stalinism would discredit itself in World War II and that afterwards the sections of the Fourth International would be at the forefront of revolutionary mass uprisings was not fulfilled; history had developed differently from what the Fourth International assumed. The Trotskyists did not believe, because of the bureaucratic character of the Soviet Union, which they described as "degenerate", that it would emerge stronger from the Second World War. Your prediction of the future of the Soviet Union between internal political revolution or the collapse and restoration of capitalism came about much later than expected.

Both the Soviet Union and Maoist China considered the claim of the IV. International, succeeding the III. International to stand as illegitimate. As before, it did not succeed in uniting mass organizations under this name. Most of the parties in the social democratic spectrum are still united under the umbrella organization of the Socialist International (II. International) as the successor organization to the "International Workers' Association" (IAA) founded in 1864. The Comintern (Third International), the International of the Communist Parties, was suddenly dissolved in 1943 as a concession to the Western Allies. Today's left-wing and left-wing socialist parties mostly refrain from organizing an international or even re-establishing one. The founding of the European Left was explicitly linked to a rejection of a new international. Even Trotskyist groups, such as those organized in the International Socialist Tendency , do not strive to re-establish a new International and regard the Fourth International as non-existent.

The sections of the Fourth International - except in Sri Lanka (Ceylon), Bolivia , Vietnam , France and partly Belgium - have nowhere got beyond the status of small cadre and splinter parties or other small groups. Trotskyist parties that also gained a certain importance after the Second World War, for example the Movimiento al Socialismo in Argentina , the Socialist Workers Party in the United Kingdom or the Trotskyist groups in France were or are not part of the Fourth International. The two largest Trotskyist organizations in Germany, Marx21 and the Socialist Alternative (SAV) are members of the International Socialist Tendency and the Committee for a Workers' International .

cleavage

In 1953 the Fourth International split. Until 1963 two wings existed parallel to each other. Their executive bodies were henceforth called the "International Secretariat" (IS) or "International Committee" (IK). This international committee is not identical to the current executive body of the IV International.

Prominent representatives of IS were Pierre Frank (France), Michel Pablo (Greece) and later Ernest Mandel (Belgium) and Livio Maitan from Italy.
Names like James P. Cannon from the USA and Gerry Healy from England and Pierre Lambert (France) were found in the IK . The former US-American section, the SWP ( Socialist Workers Party ), however, had left the Fourth International since the Voorhis Act , in order not to be practically completely under police supervision under this law.

Partial reunification

In 1963 a part of the IK wing reunited with the International Secretariat, the governing body was then called "United Secretariat", which was then used to identify this organization in the abbreviations "VS" (German) or "USec" (English).

The political basis of the merger was a common view of the historical foundations of the Fourth International, the unanimous assessment of the uprising in Hungary in 1956 and, above all, the positive attitude towards the Cuban revolution and its leadership with Fidel Castro and Ernesto "Che" Guevara .

Opposition, above all to the leadership of the Cuban revolution and the political reality in Cuba, caused large parts, especially around the "International Committee", to reject reunification and not take part in it. There was also resistance to reunification on both sides, which resulted in splintering on both sides, each of which reappeared and continued to appear under the name of the Fourth International and which have increased in the course of the decades through further splits.

present

These organizations see themselves as the Fourth International:

There are also numerous organizations that see themselves in the tradition of the Fourth International . Some of them strive to rebuild the 4th International, others in turn aim to found an unspecified new International, in the case of the "League for the 5th International" (L5I), to create a 5th International in the Marxist tradition ', Lenin and Trotsky.

literature

  • Daniel Bensaïd : The Formative Years of the Fourth International, 1933-1938, (Notebooks for Study and Research, No. 9). Amsterdam 1998.
  • Alex Callinicos : Trotskyism . Maidenhead 1990. ISBN 0-335-15623-1
  • Pierre Frank: The History of the Fourth International. Hamburg 1975.
  • Duncan Hallas: The Decline of the Fourth International , originally in International Socialism , No. 60, July 1973
  • François Moreau: Combats et debats de la Quatrième Internationale (IIRE Working papers No 8-10). Amsterdam 1990.
  • David North : The legacy we defend: a contribution to the history of the 4th International , Arbeiterpresse-Verlag Essen, 1988 ISBN 3-88634-051-1

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Heinz Brakemeier, Leon Trotsky (1879-1940), in: Walter Euchner (ed.), Klassiker des Sozialismus II, Munich 1991, p. 117.
  2. ↑ Christoph Jünke , Trotskyism, in: Bernd Hüttner, Marcel Bois (ed.), Geschichte einer Pluralen Linken, Vol. 1, Berlin 2010, p. 28.
  3. ^ Ernst Schwager: The Austrian Emigration in France 1938–1945. Böhlau, Vienna / Cologne / Graz 1984, ISBN 3-205-08747-X , p. 51f.
  4. ↑ Archived copy ( memento of the original from April 23, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.sozialismus.net
  5. ↑ Archived copy ( memento of the original dated August 7, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.marxismus-online.eu
  6. ↑ Fritz Keller: Against the Current. Faction fights in the KPÖ. Trotskyists and other groups 1919-1945. (= Materials on the labor movement, Volume 10) Europaverlag, Vienna 1978, ISBN 3-203-50688-2 , pp. 305f.
  7. ^ Fritz Keller: In the Gulag from East and West. Karl Fischer. Worker and revolutionary. ISP-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1980, ISBN 3-88332-046-3 , pp. 149ff.
  8. ^ Ernest Mandel , Trotskyists and the Resistance in World War Two