The League for the Fourth International
Holds First International Conference

The League for the Fourth International held its First International Conference over a three-day period this past November. This marks an important step forward in the struggle to reforge the Trotskyist world party of socialist revolution. The date of the conference was chosen to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the 1917 Russian October Revolution led by the Bolshevik party of Lenin and Trotsky. The gathering brought together delegates from the five national sections of the LFI – Brazil, Germany, Italy, Mexico and the United States – as well as guests and visitors.

An important feature of the Conference was that the proceedings were transmitted internationally by videoconferencing. This was crucial, as several delegates were unable to attend in person, particularly because of racist U.S. laws. It also made it possible for LFI comrades and members of fraternally allied transitional organizations to follow the discussions. After a couple of anxious hours, the team of cadres responsible for the technical arrangements was able to work out glitches and the transmission functioned well throughout the conference.

The meeting was held in a union hall, with meals and refreshments prepared by comrades. The proceedings were bilingual in Spanish and English, with additional translation to and from Portuguese. The necessity for all documents and internal bulletins, as well as motions and amendments, to be in both languages required a considerable effort for our small international. During the conference all reports were translated and consecutive translation of interventions on the discussion rounds was done by a team of comrades who did a very professional job. The experience underlined the importance for internationalist communists of learning additional languages in order to effectively communicate our Leninist and Trotskyist politics.

The International Conference is the highest body of the LFI. Thus at the beginning of the proceedings, the outgoing Executive Committee was dissolved and a presiding body was elected by the delegates to organize the functioning of the conference. After two and a half days of reports and discussion, two dozen amendments (and amendments to amendments) to the Conference Document were voted on, an exhaustive process at the end of which the document was approved unanimously and comrades sang The Internationale in multiple languages. Then in a closed session limited to delegates and fraternal delegates, a new international Executive Committee was elected by secret ballot, with the addition of several new EC members, reflecting the recent growth of the LFI.

At the start of the second day, a slide show commemorating the Bolshevik Revolution prepared by Trabajadores Internacionales Clasistas (Class Struggle International Workers) in New York was presented.

The Conference provided the opportunity to report on and evaluate the activity of the League for the Fourth International, to debate disputed issues and lay out perspectives to guide our future work. The main point of contention in the months leading up to the international meeting was over Catalonia, where the LFI calls for the right of self-determination but has not advocated and does not presently call for independence from the Spanish state. Members of the Tijuana local of the Mexican section, the Grupo Internacionalista, disagreed with the LFI’s position and wished to call instead for immediate independence for Catalonia, as well as for all oppressed nations. In pre-conference discussion supporters of the majority position explained that we unconditionally call for independence for all colonies, but that in multinational states the position of the revolutionary party depends on a concrete evaluation of the situation, as Lenin insisted.

Prior to the conference, documents on the Catalonia question were circulated in English and Spanish. While declaring an “Internationalist Workers Faction” shortly before the conference, the members of the Tijuana local short-circuited the possibility of a real debate by announcing they were boycotting the international conference and intended to put out their own independent journal. Earlier they had objected to the circulation of one of their documents to the international, and initially refused to distribute a leaflet with the LFI articles on Catalonia, then said Tijuana workers were not interested in the issue. When following the conference they announced on Facebook the publication of their newspaper, the Executive Committee of the Grupo Internacionalista noted that this flagrant violation of democratic centralism ostentatiously placed them outside the organization and thus voted to expel the members of this anti-Leninist, nationalist clique.

In the conference, a report was given by a leading comrade who had traveled to Catalonia in the lead-up to the October 1 referendum. He stressed that, while not calling for independence, we defended the right to hold the referendum, and called for workers to mobilize – not just in Catalonia but throughout Spain – against the repression by the neo-Francoist Madrid government. He noted that Catalan is the first language of only a minority of the population of Catalonia, that only a minority support the call for independence, that the working class was overwhelmingly Spanish- (i.e., Castilian) speaking, and that workers in the industrial area he visited complained of discrimination by Catalan nationalist officials. In Barcelona, the capital, barely 40% are for independence and in the surrounding workers districts less than one third back separation.

A second reporter noted that a main argument by leftists supporting the right-wing bourgeois-led Catalan independence movement is the supposed absence of militant class struggle by the Spanish proletariat. This is simply a lie. In fact, the point at which the main Catalan capitalist party went over to supporting independence was after a general strike against austerity in March 2012 when the offices of the regional government, which backed every austerity measure, were surrounded by workers. Shortly thereafter, miners marched from Asturias to Madrid fighting the Guardia Civil and National Police with home-made bazookas. More generally, the reporter noted, the rise in nationalist sentiment in Europe is a distorted response to the continuing economic crisis given the lack of revolutionary leadership.

The discussion on the conference document noted the significant growth of the LFI in the last two years, particularly following the founding of an Italian section (the Nucleo Internazionalista d’Italia) and fusion with the Better-Late-Than-Never Faction expelled by the Spartacist League/U.S., both in 2016. This played an important part in the founding of a German section (the Internationalistische Gruppe) this past summer. Both sections have now published newspapers, L’internazionalista and Permanente Revolution respectively. This year a major development has been the formation of the Revolutionary Internationalist Youth as the youth section of the Internationalist Group/U.S. This reflects the recruitment and development of a number of young comrades who are rapidly becoming cadres and assuming tasks in the IG.

A particular focus of the conference was on the situation of the Mexican section, which in addition to the factional situation in Tijuana has had a number of problems, notably the infrequent publication of its newspaper, Revolución Permanente, and an organizational overload on the central leadership. The Grupo Internacionalista’s intense work in the militant 2016 teachers strike was a model of Trotskyist intervention into a very sharp class struggle. But over the last year the organizational shortcomings intensified. Already in the course of pre-conference discussion, the section undertook important steps aimed at relieving the overload, appointing a new editor, adding a young comrade to the editorial board and naming a separate organizer for the Mexico City local. These decisions should aid greatly in resolving the problems, but fundamentally these are the result of the glaring contradiction between our numerous tasks in building the nucleus of a revolutionary Leninist-Trotskyist vanguard party and our limited forces, a situation facing every section of the LFI.

The Conference participants reaffirmed the commitment to building a genuinely Trotskyist Fourth International, in which our words match our deeds, a hallmark of the LFI which differentiates it from a host of “internationals” that exist mainly on the Internet or in universities. The extension of our core of worker cadres is key to future perspectives of revolutionary regroupment. Overall, the priorities decided upon stress ensuring the regularity of our high-quality Leninist press, building up a party apparatus and above all cadre development. Also, with the ominous growth of rightist and racist action squads in recent months, the Internationalist Group in the U.S. is seeking to lay the basis for workers defense guards following the historic June 4 labor mobilization against the fascists in Portland, Oregon. The possibility of increased repression was underscored, particularly in connection with imperialist war threats (notably against Korea) and the growth of paramilitary police forces outfitted for preventive domestic war.

Our comrades expressed great satisfaction and pride over the conference, which for many made real the meaning of belonging to a single international party that brings together revolutionaries from many countries in the common goal of fighting for new Bolshevik Revolutions. The First International Conference of the League for the Fourth International is an important milestone in the struggle to build anew a Fourth International that Trotsky would have recognized as his own. ■