The Struggle to Reforge a Genuinely
Trotskyist Fourth International

Document of the First International Conference
of the League for the Fourth International

The following document was adopted by the International Conference of the League for the Fourth International held in November 2017. It has been edited for publication.

The First International Conference of the League for the Fourth International is being held in this centenary year of the October 1917 Russian Revolution. In our recent international celebrations of this world-historic event, we stressed that while all manner of left groups are having events where they hail the “relevance” or “example” of the Russian Revolution, the LFI uniquely is fighting for the Bolshevik program of international socialist revolution of Lenin and Trotsky. We uphold the programmatic continuity of the first four Congresses of the Third (Communist) International and Trotsky’s Fourth International, while the grab bag of pseudo-Trotskyists have distorted and betrayed that program in myriad ways. When we call to reforge the Fourth International, we stress that it must be on the solid basis of that revolutionary program, not just rearranging the flotsam and jetsam thrown off by past splits.

We began as a handful of cadres who had been expelled from the International Communist League (ICL), or – in the case of the Brazilian comrades – were abandoned by it. In the wake of the counterrevolutionary destruction of the USSR and of the East European deformed workers states the ICL drew defeatist conclusions from that historic defeat, turning its back on the Trotskyist program on a series of key points centering on the revolutionary capacity of the proletariat, as well as the nature of the Stalinist bureaucracy. In so doing, the ICL joined the bulk of the ostensibly socialist left which bought into the bourgeois lie of the supposed “death of communism.” In contrast, the 1998 Declaration of the LFI proclaimed, in the words of the Permanent Revolution Faction that had just been expelled by the French section of the ICL, that “Communism Lives, In the Struggles of the Workers and Oppressed and in the Trotskyist Program – Reforge the Fourth International!”¹

As we noted in our 1998 founding Declaration, the struggle to build anew a genuinely Trotskyist Fourth International will involve the tactic of splits and fusions, which for a number of years was more a theoretical possibility than an actual reality. Now that is beginning to change as the effects of the decade-old capitalist economic crisis, acute political crises in several major countries and the imperialist “war without end” are leading to both a limited radicalization among youth and the growth of right-wing racist and outright fascist forces. The fact that popular discontent has mainly been reflected in bourgeois populist tendencies (both right and left), and secondarily in the growth of reformist currents, is a reflection of the acute crisis of revolutionary leadership. The process of revolutionary regroupment will require sharp political debate with potential Trotskyists coming from revisionist tendencies in various parts of the globe.

It will also mean strengthening our original sections (Brazil, Mexico and the United States) by further concerted efforts of cadre development, through systematic study and intervention in the class struggle, of new militants won in recent years and those now joining; and by building a solid proletarian core, notably including the worker Trotskyists who have been key to the development of the LFI in Brazil and the U.S. In the late 1960s and early ’70s, it was possible to recruit significant numbers of already radicalized militants who had experience with Stalinist-led movements of different varieties (Maoism, Castroism). In recent years we have fused with and won cadres from several leftist currents, but for the most part we are recruiting young people and workers with no background in left politics. Thus the process of becoming experienced Leninist and Trotskyist cadres will take some time and a conscious effort amid the pressures of the class struggle.

In the process, we must build up a party apparatus which will enable us to regularize the production of the press of the LFI and its national sections, along with the various other tasks involved in building a Leninist party of professional revolutionaries. Simultaneously we must be alert to possibilities for intervention with burgeoning mass movements whose initial politics may be quite distant, and for regroupment with militants breaking from opportunist tendencies. At the beginning of the 1960s, the activists of the New Left in the United States were quite moderate and reformist. But the impact of struggles for black liberation and against the Vietnam War polarized society so that by the end of the ’60s by some estimates there were as many as 100,000 people who saw themselves as revolutionaries and, in the case of many of them, communists. But again, winning revolutionary-minded militants to genuine Leninism and Trotskyism will require waging hard political battles.

This draft document builds on and incorporates by reference the “International Perspectives of the League for the Fourth International” (April 2015),² which summed up the political positions and development of the LFI to that point; and on the “Call for the First International Conference of the LFI” (9 September 2017), which includes an overview of the present world conjuncture and the position of the LFI in it.

Trotskyism vs. Populism, Fascism and the Drive toward World War

In the aftermath of World War II, the dominant imperialist power, the United States, and its European allies were able to peddle the seductive vision of a future of peace and prosperity by blurring the awareness that this was based on the vast destruction of the world’s productive forces in that second global imperialist conflagration. The “American Dream” and the supposed long postwar boom (referred to in France as “les trente glorieuses,” or the 30 glorious years from 1945 to 1975) were always an illusion. In fact, the “boom” ended with a sharp recession in 1954 following the end of the fighting in the Korean War, leading to the deportation of one million Mexican workers from the U.S. For African Americans, the “dream” was an “American nightmare,” in the words of Malcolm X, as black people were beset by Jim Crow segregation in the South and brutal ghettoization in the North.

Since the mid-1970s there has been a steady fall of real wages (adjusted for inflation) in almost all the imperialist countries and in many semi-colonial countries as well. In Mexico the minimum wage is now below the level of 1940. One need only see the film of Luis Buñuel, Los olvidados (1950) to see that the living standards of the urban poor in Mexico three-quarters of a century ago were higher than they are today in the vast slums surrounding the capital city, filled with former peasants who have been thrown off their land because of imperialist “free trade.” In the United States and other imperialist countries, living standards have barely been maintained due to a massive influx of women into the workforce to augment family incomes. While the incorporation of women into social labor is an advance, it also means that they often work a triple shift (housework, taking care of children and paid work).

By the 1980s, the postwar illusions of prosperity wore off and the workers movement in the U.S. and Britain suffered defeats under Reagan and Thatcher. In the post-Soviet 1990s, “welfare state” social programs were cut back, and in many cases eliminated entirely. Bowing to the bourgeois offensive, large sections of the union bureaucracy, labor aristocracy and social democracy embraced the Reaganite/Thatcherite “neo-liberal” doctrine of “free-market” capitalism under the watchword of TINA (‘there is no alternative”). But as the dot.com bubble and then the housing bubble burst, trillions in household income went up in smoke while millions of working-class (and, in the U.S., particularly black) homeowners lost their homes and savings. People began to question not only the free-marketeers but capitalism itself. Karl Marx appeared on the front page of Time magazine and there was a renewed interest in Marxism on the campuses.

The sharp economic crisis of 2007-08, was not a cyclical event but the beginning of a long-lasting downturn that is now in its eleventh year. It wasn’t the “Great Recession” that bourgeois economists refer to but a new depression. While profits are up, wages are stagnant and the wave of mass unemployment has not receded, despite phony government statistics which simply eliminate millions of long-term unemployed from the workforce. The working class has not seen the fabled “recovery” that the capitalist media and politicians crow about. Moreover, from Europe to Latin America, working people have seen their living standards further degraded through counter-“reforms” to pensions, health care and labor rights. Sectors of the ruling class have sought to fuel hostility along ethnic lines between native-born and immigrant workers, whipping up nationalist/protectionist sentiment in the former while subjecting the latter to police terror. Meanwhile, thousands of refugees and immigrants drown in the Mediterranean Sea due to the racist immigration policies of Fortress Europe, or are subject to brutal exploitation and seclusion in concentration camps.

On both sides of the Atlantic, using the “war on terror” as an excuse, imperialist rulers are intensifying repression of poor, oppressed and working people with militarized police forces outfitted for preventive internal war. In the U.S., paramilitary forces using equipment from the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan patrol black, Latino and immigrant communities, putting down urban upheavals over racist police murder and the biggest mobilization of indigenous people since the late 1800s. Racist murders by fascists multiply while fascistic militias act as auxiliaries to the police. In Germany, an army of police squelched protests against the imperialist rulers at the G20 summit in Hamburg this summer, attacking residents and demonstrators alike. In Spain, the central government in Madrid has moved to suppress a drive for independence for Catalonia with judicial and police repression.

The ongoing capitalist economic crisis and endless imperialist war in the Middle East have brought various political responses, including the growth of right-wing populist groupings such as the Tea Party in the U.S. and left populists such as the Indignados (Outraged) in Southern Europe and Occupy Wall Street in the U.S., as well as the Greens and Bernie Sanders, who poses as a “democratic socialist” while running for the Democratic nomination for president. Sinister fascist forces have grown, from Golden Dawn in Greece, the Freedom Party in Austria and the National Front in France to the various “Alt-Right” fascistic and fascist groups that have surfaced in the U.S. under the Trump presidency.

The intense murderous repression by the police in the United States, both under Trump and the Democratic Obama administration, and under Democratic mayors across the country, is rooted in the racist oppression that is in the bedrock of American capitalism. Over 1,100 people are killed every year by the police in the United States, over a third of them African Americans. It has been calculated that a black person is killed by the cops every 28 hours. This is part of the continuing heritage of slavery and Jim Crow segregation, even though they have been formally abolished. From the frame-up of the Scottsboro youth to that of Mumia Abu-Jamal, to the murders of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Philando Castile and so many others, this reality continues to spark convulsive protests.

The explosive struggle against black oppression can ignite powerful class and social struggles. This was shown again recently as Trump, the white supremacist in the White House, unleashed a racist diatribe against the black players of the National Football League (NFL) who refused to stand for the national anthem, and of the National Basketball Association (NBA) who supported them by making other statements against Trump or police violence. Their daring gesture punctured the veneer of forced loyalty to U.S. patriotism and had a deep impact on the consciousness of African Americans, serving as a reminder that the protests against racist repression will not go away. But lacking a revolutionary leadership, fighters against racist oppression continue to suffer the fate of the Black Panther Party, shot down in the streets or co-opted, as has happened most recently with Black Lives Matter, a number of whose leaders have been recruited by the Democratic Party.

What has not happened is an explosion of sharp class struggle as occurred in the Great Depression in the 1930s, with plant occupations and formation of industrial unions under the CIO in the U.S., general strikes in France, and civil war in Spain. The relative dearth of militant class struggle is above all due to the crisis of revolutionary leadership. The big reformist parties have moved sharply to the right, or disappeared altogether as with the PCI in Italy. The opportunist left, in turn, has focused on chasing after the populists, or the resurgence of reformist Labourism in Britain. In the United States, the Internationalist Group, U.S. section of the LFI, has uniquely fought in the unions to break the stranglehold of the capitalist parties, and not to form a bourgeois “third party” or reformist-electoralist labor party but to build a workers party on a program of class struggle. In Oregon on the U.S. West Coast, at the height of the 2016 presidential election, Class Struggle Workers – Portland (CSWP), fraternally allied with the IG, won the support of the Painters Union (IUPAT Local 10) for a motion calling to break with the Democrats, “or any bosses’ parties,” and “build a class-struggle workers party.”

This was the result of several years of building labor solidarity in the Portland area, notably against union-busting and police attacks. In the 2015 May Day march, the CSWP had initiated a Labor Against Racist Police Murder contingent of dozens of unionists. In early 2016, it called a “Labor: Defend Abortion Rights” mobilization, and later that year it sparked a “Hard Hats for Gay Rights” contingent. To blame the absence of big class battles on the backwardness of the working class (as the ICL and various other pseudo-Trotskyists do) is to confuse cause and effect. Clearly there is a dialectical interaction between the leadership and the proletarian base, but the active element in recent years has not been a growing backwardness among the ranks but rather the abandonment of any vestige of communist, socialist or simply leftist – or even militant trade-unionist – heritage by the pro-capitalist misleaders of labor and the absence of a challenge to that by the not-so-far left.

Today the long-term effects of the capitalist depression and endless imperialist war are coming together pushing in an ominous direction. In Europe, central bankers continue to push a hard-line policy of anti-worker austerity, bankrupting Greece and impoverishing its working people. In the U.S. there is a political paralysis in Washington, even with all the branches of federal power under Republican and right-wing control, while fascist violence escalates. In Latin America, a decade of populist and popular-front governments is coming to an end as the high commodity prices that sustained them have fallen, and imperialist-run reactionaries are emboldened.

Meanwhile, a new global economic crisis could break out at any time, as stock prices continue to rise out of all proportion to real economic growth and the U.S. Federal Reserve abandons policies that have kept interest rates near zero. In the late 1930s, this took the form of the 1937 “depression within the depression” as the Roosevelt New Deal lost steam and unemployment soared. A result was a sharp growth of fascist forces. Simultaneously, inter-imperialist economic rivalries increased with sanctions on Italy, Germany and Japan, ultimately leading to world war. This scenario could repeat itself as the all-sided reactionary (misogynist, racist, xenophobic, red-baiting) and erratic president Trump pushes for trade war with Canada, China, Europe and Mexico while threatening to wipe out North Korea. Meanwhile, the Democrats and the Pentagon are itching for a showdown with Russia, in Syria or Ukraine, and to militarily strike at China.

The stage is being set for a major crisis in which the present regional wars and looming trade wars can escalate into a world war. A trigger could be a U.S.-sanctioned, Saudi-backed Israeli strike against Hezbollah in Lebanon. As before, the League for the Fourth International will continue to call for the defeat of U.S. imperialism in Afghanistan, Iraq and now Syria, and to drive the imperialists out of the Middle East and Africa. The LFI will unconditionally defend the bureaucratically deformed North Korean workers state against imperialist aggression, including if it is forced to counterattack with untold consequences. We likewise defend the Chinese and Cuban deformed workers states – and the remaining revolutionary gains which are under attack – against counterrevolution from within and without. In all these cases, we Trotskyists fight for proletarian political revolution to replace the nationalist Stalinist bureaucracy with revolutionary-internationalist soviet democracy.

In this situation of mounting crisis, revolutionary Trotskyists could be subject to repression, as our forebears of the then-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party of James P. Cannon and the Trotskyist-led Minneapolis Teamsters were at the outbreak of WWII, their leaders sentenced to jail on charges of sedition under the anti-communist Smith Act for their revolutionary opposition to the imperialist war. We have already had a taste of witch-hunting by red-baiting reformist leftists and feminists intent on provoking retaliation for our principled defense of gay and lesbian rights and our opposition to anti-gay repression of unpopular groups such as NAMBLA. Our calls for workers defense guards to crush the fascist threat, and for worker/immigrant action to stop deportations and racist attacks, could lead to reprisals amid the escalating attacks on immigrants, to which we will respond redoubling our efforts for mass action.

The LFI Faces New Challenges

In the first years of the League for the Fourth International, in the political climate dominated by “death of communism” triumphalism of the bourgeoisie and its absorption by most of the left, our struggles focused on issues accompanying or growing out of our expulsion from the ICL: upholding Trotsky’s analysis of the dual character of the Stalinist bureaucracy, and Lenin’s insistence on the need for the proletariat to stand for the defeat of its “own” imperialist rulers in imperialist war. As the ICL joined the pseudo-Trotskyists in falsely claiming that the bureaucracy led the counterrevolution, the LFI stood on the ICL’s historic intervention fighting the imperialist-led restoration of capitalist rule in East Germany (the DDR) and the USSR. Following the U.S. 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, the ICL grotesquely denounced our call for the defeat of U.S. imperialism, smearing us as “Playing the Counterfeit Card of Anti-Americanism” and tailing after “‘Third World’ nationalists for whom the ‘only good American is a dead American’.”³ This monstrous lie was a set-up for repression.

In the U.S., the Internationalist Group mobilized students to drive military recruiters off campus, which was successful for several months in 2005 at Bronx Community College in New York, and fought for workers strikes against the war. After a number of years raising this call, we played a significant role in and aided the effort that led to the May Day 2008 strike by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) that shut down every port on the U.S. West Coast demanding an end to the war on Iraq and Afghanistan and defending immigrants’ rights. It was the first-ever strike action by U.S. workers against a U.S.-imperialist war since the longshore boycotts on the West Coast in 1919 of weapons to the White counterrevolutionaries and U.S. expeditionary forces fighting the Red Army in Soviet Russia.⁴ Earlier, in April 1999, the Brazilian section of the LFI, the Liga Quarta-Internacionalista do Brasil, sparked a statewide work stoppage by Rio de Janeiro teachers demanding freedom for U.S. revolutionary and class-war prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal, which was followed the next day by (and organized in conjunction with) a West Coast port shutdown by the ILWU.⁵ When the LFI calls for something, we mean it, and fight to implement it.

In recent years, with the acceleration of capitalist decay in the new depression following the 2007-08 financial meltdown, we have faced new challenges. The rise of populist movements and parties of left and right as well as the surfacing of dangerous fascist forces have posed issues that required Marxist study and analysis to draw revolutionary programmatic conclusions.

In Mexico, the LFI’s analysis of the corporatist nature of government-controlled pseudo-unions continued the policy of the ICL when it stood for revolutionary Trotskyism, of fighting for genuine workers unions free of all control by the capitalist state. The now ex-Trotskyist ICL joined the rest of the opportunist left in whitewashing these strikebreaking “labor” bodies which organize death squads to murder opposition unionists.⁶ Our Trotskyist program enabled the Grupo Internacionalista to intervene heavily in the explosive upheavals by the dissident CNTE teachers union movement in 2006, 2013 and 2016 while most of the left was either absent (like the ICL section) or marginal.⁷

On Syria, the LFI’s position of opposition to all sides in the sectarian/communalist civil war while calling to drive out and defeat the U.S. imperialists, and to mobilize the militant working class next door in Turkey, uniquely represented a proletarian revolutionary program. Most of the left lined up either with the imperialist-backed Islamist opposition gangs, with the authoritarian Assad government or with the U.S.-allied Kurdish forces. While the LFI declared that any blows against the imperialist invaders, including by reactionary Islamists, were in the interests of the world working class, the ICL essentially portrayed the Islamic State as an anti-imperialist force, obscuring the fact that its blows were mainly directed at Shiite, Christian, Kurdish and other “apostates” and “infidels.” (See the section on Syria in “International Perspectives of the League for the Fourth International” in The Internationalist No. 40, Summer 2015).

On the crisis in Ukraine in 2014, the LFI early on pointed to the fascists’ role in leading the imperialist-backed nationalist protests in Kiev. We also undertook an analysis of whether post-Soviet Russia is imperialist, a vital issue that almost the entire left skated around. Our article (“The Bugbear of ‘Russian Imperialism’” [May 2014], reprinted in The Internationalist No. 40, Summer 2015) conclusively demonstrated that Russia today is an intermediate or regional capitalist power with imperialist ambitions. We also noted that many of those screaming against “Russian imperialism” in Ukraine earlier denounced “Soviet imperialism” while Trotskyists defended the USSR against capitalist imperialism.

In Greece in 2015, the rise of SYRIZA posed the question of its class nature. The LFI explained how that Coalition of the Radical Left had become a bourgeois party. We also exposed SYRIZA prime minister Alexis Tsipras’ phony referendum on the Eurobankers’ austerity demands. While the bulk of the left (including the ICL) fell for Tsipras’ call for a “no” vote, which a week later led to the imposition of an even more drastic austerity package, the LFI put forward a program for sharp class struggle, including occupation of the ports. (See “Greece: The Naked Rule of Finance Capital,” and “The ICL on Greece: Goodbye Trotsky, Hello Minimum Program,” in The Internationalist No. 41, September-October 2015.)

In Brazil in 2016, the right-wing drive to impeach Dilma Rousseff of the Workers Party (PT) and her popular-front government split the left. The LFI called for “No to Impeachment! For Workers Mobilization Against the Rightist Bourgeois Offensive – No Political Support to the Bourgeois Popular-Front Government” while the ICL declared its indifference to the sinister rightist power grab aimed at pushing through the anti-working-class “reforms.” These have now been enacted, legalizing slave labor in rural areas and overriding legal protections on working hours and safety conditions. Our article “Stumbling in the Dark With ‘Blown-Out Lanterns” (The Internationalist No. 44, Summer 2016) pointed to the parallels between the ICL’s position and the German CP’s attacks on Trotsky over the “Red Referendum” of 1931.

Most recently on Spain, the LFI has called for defense of Catalonia’s right to self-determination and independence, including holding a binding referendum, but not advocating at this point separation from the Spanish state. While calling on the workers movement throughout the Spanish state to defend the elected Catalonian government against neo-Francoist repression, we politically combat the bourgeois nationalists in Barcelona. We also noted the intersection of national and class division, with the Spanish-speaking industrial working class in the region largely opposed to secession. The call by most of the left for support to Catalan independence under the current circumstances reflects its ingrained tailism, while the ICL embraces bourgeois Catalan nationalism at the same time as it refuses to call for independence for colonies such as Puerto Rico.⁸

We also analyzed the struggles of indigenous peoples in South America, uniquely calling for worker-peasant-indigenous governments in the Andean region (Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia),⁹ and defended the struggle of Standing Rock Sioux against a pipeline threatening their lands, which led to the largest mobilization of indigenous peoples in the U.S. since the late 1800s.¹⁰ On South Africa, we have called for a revolutionary workers party to break with the tripartite popular-front government presiding over the neo-apartheid system that resorts to murderous violence to keep black workers in thrall to the capitalist rulers.¹¹ In all these cases, the League for the Fourth International has put forward a Marxist analysis of the contending class forces and a program for workers action leading toward international socialist revolution – what the formerly Trotskyist ICL has ceased to do as it thrashes about in a downward spiral of centrist confusion.

The Demise of the Post-Soviet Spartacist Tendency

Recently, the ICL published the document of its seventh international conference under the title “The Struggle Against the Chauvinist Hydra” (Spartacist, Summer 2017). This was not just another in the endless series of ICL line changes, this time on the national question, but a wholesale renunciation of Marxism and denunciation of the Spartacist tendency’s own historic program and tradition on a central issue. In pretending to fight against chauvinism, it actually promotes more chauvinism and blatantly embraces bourgeois nationalism, while announcing a generational purge of a whole layer of long-time leaders. Akin to Jack Barnes’ 1983 speech, “Their Trotsky and Ours,” which denounced permanent revolution and renounced Trotskyism while bestowing the mantle of “continuity” on an individual rather than the program and ousting the SWP old guard, in some respects this is even more grotesque, publicly smearing and even slandering a number of the ICL’s leading spokesmen, sometimes by name.

The “Chauvinist Hydra” document is a kind of suicide note and auto-obituary officially pronouncing the demise of the ICL as a once-revolutionary tendency. There is much to be said about this dramatic turn, and we have had a preliminary discussion in the LFI’s Executive Committee as well as several documents written, which we quote from here. A list of “Ten Questions for the ICL” began with: “According to them, their position on the national question over the last 40 years has been chauvinist. If that is so, has the ICL been a revolutionary organization, yes or no?” (SLers responded “yes,” positing a new political category, “chauvinist revolutionaries.”) Also: “Do they mention their betrayal on Haiti?” (They do not.) Another document noted the ICL’s new position that statehood for Puerto Rico would be self-determination, whereas in reality it would be an annexation subjugating the Puerto Rican people.

In a draft article on “The ICL: An Obituary,” a comrade wrote:

"After 20 years of centrist degeneration, the International Communist League (ICL) has now gone completely off the rails in a spectacular train wreck. Its latest issue of Spartacist (Summer 2017, No. 65) presents the aspirations of a ‘new axis’ of leadership to liquidate what was once a revolutionary organization into yet another ‘Leninist’ cheerleading squad for bourgeois nationalism. Claiming to have waged a successful ‘Struggle Against the Chauvinist Hydra,’ the ICL in fact did no more than slander its revolutionary past as ‘chauvinist’ and reaffirm its current chauvinism as ‘revolutionary.’ While the ICL pompously depicts this latest development as ‘Hercules fighting the Hydra of Lerna,’ the more fitting analogy from Greek mythology would be the ouroboros – a serpent eating its own tail….

“The ICL was founded to fight for proletarian internationalism, and that’s what it did until the mid-1990s. While the bourgeoisie succeeded in fooling much of the left into accepting colonialism with ‘democratic’ tricks like colonial referendums (i.e., ‘proof’ that colonial slaves ‘want’ to remain enslaved), the ICL refused to drop the call for independence. On Puerto Rico, Martinique, Guadalupe and all other colonies, the ICL upheld the famous 21 conditions of the Communist International, including that ‘Every party that wishes to belong to the Communist International has the obligation of exposing the dodges of its “own” imperialists in the colonies, of supporting every liberation movement in the colonies not only in words but in deeds, of demanding that their imperialist compatriots should be thrown out of the colonies.’…

“Today, the ICL is quite the opposite of what it once was. Since 1998, the ICL has given their stamp of approval to the continued colonial enslavement of Puerto Ricans, as long as imperialist-controlled referendums show that ‘they want it.’ In 2010, the ICL vociferously supported the U.S. imperialist invasion of Haiti in the name of ‘humanitarian aid’ for three months, then admitted that this was a ‘social-imperialist’ betrayal ‘akin to August 1914,’ when the social democrats proved themselves to be on the wrong side of the class line by voting for war credits. While in 1914, Lenin responded to this betrayal by declaring the Second International dead as a party for revolution and building the Third International, the ICL maintained the same leadership and slandered any members who wanted a thoroughgoing correction, demoralizing many of them to the point of quitting.”

Another comrade wrote that the ICL’s new-found support for the language laws in Quebec and Catalonia – on the claim that “they constitute defensive measures essential to the very existence of the oppressed nation” – deforms and directly contradicts Lenin’s position that “The national programme of working-class democracy is: absolutely no privileges for any one nation or any one language....” In short, “no privilege for any one language ‘means’ privilege for one language, according to the ICL today,” which cynically calls this “French only” and “Catalan only” policy “an extension of Lenin’s struggle for the equality of languages.” The comrade noted:

“[T]he ICL’s new line is not just bourgeois nationalism. It is the specific kind of ‘nation-building’ bourgeois nationalism pursued by petty-bourgeois and bourgeois sectors who are preparing to become part of a ruling class. National, linguistic and cultural issues are wielded in support and defense of class dominance…. The new national ruling class must establish the terrain for commodity production and exchange; the laws; the sovereignty; promote national culture; standardize language; promote the national language; and crack down on linguistic, cultural, national and other minorities that impede this process….. After independence, the Algerian FLN pursued the Arabization of the Berbers of Kabylia. Sinhala only! decreed Bandaranaike’s Sri Lanka ‘Freedom’ Party in 1956.”

A third comrade wrote that: “According to the ICL’s current views, the national struggle is everything and the class struggle is nothing (and thus this is de facto a stageist conception of revolution). Contrary to their rhetoric, there is nothing anti-imperialist at all about their positions, which of course continue to be anti-refugee and anti-immigrant.” And in the discussion of the LFI exec, a leading comrade of the Mexican section noted that the ICL had embraced the politics of “possibilism,” the anti-Marxist current of French social democracy that in the wake of the defeat of the 1871 Paris Commune wrote off the struggle for workers revolution and instead limited itself to the “minimum program” of reforms under capitalism.

Once the voice of revolutionary Trotskyism, the ICL today has abandoned the historic Spartacist line for a single binational workers state in Palestine. Soon it may renounce its distinctive position, upheld by the LFI, that in cases of interpenetrated peoples, where two nations dispute the same territory (as in historic Palestine), an equitable and democratic resolution of the national question is not possible on the basis of bourgeois rule but can only be achieved through socialist revolution. And rather than fighting today for a united socialist republic of Kurdistan, as it did for decades (and the LFI does today), the ICL now calls for a united Kurdistan, and later for socialism – i.e., a classic formula for two-stage revolution.

Meanwhile, the “Hydra” document resorts to falsifications, distortions and fabrications about the Internationalist Group and the LFI (which it never mentions). The section titled “True Chauvinist Continuity” starts off with a remarkable paragraph in which every word about the IG and every position they attribute to us is false. But that is par for the course from a group that from the start lied that our Brazilian section, the LQB, had sued the unions when the fact is not only that our comrades never sued the union but the exact opposite is the case, they were the union leadership removed by the bourgeois “justice system” for their unprecedented fight to expel cops from the municipal workers union; that they were abandoned by the ICL just as bourgeois repression came down on them; that our comrades were sued in the bosses’ courts by pro-police elements whose lies the ICL has repeated ever since, going so far as to sabotage their defense campaign.¹²

At the same time, as a comrade noted, one should not “over-dignify” the latest ICL turn: “at least half of the ‘Hydra Purge’ document is a very crude and vulgar smear job against their own comrades, in which fragments of topics and concepts are bunched together, covered in invective and hurled at the clique opponents of the day. For central elements involved in this sordid affair, ideas are almost purely instrumental; they are clubs to pick up and batter the internal enemy with, so they don’t have to make much sense.”

It is worth noting here that for anyone outside the ICL, the often bizarre “Hydra” document will make clear that the latter-day Spartacist tendency is anything but a stable pole of revolutionary leadership and instead a vipers nest of poisonous cliquism which ousts its leadership as often as it changes its political line (which is about every two-three years since 1996), renouncing key Trotskyist programmatic positions one after another. It continues to be important to polemicize against the International Communist League, as the LFI exposure of the ICL's accelerated centrist degeneration is a defense of the programmatic heritage of revolutionary Trotskyism on key issues for revolutionary workers and youth worldwide.

The Fracción Trotskista: Reformist Politics Masquerading as Centrism

By and large in the period since the destruction of the Soviet degenerated workers states, there have been few centrist would-be socialist groups that at least make a pretense of revolutionary politics even as their actual policies are reformist. But as social contradictions sharpen in the coming period, new centrist groups may appear. One outfit which has lately been more prominent is the Fracción Trotskista (Trotskyist Faction), led by the Argentine PTS (Party of Workers for Socialism), which comes out of the tradition of the late Nahuel Moreno. Lately, the FT has picked up some support in Europe and the United States, based on its name and ultra-opportunist practice, making exposure of its pseudo-Trotskyist posturing all the more important.

In reality, the FT has nothing to do with genuine Trotskyism and plenty to do with Morenoism. In his final phase in the 1980s, the quick-change artist Moreno settled in as a vulgar social democrat after discarding his earlier persona as a pretend Sandinista guerrilla and before that a would-be Iranian “Islamic revolution”-ist, a champion of “black nationalism” in Angola, a Guevarist guerrillaist (until some in his Argentine group tried to start a guerrilla foco), a fan of the Maoist Red Guards and a left Peronist. But throughout, Moreno was anti-Soviet, hailing the imperialist-backed mujahedin as they used their U.S.-supplied weapons to battle the Soviet-backed reform regime in Afghanistan in the 1980s (and to shoot communist teachers). Genuine Trotskyists, in contrast, proclaimed “Hail Red Army in Afghanistan!” and called to extend the social gains in Soviet Central Asia which were won through the Russian Revolution.

In his latter phase, Moreno broke openly with Trotskyism, opposing Trotsky’s insistence on proletarian leadership that is at the core of his program of permanent revolution, while calling to “update” the Transitional Program by turning it into a laundry list of capitalist reforms. He summed up his social-democratic perspective with the call for a “democratic revolution” and to carry out new bourgeois “February Revolutions” around the world, while Trotskyists call for new October Revolutions. The founders of the Fracción Trotskista split away from the main Morenoite current in 1988 not long after their former mentor’s death the year before. While formally upholding Trotsky against Moreno and rejecting the slogan of a “democratic revolution,” the FT campaigns everywhere on a “democratist” program, summed up in its call for (bourgeois) constituent assemblies just about everywhere on the globe. This tendency is further characterized by its all-sided, inveterate tailism. In the United States it has lately been fawning over the growth of the DSA as the latter runs on the Democratic Party ticket and the “Sanders Socialist” Socialist Alternative group as it runs on a tepid municipal-socialist platform.

The FT has also inherited from Moreno a policy of constant maneuverism, forming electoral coalitions, sponsoring front groups on a (democratic) minimum program and the like. It flaunts its participation in the FIT (Left and Workers Front) in Argentina, a propaganda bloc with other left groups (Partido Obrero and a Morenoite offshoot) whose platform consists of a standard-issue reformist minimum program (plus a couple words tacked on about a socialist Latin America) that could be raised by a Jeremy Corbyn in Britain or any number of left-talking “socialist” populists. Their formal position that police are not “workers in uniform” notwithstanding, the PTS/FT had no problem continuing the FIT coalition after their bloc partners hailed a cop “strike” in Argentina. Seeking “millennial” appeal, it has launched a digital Internet daily consisting mainly of vaguely “progressive” commentary. Not having a formal political line (or membership), the web site can appear as all things to all people. But, of course, it does have a program and that is a “left voice” of social democracy, in particular rejecting in practice the Trotskyist defense of the deformed workers states against imperialism and counterrevolution.

As the counterrevolutionary wave swept across East Europe in 1989-90, the FT’s earliest incarnation called for a “constituent assembly” in East and West Germany and for withdrawal of Warsaw Pact troops (i.e., the Soviet Army) from the DDR. This was the call for “Russians out” that George H.W. Bush and West German imperialist chief Helmut Kohl were screaming for, so that the troops and banks of imperialism could move in. That meant capitalist restoration in the guise of promoting classless “democracy.” The FT mislabels China capitalist and recently the Fracción Trotskista published an article (Left Voice, 7 September) by an FT leader on Trump’s threats against North Korea that oh-so “even-handedly” reports tit-for-tat threats while labeling the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) a “detestable dictatorial regime,” with not one word of defending the deformed workers state against imperialism. An earlier article (Left Voice, 23 June) by a prominent writer of the FT’s German section remarks that “we worry about the DPRK developing ever more sophisticated nuclear weapons,” whereas Trotskyists defend North Korea’s acquisition of nuclear weapons as vital to its survival.

Thus in practice, while posing as a Trotskyist tendency, in practice the FT pursues the same kind of anti-Trotskyist policies as its erstwhile mentor Nahuel Moreno and other anti-Soviet renegades from Trotskyism such as Max Shachtman and Tony Cliff. Nevertheless, we confront these imposters in various places, and the LFI should publish early on articles exposing their public relations image by detailing the actual reformist policies of these (very) right- centrists.

Tasks and Perspectives of the LFI

In this First International Conference of the League for the Fourth International we seek to take stock of the activity of the LFI, as outlined above and in our 2015 “International Perspectives” document, and to lay out the tasks and perspectives of our work in the coming period. As noted at the beginning of this document, these include:

1)    Regularization of the press of the LFI in the five languages and five countries where we have national sections, as well as in French. This also requires developing young comrades as writers and to take over the production of the press. Advances have been made in this respect over the last year in the United States, with The Internationalist appearing according to its published frequency and the layout increasingly being done by a young comrade. In Europe, the writing and production of L’internazionalista (Italy) and Permanente Revolution (Germany) are largely by experienced cadres there. In Mexico, despite a decision at the second national conference of the Grupo Internacionalista (2016) to increase the frequency of Revolución Permanente and integrate new writers, this did not happen in the year that followed; however, before this conference some important steps were already taken to immediately solve the problem. It is a key priority for the entire international that the problems preventing this be overcome, as Spanish-language publications are key to the growth of the LFI, both in Latin America and in Europe. In Brazil, it will take a major effort to publish Vanguarda Operária on a once-yearly basis – this is linked to the task of recruiting new members. We also seek to accelerate the updating of articles on the web site in all languages, and to increase the production of audiovisual propaganda and internal educational material.

2)    Production of high-quality analyses and polemical articles on key questions is vital to revolutionary regroupment. In the U.S. we have drafts for a pamphlet on the history of the U.S. social democracy and Shachtmanism, of particular relevance given the growth of the DSA, that must be published as soon as possible. Drafts for Marxism and Education as the continuation of the CSEW Newsletter are also waiting and should likewise be published early on. We plan to have an international seminar as preparation for publishing a special issue of The Internationalist and El Internacionalista on China. This is a key priority as China is a major point of dispute with almost all the ostensibly Trotskyist tendencies in the world today. The need for a major piece on the Fracción Trotskista has been mentioned, and should go together with the second installment of the Moreno Truth Kit analyzing his final social-democratic phase. We are also seeking to prepare important articles on anti-fascist workers mobilizations by the Minneapolis Trotskyist Teamsters and the history of “antifa” activity in Germany in the 1920s and ’30s.

3)    Cadre development is a vital priority for young comrades, particularly in the framework of building the Revolutionary Internationalist Youth in the United States. This includes developing young writers for the RIY newspaper Revolution, so that it can appear twice a year, something that is already underway. Also important is preparation for polemical interventions and study of Marxist and Trotskyist literature. Thus the basic Marxist texts that are the focus of the weekly study groups in New York, Portland and Los Angeles are supplemented by additional reading programs for the RIY members. In Mexico, we have held study groups by teleconference at the national level, in which comrades from different locals have participated.

4)    Continuing and accelerating the development of a professional organizational apparatus is vital for the training of young comrades but also to further relieve the burden on long-time cadres who have had to carry out a number of practical tasks involved in building a communist organization. This will aid the LFI as it frees those comrades up for writing texts that we are uniquely in a position to contribute to world Marxism.

5)    Expanding the fraternally allied transitional organizations should be a major priority. The existence and work of Class Struggle Education Workers, Class Struggle Workers – Portland and Trabajadores Internacionales Clasistas is a distinctive feature of the LFI and we must seek to substantially expand their work. This involves recruiting members to the party, intervening in sharp struggles on a class axis and helping comrades to grow politically through regular study sessions, such as the Spanish-language study group of the TIC in New York and political education in the CSWP in Portland. In schools and hospitals where immigrant students, their families and patients are targeted by the deportation machine, the CSEW has taken the initiative to form immigrant defense committees to block I.C.E. raids and put an end to the crime of “medical deportations.”

In Brazil, the Comitê de Luta Classista is celebrating 20 years of existence. The CLC has gained new members over the last two years as a result of successful intervention in the SEPE teachers union in the state of Rio de Janeiro. It is important to expand the CLC as a result of the intervention in the recent struggle by steel workers at the CSN plant in Volta Redonda in defense of the six-hour workday which was won and has been defended by our comrades over the years, and to seek to win young workers from the new automotive plants that have made the region a second major pole of the metal industry in Brazil. In Mexico, we should redouble efforts to win teachers from the CNTE to build a Comité de Lucha Proletaria in this key sector.

National Perspectives

6)    In Brazil, we need to expand beyond our base in the steel city of Volta Redonda and recruit younger militants in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. This is a longstanding priority, and for many years it was hindered by the popular front led by the PT. But the prospect of a 2018 election campaign by Lula in alliance with some of those the PT denounced as “coup-plotters” has thrown the popular-frontist left into crisis.

7)    In Mexico, the intensive and exemplary involvement of the GI in the three-month-long teachers strike in 2016, particularly in Oaxaca and Mexico City, marked a major advance for the LFI as a whole. Holding daily political film showings and weekly Trotskyist study groups at strike headquarters, as well as systematic intervention in the strike plantón (encampment) in Mexico City, including sharp debates with supporters of the populist MORENA, made us very well known among this most militant sector of the labor movement. The work of the comrades in aiding victims of the massacre in Nochixtlán was courageous and admirable. However, follow-up has had only limited success and we must pursue leads, including in outlying states. The abiding weakness of the Mexican section has been the infrequency of the press. The EC of the GI resolved to appoint a new editor and to add a young comrade to the editorial board. The LFI leadership, the GI leadership and younger members must work out a concrete plan to carry out the decision of the GI’s Second Conference to publish three times a year. It is also key to back up the Oaxaca local whose leaders have faced official repression in reprisal for their solidarity work. It is essential to professionalize our Frecuencia Obrera Internacionalista program [on the teachers’ Radio Plantón] with workshops which could be given by our comrades from the Mexico City local.

A worrisome situation has existed for some time in the Tijuana local of the GI, as manifested fairly dramatically at last year's Second Conference of the GI. At the programmatic level, the local's members have now expressed opposition to our line on Catalonia, counterposing a call for independence to the LFI’s position of defending the right to self-determination and independence while not calling for secession at this time. This issue was debated at the conference, and it would have been in the interest of the LFI as a whole that the members of the Tijuana local exercise their right to argue their position. At the same time, internal political debate must, as always, be predicated on strict adherence to the norms of democratic centralism requiring all members to publicly defend the line of the organization.¹³

8)    In the United States we must build on the work of the Portland branch of the IG in fighting in the unions to break from the Democratic Party and build a class-struggle workers party. In addition, despite setbacks in the union work in the Portland area, we must put a priority on preparing the basis for a workers defense guard. This means systematic work building a base of union militants around the core of the CSWP in order to defeat right-wing elements and to develop that core politically into real worker Trotskyist cadres. The existence of such a core was what made the Minneapolis Teamster strikes of 1934 possible, and it will require sustained work to achieve this. In the Los Angeles area, with our small forces we need to pick and choose where to focus our activity depending on where real opportunities exist, while always being aware that this is a majority Latino and immigrant area with the potential for explosive struggles against the bipartisan deportation machine. In New York, the RIY needs to expand beyond our base at one of the city colleges. The TIC must continue to seek to intervene among immigrant workers where there are significant opportunities, including among non-Spanish-speaking immigrants, and with particular emphasis on winning women, who experience double oppression. Our systematic sales in Haitian areas may offer a means to do so.

9)    In Germany the Internationalistische Gruppe, founded this past August, has held sessions of a study group and intervened at demonstrations in Berlin against fascists and in defense of Catalonia’s right to self-determination. Most recently, the IG undertook a modest effort to mobilize student solidarity for Siemens workers protesting threatened layoffs of some 7,000 employees. A separate document outlining perspectives in Germany has been written, concluding:

“The Internationalistische Gruppe begins with very tiny forces, but has already attracted a number of supporters and well-wishers, some of whom may prove invaluable in sparking some form of exemplary action which can demonstrate the power of the working class even on a limited, defensive terrain. We have already shown our appetites in this direction by taking up the defense of a lecturer at the Free University of Berlin, and seeking to get trade-union support for her case. We hope to crystallize contacts from successful sales at this campus. The prospect of wage struggles by student employees at this university early next year will provide yet another arena.

“Above and beyond the absolutely indispensable organizational reinforcement of the Group, other tasks posed are to further investigate and effectively polemicize against the pseudo-Trotskyist German groups as well as to seek to capitalize on the accumulated expertise on the history of German communism available in the international.”

10)    In Italy the comrades of the Nucleo Internazionalista d’Italia have been actively doing public work with their first paper since September 2016 and are becoming more known among a large part of the left. According to their report:

“We have probably sold over 200 papers to the ‘Trotskyist’ left and several hundred other papers. Our first paper concentrates on the question of immigration and explaining who we are as opposed to the ICL. The second paper mostly concentrates on the woman question and also the Russian question. Our third paper will have an article going into the rotten history of Italian Trotskyism (Pabloist liquidationism).

“With the exception of two Stalinist groups, we directly immediately confront all of the left’s state capitalist position, particularly on China, and the ‘Russian question’ in general (both old and current), all the time. This is the most central question to confront in order to be able to recruit…. We have sold all over most of Italy to demonstrations and important meetings: in Naples and Rome many times, in Florence, Bologna and Rimini several times and also sometimes in Turin, Genoa and other places.

“We need to keep an eye on what is happening in France and other parts of Europe. Our joint intervention with our new section in Germany at the Lutte Ouvrière Fête in Paris should just be the beginning.”

The League for the Fourth International in our first two decades of existence successfully withstood the pressures of a temporarily triumphant bourgeoisie, holding fast to the Marxist program in an adverse (but contradictory) period. With our limited forces, we have established sections and are publishing a high-quality Trotskyist press in five countries and five languages. We have a layer of worker and immigrant cadres that is unique on the left, have achieved some important victories and waged international campaigns. Now we are facing new challenges, both of growth and in confronting the political consequences of the advanced state of putrefaction of the capitalist-imperialist system. And with the recent dramatic abandonment of Leninism on the national question and embrace of bourgeois nationalism by the ICL, along with an extensive purge of its leading cadre, the unique position of the LFI as the political continuity of Trotsky’s Fourth International is thrown into sharp relief.