This new anniversary of the assassination of Comrade Leon Trotsky finds revisionism and the liquidators of the Fourth International, seeking to liquidate all continuity and leaving no trace of the theory, the program and the combat of the most important work of Comrade Trotsky, which was the Foundation of the IV International.

The events of 1989 found the renegades of Trotskyism at the feet of Stalinism, which sold out the former workers’ states to imperialism

While Stalinism sold out the former workers’ states, the USSR, China, Vietnam (as now Cuba) to imperialism, the renegades of Trotskyism were - just like today - at their feet. They had followed Stalinism as the soul to the body. Their parties burst into pieces in the late ‘80s and’ 90s. The laws of history proved to be stronger than any apparatus. The renegades of Trotskyism who had usurped the Fourth International had turned their backs, throughout the post-war period, to the enormous battles of the working class of Eastern Europe and the former USSR against the Stalinist bureaucracy.
Those who had long ago broken with the program of the Fourth International blamed the masses, their supposed “backward consciousness and Bolshevism for such a catastrophe of the collapse of the former worker states. They accused, in a true crusade and holy alliance, Trotskyism of being “sectarian” throughout the postwar period. Thus, they ended up washing the dirty clothes back to Stalinism, which had already become a direct agent of imperialism and become a new possessing class.
With the fall of the workers’ states, a great subversion against Marxism emerged. In the late 1980s and 1990s, every thread of continuity with the revolutionary program of the Fourth International and its lessons had been cut. With an open rupture with Trotskyism, those who continued to speak in his name already only falsified it. Thus, with a true crisis and outbreak, and without historical continuity of its combats, the “IV International” entered the 21st century.

The so-called “anti-capitalists”, like the French LCR, openly reneged on the dictatorship of the proletariat. Others lamented the fall of the Stalinist bureaucracy and from that moment on they openly support it. They were and are the ones who tie the fate of the working class to the leaderships that betray it at every step.
Others, like today’s LIT, insisted and continue insisting on the enormous “victory” that the “fall of the bureaucracy” meant as a “victorious democratic revolution” and not as it was: the defeat of a historic conquest and the collapse of worker states. Even today they have to explain how can the fall of the bureaucracy of a worker state be a victory when they were dissolved.
Others, like the PTS of Argentina, saw a decomposing worker state until well into the first decade of the 21st century, giving suprahistorical powers to the Stalinist bureaucracy when it was already in private hands and the imperialism had appropriated of all the property of the planned economy. Not to mention China, when the new party of the Chinese mandarins put the most numerous working class to produce for the world economy under conditions of slavery.

Before the fall of Stalinism, the Fourth International was the only place from where one could speak to the world working movement. In the name of Trotskyism, opportunism legitimizes Stalinism and the traitors of the WSF

After ‘89, the renegades of Trotskyism, which had burst into a thousand pieces, and after having become the greatest destroyers of the revolutionary program, give Stalinism a survival so that it continues betraying the world proletariat. When the first wave of revolutionary struggle comes after the fall of the worker states, at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century, with an enormous process of struggle in the colonies and semi-colonies took place. Stalinism was totally delegitimized by the surrender of the former worker states and Trotskyism was from the only place where one could speak in the name of socialism and the left. This time, in his name, opportunism usurping the flags of the Fourth International, legitimized the battered Stalinism that the bourgeoisie accommodated by making them lead the unions in a counterrevolutionary way and supporting the native bourgeoisies in the semi colonial world. Thus arose a new counterrevolutionary direction regrouped by big capital, the World Social Forum (WSF).

The former Trotskyists were the left flank of the new counterrevolutionary international regroupment that was the WSF, giving life to Stalinism and its debris so that it continues betraying the revolutions on an international level as it did from the WSF together with the native bourgeoisies. In the name of Trotskyism, the entire Bolivarian bourgeoisie that expropriated the Latin American revolution was legitimized. Chavez and Morales were called to be voted for “critically” ... to demand that they “make socialism”, while defending the Castroite bureaucracy that had already begun a open course to capitalist restoration. Remember that Alan Woods was the one who gave Chavez the Transitional Program and a long etc.

Before the el crack of 2008, imperialism centralizes all its agents. The Fourth International in the hands of the renegades of Trotskyism, is led at the feet of the bourgeoisie and the counterrevolutionary leaderships

The response of imperialism to its bankruptcy with the crack of 2008 was to recruit all its agents into the labor movement to contain the masses’ offensive that threatened to sweep away imperialist domination and open a new 68/74. The WSF played all its role. Today it is clear how it retires from the historical arena with the Maduros, the Ortegas, the Morales, the Kirchner, the Lulas, the Iranian ayatollahs, starving and shooting the people, after having aborted the anti-imperialist struggle of the working class of the semicolonial world. With the Castroes it imposed a pact with Obama that allowed Yankee imperialism to cushion inside the hard blows meant by the battles of the masses in Iraq and Afghanistan that forced it to withdraw from Iraq.

Imperialism has not managed to get out of its bankruptcy up to now. Here and there it treats its agents like squeezed lemons. Faced with the crash of the imperialist powers, and to support their governments in crisis and harassed by the masses, the so-called “New Left” emerges.
The change of command to its followers of the “New Left” was organized in the last meetings of the World Social Forum in 2013 and 2015 in Tunisia along with Podemos and Syriza. There they imposed their program of “the enemy is the ISIS” that imperialism and its agents used to massacre and crush the revolutionary processes initiated in 2011 in the Maghreb and the Middle East. A social-chauvinist “New Left” that enters history with blood-stained hands of the most advanced of the world revolution.

These parties, supported by the old European Communist parties, by the old renegades of Trotskyism today turned into “anti-capitalists” and the leftovers of the social democracy, are a Menshevism new wave. Already in ‘89 all continuity with the program of Bolshevism had been cut off. The crash of the world capitalist system led those who had long since reneged Marxism, to a new reactionary offensive and falsification of it. They proclaimed the party of “Lenin and Jean Jaures”, the convergences between Trotsky and Gramsci. They repeated cries that “socialism did not work anymore, even in Cuba” as Fidel Castro said. Hung from the coattails of Stalinism and its old policy of class collaboration and revolution in stages, they proclaimed and proclaim the expansion of bourgeois democracy so that the working class, through it, could achieve new conquests and raise their standard of living.

They have the audacity to raise, as does Varoufakis and the left of Syriza, that the imperialist Europe of Maastricht can be democratized with a European constituent assembly. Like the PTS of Argentina and the FIT, they fall over themselves presenting bills in the bourgeois parliament together with the parties of the bourgeois opposition for the working class to recover or achieve new conquests.
In England, with the English SWP, they support the Labor party, the greatest agent of the City of London, partner of the Tories in the looting and exploitation of the colonial and semi-colonial world by British imperialism. They are defenders of the Crown parties in their colonies, just like the ISO in Zimbabwe calling to vote, nonchalantly, to the MDC.
In Latin America, in the face of the bankruptcy of Stalinism and the WSF, they have quickly formed their broad fronts and “New Left” parties, which are no more than Popular Fronts imitations and class collaboration with the bourgeoisie. There we saw the LIT voting for Petro in Colombia, a petty-bourgeois democrat supported by the big bourgeoisie of Antioquia. Or, heading as does the ITU, the list of the Broad Front of Peru, supported by Stalinism and fractions of bourgeois gangs that quickly flee from traditional parties to better deceive the masses posing as “leftists”.
The particularity of the tragedy we are living in this historical period with our world party, the Fourth International, is that after denying it a thousand times, its theory and its program, after using it -as we have seen- to support and resuscitate Stalinism as a new “Lazarus”, they ended dissolving it in this “New Left”. The clean banners of the Fourth International with the parties of the Stalinist counterrevolution, which the bourgeoisie preserved to control the workers’ movement at the international level from the trade unions, have been and are still dirty there.
The “anticapitalists” of course, have been dissolved in Podemos and Syriza for some time, they are inside the Labor Party, they are the left wing of Sanders in the US to subordinate the working class to the Democratic Party, while they preach “antifascist fronts” against Trump. to support Clinton and Obama.
We are facing a new reissue of the old theory of revolution by stages and popular fronts of Stalinism, openly defended by ex-Trotskyists who crossed the Rubicon long ago. Today, 78 years after his assassination, they pay “homage” to Comrade Trotsky, when they are with their assassins in common parties betraying to the world working class.
For the Trotskyists, in the Fourth International there is no place for those who are hanging on the coattails of the bourgeoisie with the popular front. There they are wallowing with Stalinists, not only reviewing Marxism but acting directly as a counterrevolutionary force, where imperialism is testing them, as in Syria.
That’s because this “New Left” entered the class struggle with hands stained with blood. In the Middle East they supported al-Assad, who along with Zionism, the US and other imperialist powers, is the largest genocidal of the working class in the 21st century. None of these leftists passed the test of the Syrian revolution.

Some directly treated the dog Bashar, supported by the assassin Putin, as an “ally of the oppressed peoples”, when he was the one who did the “dirty work” of imperialism to massacre the Syrian revolution.
On the other hand, there are those who cover it up by stating that in Syria there is a “war of two reactionary camps”. An “abstentionism” that only served al-Assad and his government to have their hands free to crush a revolution, which was delivered from within by the generals of the FSA.
Other currents of the “New Left” ended at the feet of the “democratic” bourgeois generals of the FSA. Such is the case of the English SWP, the French NPA and the LIT-CI. They asked the US to stop the war decreeing the prohibition of flights in the airspace of Syria or, by sending weapons and equipment to the resistance...While it was USA itself who supported the dog Bashar and gave the order so the bourgeois generals of FSA sold out all rebel cities one by one.
This “New Left” is conformed with the Stalinist Third International, together with the ex-Trotskyists who appropriated the Fourth International and its flags, petit-bourgeois politicians and with the shadow of the bourgeoisie. Thus the substitutes of the World Social Forum have arisen: a “New Left” defender of the different imperialist gangs that today are fighting for the world market spoils.

The actuality and validity of the theory and program of Trotskyism and the Fourth International. We have to recover the Fourth International from the mud to which opportunism and revisionism led it, to regroup the forces to re-found it.

As the Transitional Program of the IV International proposes: “The objective prerequisites for the proletarian revolution have not only” ripen”; they have begun to get somewhat rotten. Without a socialist revolution, in the next historical period at that, a catastrophe threatens the whole culture of mankind. The turn is now to the proletariat, i.e., chiefly to its revolutionary vanguard. The historical crisis of mankind is reduced to the crisis of the revolutionary leadership”.

Written 80 years ago, the objective premises of the Transitional Program remain fully valid. Reformism and revisionism settled down destroying these premises to end up supporting the capitalist system in bankruptcy. The destroyers of the Fourth International prepared their passage to Stalinism, with a brutal revisionism of Marxism and the legacy of the Trotskyist theory and program. In recent years, such as the English SWP and the PTS of Argentina, for example, they have been trumpeting the convergences of Trotsky and Gramsci, a confessed theoretician and militant of Stalinism.
The crisis of leadership has worsened to an extreme degree because of this betrayal of the Fourth International. The productive forces are totally decomposed, the delay in solving the crisis of leadership can lead to the path of war if the proletariat does not give an answer. The political and economic clashes in the current trade war, tomorrow will be interimperialist military conflagrations, or between any agents acting on their behalf.

After 78 years of the murder of Comrade Trotsky, the combat is under the banners of the Fourth International. Reformism is exposed day by day. It can no longer pass alms as conquests. In its struggle, the working class here and there poses “milestones of socialism.” The fight is to regroup the revolutionary and internationalist forces. The theory and program of the Fourth International for socialist revolution remains intact. It is about recovering the Fourth International from the mud to which opportunism and revisionism led it to regroup the forces to re-found it.
On this new anniversary of Trotsky’s assassination, we call the forces that claim themselves as Trotskyism and resist the passage of ex Trotskyists to the field of Stalinism, to turn next September, which marks the 80th anniversary of the founding Congress of the IV International, into a month of struggle and combat to recover it.
The program that Trotskyism raised today becomes a powerful weapon against those who betrayed it and sold it out. We reproduce here excerpts from a FLTI’s manifesto of the year 2010 on the 70th anniversary of the murder of Leon Trotsky, as a contribution in the fight to regroup the revolutionary forces and to recover the flags of the Fourth International.

Paper "Quatrieme Internationale"

Trotskyists members of the IV International
in Johannesburg, South Africa - 1934

Facsimil de las resoluciones de la Conferencia de fundación
de la IV Internacional

Tatu Tao, leader of the Vietnamese section
of the IV International

Trotsky with leaders of the youth of the IV International

Trotsky in the revolutionary soviet of Petrograd in 1919

Leon Trotsky founder of the IV International
and of the Red Army of the USSR

Trotsky's speech in the University of Copenhagen in 1932

The second Congress of the Communist International - 1920