Trotskyism and the Fourth International
were the only and genuine continuity of Bolshevism
Trotskyism in the ‘30s put before the World proletariat the same war cry and the same motion that had been put by Lenin and the Bolsheviks in their fight against Menshevism. Against the counterrevolutionary Second and Third Internationals, against the centrist (called 2 and a half) Amsterdam International, the Trotskyists in the ‘30s held: “Let Mensheviks and reformists build their party; we Leninist-Bolsheviks will build ours to prepare the victory of the socialist revolution”.
The Fourth International, heir to Bolshevism, was conscious about the imperialism as “the splitting of socialism” and they know that only by defeating the interests of the worker aristocracy and bureaucracies, bought by finance Capital and the bourgeoisie to submit the working class and its struggles, the proletariat will be able to seize the power.
These people want to hide and blur the fact that the struggle in Zimmerwald and Kienthal, continued by the revolutionary Third and Fourth Internationals was the response by revolutionary Marxism in the twentieth century to confront the betrayal of Social Democracy and Stalinism that had changed sides going to defend the interests of Capitalism in its parasitic, last phase of death agony.
Be it during a tide or an ebb of the working class activity, from the top of power or in the resistance, from Zimmerwald-Kienthal to the Coyoacan centre of Trotsky’s in Mexico in the ‘40s, the revolutionary proletariat could keep an international centre, a general staff that took on the task of centralizing the proletarian struggles worldwide against the counterrevolutionary general staff of the imperialist bourgeoisies and the treacherous leadership. As soon as Social Democracy led by social-imperialist Kautsky and Bernstein changes sides, going over to the trench of imperialist counterrevolution, an international wing emerges that re-groups the ranks of revolutionary Marxism during the war, wages battle to the defectors and prepares in Zimmerwald-Kienthal the fight for power during and in the aftermath of war.
The Fourth International after Trotsky’s death failed to play that role. Centrists and opportunists liquidated any possibility of being a continuity of the Marxist program, as this is international and cannot develop in a party that is not a world party, much less in national groups federated from time to time in congresses where they whitewash their “blunders” as was the case with the Fourth International in the last 70 years.
Far from that, during Trotsky’s life, the Fourth International as continuity of Bolshevism confronted ruthlessly the popular front and the policy of strangling the revolution in the West on the part of Stalinism and Social Democracy. It was backstabbed from the own “republican” camp during the Spanish civil war against Franco by the fifth column set by the KGB, the same fifth column that murdered Trotsky in Mexico in cold blood.
That’s why, against the imposture of the Trotskyite renegades, we affirm that since the foundation of the Fourth International in ’38, what the internationalist revolutionary movement has done after 70 years is “sowing dragons to harvest fleas”, as Trotsky said talking about Stalinism in the ‘30s in France.
We Trotskyists from the FLTI pay homage to Trotsky and with him to the Soviet section of the Fourth International, to the French section that was prepared to struggle against the “democratic” imperialisms, as well as to the rest of the European sections that were formed by our world party to intervene in the second inter-imperialist war with the war-cry: “about-face with your guns! Kill the exploiters, not your class brothers!” and the program of the revolutionary defeatism.
The Fourth International we make ours is that International which in Latin America led the struggle against fascism in Brazil in ’36 and took he revolutionary lessons drawn from that struggle to Bolivia, where in 1946 the Mineworkers Federation voted the Pulacayo Theses, i.e., the Trotskyist Program for the 1952 Revolution adopted by the COB (Bolivian Central Labour Union) that same year.
We want to pay homage and vindicate Trotsky and young Cannon’s SWP in the US that in the ‘30s confronted ruthlessly the Rooseveltians and Stalinists in the American labour movement; that SWP which parted its banners with those of Bukharinist opportunism and far from placing the US working class to Roosevelt’s feet, as the entire American left does today with Obama, it confronted openly both fascism and “democratic” imperialism alike, and said “presently the Second and Third Internationals and the International of Amsterdam are counterrevolutionary organizations whose objective is checking and paralyzing the world proletarians’ revolutionary struggle against the “democratic” imperialists” (Conversations with Argentinean Bolshevik-Leninist Mateo Fossa, September 29, 1938, our translation).
From the FLTI we make ours every battle waged by factions of the Fourth International which in a honest way tried to keep unabridged that bloody river existing from long ago between Bolshevism and Menshevism, between Trotskyism and Stalinism, between revolution and reformism.
We pay homage to the fighters of the Russian section that were abandoned in the frontline of the war against the Stalinist filth, betrayed in the West by the liquidationist rascals of the Fourth International that usurped its name and banner after Trotsky’s death. We pay homage to those martyred comrades that fell fusilladed in the Stalinist concentration camps, crying “Long live the October Revolution! Long Live Bolshevism! Long Live Trotskyism! Long Live the Fourth International!”
We make ours the thousand and one attempts with which different proletarian generations in the last 70 years gave their life to put in place an internationalist fraction of the world proletariat, that longed for fighting under the program and the banners of the Fourth International, but were endlessly taken by opportunist, centrist and liquidationist leaderships to political and physical defeats and demoralized.
Those heroic efforts by the precedent generations oblige us to put our best and utmost forces in order to give continuity to the Marxist program of combative internationalism, so that the new proletarian generations are never more led by the “Marxian” impostors to new frustrations and demoralizations in the class struggle.
We denounce that for the Trotskyite renegades and for those that destroyed the Fourth International, speaking about the Fourth International today amounts to a political suicide and nobody kills itself in politics, because these people have abandoned the battlefield and the fight for the Fourth International long ago. How dare these people speak and vindicate the Fourth International, its theory and program, which have passed the test of History, when they have been doing nothing more than revising them during decades and preparing their overt leave to the ranks of the Fifth International? There they hold up together with the remains of Stalinism and Social Democracy the old and long ago perished theories, which revolutionary Marxism has buried successfully as the “two-stage revolutions”, “socialism in a single country”, “supporting and backing popular fronts in order to confront fascism”, or “national front to confront imperialism and after that –donkey’s years ahead- let’s do the socialist revolution”.
We want to affirm that the hard blows against Trotskyism have not only come from Stalinism but from the vicious actions of Pabloism and revisionism, which from within the very same belly of the Fourth International liquidated its theory, legacy and program, in the same way that the 2nd and Third International were lost.
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Trotsky with leaders of the youth of the IV International
Resolutions of the Foundation Conferences of the
IV International
Trotsky with leaders of the IV Internacional
Trotsky in the revolutionary soviet of Petrograd in 1919
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