Issuing body: The Provisional European Secretariat [of the Fourth International] Original publication: In Quatrième Internationale, nouvelle série n° 1, August 1943
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Resolution: Reconstruction and Strengthening of the Fourth International
1. The need for an international organization has made itself felt from the very first steps of the workers' movement, even on the level of its economic demands. This need results from the fact that the emancipation of the working class is no longer a local or national problem but a social problem embracing all the countries where the capitalist regime exists, and whose solution depends on the combined practical and theoretical efforts of the most advanced countries.
2. The internationalism of the working class is the necessary reflection of the universality of the general economic and political conditions that characterize the historical development of the capitalist regime through the progressive fusion of the different national economies into an organic whole.
3. In the present imperialist epoch, the universality of economics and politics, directed by world finance capital, is an accomplished fact, and, more than ever, in every capitalist country, the analysis of its own situation can be deduced only from the analysis of the general world situation.
4. All the historical efforts of the workers' movement therefore bear, despite the national form that its emancipatory struggle necessarily assumes in each separate country, the stamp of an essentially international policy and organization.
5. In an epoch when the universality of economics and politics was still more a tendency than a reality, the First International, while declaring the necessity of coordinating the workers' movement in all capitalist countries, laid particular stress on the importance of the special conditions of each country and strongly recommended the elaboration of an adequate political programme.
Later, the Second International carried on the work of the First International, while developing the trade-union and political organization of the masses in the capitalist countries and elaborating a programme of international action in keeping with the progressive fusion of the national economies into a whole, and with the general prospects of the war that threatened the entire capitalist world.
The Third International, finally, constituted after the end of the 1914–1918 war and after the triumph of the Russian Revolution, expressed, in its first four congresses, the political and organizational necessities of the workers' movement during the imperialist epoch dominated by the world economy and world politics of finance capital.
6. The First International foundered in the waves of passivity and political indifference of the masses that followed the defeat of the Commune, and in the theoretical incomprehension of the advanced elements of the proletariat, still dominated by anarchist and Blanquist ideas.
The Second International perished during the war of 1914–1918, undermined by opportunism and struck down by the betrayal of its leaders, who passed over into the camp of the bourgeoisie.
The Third International, having tied its fate to the evolution of the Soviet state, rapidly degenerated along with it and disappeared, even formally, the moment the interests of the diplomacy of the Soviet bureaucracy, in its relations with the Anglo-Saxon imperialist clan, demanded it.
7. At the root of the crisis of the international organization of the workers' movement lies the latter's inability, up to now, to take its own destiny into its own hands and to prevent the interference of hostile tendencies which, with the aid of favourable circumstances, divert it from its historic mission. The lack of continuity in its own experience, owing to the massive disappearance — during the war of 1914–1918, the Russian Revolution, the civil war, the terror exercised in the other capitalist countries and by Stalin in the USSR — of its most mature political elements, is one of the principal causes of this over the last twenty-five years.
8. The movement for the Fourth International was set in motion in 1934 by the Left Opposition of the Third International. It culminated, in 1938, in the founding of the Fourth International. This movement was determined by the absence, on the revolutionary political scene, of an international organization capable of leading the class struggle, in the present imperialist epoch, toward its historic outcome: the triumph of socialism. The Fourth International is the expression of a historical necessity of the revolutionary process of our epoch, which tolerates no interruption.
Its proclamation was not an arbitrary act. It imposed itself, not only objectively but also subjectively, as the necessary political line of any revolutionary current making its way through the worst of obstacles.
At the moment of its proclamation, the Fourth International was already strong in its doctrine. This doctrine prolongs and develops the Leninist doctrine of the first four congresses of the Communist International, under the new conditions characterized by the degeneration of the Soviet state and of the Third International, the aggravation of the crisis of the capitalist regime, fascism, and the preparation of the new imperialist war. The Fourth International also possessed, in several countries of the world, a number — restricted, it is true — of organized cadres who, despite their weakness, generally defended a correct revolutionary policy.
9. The approach of the world imperialist war largely determined the proclamation of the new International. To provide the disoriented masses — drawn, for the second time within twenty years, into the infernal circle of imperialist brigandage and carnage — with a revolutionary line of conduct, and to create a pole of attraction that could facilitate ideological and organizational regrouping: such was the guiding thought that dictated the act of proclaiming the Fourth International.
10. The imperialist war, which came shortly afterward, caught the popular masses unawares and, thanks to the coalition of the social-democratic and Stalinist parties with the bourgeoisie, pushed them, disoriented, onto the side of their governments and of chauvinism.
In the world atmosphere, poisoned as it still is by the fumes of national and racial hatred, by the stupefying propaganda of the international bourgeoisie, of the bureaucratic caste of the USSR and of their agents within the workers' movement, revolutionary policy still finds no appreciable echo. The weak national sections of the Fourth International inevitably felt isolated and, on the whole, responded only mediocrely to the immense tasks that the situation imposed upon them.
11. Nevertheless, the revolutionary tide is inevitable and close at hand. This war, the necessary outcome of the contradictions between the imperialist powers, further aggravates the general crisis of the capitalist regime, gnaws at and undermines its economic foundations, and makes any lasting social equilibrium impossible. Only fresh defeats, and the passivity of the proletariat that follows from them, can allow the possessing classes to prolong their bloody rule over the material ruins, the economic chaos and the social misery that will follow the present imperialist carnage. The masses, sobered in the fire of a cruel reality that appears ever more clearly in the light of the events now preparing the final phase of the war, will soon set themselves in motion to avoid their total crushing beneath the weight of a capitalist liquidation of the present imperialist conflict. A period of revolutions, of civil wars and of new wars, more or less localized, will inevitably prolong this conflict. The Fourth International will draw its strength from the torrential waters of this coming revolutionary upsurge.
12. The reality of the new revolutionary parties and of the new International will spring from the revolutionary spirit of the masses as they set themselves in motion. The Fourth International, which today lives in the consciousness of a restricted number of revolutionary cadres, will tomorrow be the confluence of all the revolutionary processes that will unfold within the masses. By diverse paths, according to the traditions, the experiences, the economic and political conditions of each country, seeking one another out, regrouping into small or large nuclei, reconstituting themselves as tendencies, as factions or as distinct parties, the workers' movement will make the fundamental ideas of the Fourth International its own and will build its mass organizations.
13. With the aim of hastening the moment of the ideological and organizational regroupment of the proletariat and of accelerating the pace of the revolutionary processes now under way, even now, within the working masses, the Provisional European Secretariat of the Fourth International proposes the convocation, within a few months, of an international conference.
14. This conference will bring together all the revolutionary tendencies, factions or parties that accept, or are evolving toward, the principles of the Third International of Lenin and Trotsky, as well as the fundamental ideas set forth by the original nucleus of the Fourth International in its transitional programme, and who recognize the necessity of new parties and of the new International.
15. The international conference will have as its aim the elaboration of a concrete platform of immediate common action, which will sum up the assessment, the tasks and the perspectives of the present situation, as well as the organizational methods indispensable to the building and strengthening of the parties and of the new International. In the elaboration of this platform, each tendency, faction or party will contribute its own point of view, and no political question raised by the present situation will be regarded as definitively settled in advance and beyond all criticism or revision.
16. The international conference will elect, in proportion to the strength of the ideological tendencies compatible with the general principles of the Fourth International, an enlarged executive committee and a restricted international secretariat expressing the political line of the majority of the conference.
17. The Provisional Secretariat will publish, for the organization of the international conference, a special bulletin that will open its columns to all revolutionary groupings that send the secretariat written confirmation of their decision to take part in the said conference. This bulletin will publish all documents emanating from organized revolutionary groups bearing on the problems relating to the aim of the conference.
18. The Provisional Secretariat considers that only the current political ideas of each tendency, faction or organization likely to take part in the conference should be taken into account, and that, consequently, no past divergence and no earlier decision may be invoked to justify an exclusion, except in cases of incompatibility with proletarian morality and honesty.
The Provisional European Secretariat 19 July 1943
In Quatrième Internationale, nouvelle série n° 1, August 1943