Issuing body: European Conference of the Fourth International (clandestine conference)
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Theses on the situation in the labour movement and the perspectives for the development of the Fourth International
1. Since the last war, the crisis of humanity has been reduced to the crisis of revolutionary leadership.
It is because, within the world proletariat, a resolute vanguard, attached to the masses, rich in the strategic and tactical lessons of past struggles, has failed to select and crystallize itself, that the working class as a whole has found itself disoriented and powerless at decisive moments. As a result, the middle classes, incapable of an autonomous policy, forever oscillating between proletariat and bourgeoisie, have each time lined up behind the latter and prolonged its domination.
2. At the end of the 1914-1918 war, the capitalist regime went through a crisis that could have been fatal to it. It was only thanks to the open betrayal of social democracy and the political incapacity of the leaderships of the young Communist parties of the Third International that the bourgeoisie was able to maintain itself, regain confidence in itself, and then pass over to the offensive.
Between 1918 and 1923, the situation became, more than once, and in several capitalist countries, objectively revolutionary: the bourgeoisie was losing confidence in its own forces and control over the masses, at the same time, animated as they were by an irresistible drive to change the social order. Only the lack of maturity of a revolutionary leadership in countries other than Russia is the cause of the first great defeats that followed the war (Germany, Hungary, Finland, etc.), and which consequently permitted the subsequent relative stabilization of capitalism.
The formation of a Bolshevik revolutionary leadership in Russia, capable of leading the proletariat to victory, was due to the particular conditions of pre-1914 Russia (the absence of a broad labour aristocracy, revolutionary traditions among significant layers, even of the petty bourgeoisie, which lined up behind the proletariat, experience of revolutionary methods of struggle and organization); the creation of a revolutionary leadership in the other European countries would only be facilitated by the circumstances created by the war (the destruction of the social base of social democracy, the levelling of the working class, the massive pauperization of the petty bourgeoisie).
But the assimilation of the revolutionary lessons of Bolshevism (above all concerning the role of the party, the linking of democratic and transitional slogans with insurrectionary slogans) did not occur automatically: the leadership of the young Communist parties consequently found itself lagging behind the objective revolutionary conditions, and thus permitted, through a series of defeats of the working class, the relative strengthening of the bourgeoisie.
3. As a result of the defeats suffered between 1918 and 1923, capitalism entered a period of relative stabilization which would in turn accelerate, through the isolation of the USSR, the degeneration of the new revolutionary leadership embodied in the Third International. From 1923 until the Second World War of 1939, the leadership of the Third International was the principal organizer of the defeats suffered by the revolutionary movement and the principal cause of its retreat and disorientation. Exploiting the tradition of the October Revolution and the prestige of the USSR among the masses, the Soviet bureaucracy has succeeded up to now, through its enormous weight, in preventing the crystallization of a new revolutionary vanguard genuinely linked to the masses.
4. The mechanical strength of the bureaucratic apparatuses of the social-democratic and Stalinist parties has proved, up to now, stronger than the revolutionary will of the masses, thanks above all to the uneven development of the revolutionary crisis after 1923 in the capitalist countries, to its localization and its fragmentation.
Before the proletariat could redo its own experience of the bureaucratic apparatuses, rid itself of its illusions and its national blinkers, renew its forces and regain confidence in itself, a certain lapse of time was absolutely necessary: in an internationally objectively revolutionary situation such as that of 1918-1923, this lapse of time could be reduced to a minimum thanks to the Bolshevik victory in the USSR and to the still powerful revolutionary counterweight within the apparatus of the Third International.
By contrast, in a period when, after a series of major defeats, the fragmentation of the revolutionary crisis becomes ever more pronounced, the maturing of revolutionary consciousness follows a far more complex and contradictory process. Between 1923 and 1929, despite the upsurge of the English proletariat in 1926 and the Chinese revolution of 1925-1927, the revolutionary wave that arose from the 1914-1918 war could no longer overcome the bureaucratic apparatuses, strengthened as they were by these very defeats, and the retreat of the labour movement became ever more pronounced.
The economic crisis of 1929-1933 again created a general revolutionary situation in which the rectification of the labour movement became possible. But the defeat of the German proletariat in 1933 once again broke the upward curve of the labour movement: since then, despite the French June of 1936 and the Spanish revolution of 1936-1938, which marked the high point of workers' struggles in Europe after 1923, the general line has been one of retreat.
5. Today, as a result of the second imperialist war, there is once again talk of an entire revolutionary epoch. Infinitely more than any crisis of the past, the present ordeal of the second planetary imperialist war, by its scale, its depth, its consequences, opens the period of a gigantic social crisis in which revolutionary thought, ordinarily obliged to develop through a slow molecular labour of consciousness, will make genuine leaps forward and will once again prove the sceptics and pessimists wrong.
In the final analysis, historical laws will inevitably prove stronger than all the mechanical and bureaucratic forces that obstruct the conscious revolutionary process. A historically correct body of thought, painstakingly elaborated over long years, that of the Russian and German revolutionary Marxists, became between 1917 and 1923 the unique expression of the vital needs, aspirations and goals of millions of workers across the entire surface of the globe.
Tomorrow, under objective conditions more favourable than ever, the ideas of the Fourth International, which sum up the entire revolutionary experience of the last twenty years, will ineluctably become the sole ideological guide of the masses in their struggle for socialism.
Reformists, Stalinists, centrists
6. The reformist degeneration of the Second International before the war of 1914-1918 was the product of the organic development of capitalism at that time, which permitted, above all through the exploitation of the colonies, the raising of the standard of living of the European and American proletariat, and justified to a certain extent, before the masses, the optimism of the parliamentary and trade-union bureaucracy regarding the economic capacities of capitalism.
7. The imperialist war, coming shortly after the last economic boom of capitalism (1909-1913), cruelly dissipated the reformist illusions and opened the way to the rebirth of the revolutionary movement, which crystallized after the end of the conflict in the formation and development of the [Third] International.
Thanks to the revolutionary action of the latter between 1919 and 1923, and within the framework of the general crisis of capitalism, which eliminated in part the economic and social base of reformism, the opportunist bureaucracy of the Second International and the Amsterdam International lost a large part of their prestige among the masses and felt obliged to appeal openly for the protection of the bourgeoisie against revolutionary action, and even revolutionary criticism.
8. The relative consolidation of reformism in the period after 1923 was made possible not so much by the restoration of an important capitalist equilibrium, as by the profound disappointment, discouragement and mistrust caused among the masses by the failure of the Third International, consequent on the bureaucratic degeneration of the Soviet state.
9. However, the evolution of capitalism, between the first and second imperialist wars, rendered the existence of reformism increasingly precarious. In the fascist countries, the bourgeoisie resolutely dispensed with the luxury of the reformist bureaucracy, which could no longer justify its existence before the proletarian masses except through the demand for impossible and illusory reforms. In the democratic countries, by contrast, favoured by their earlier imperialist accumulation and by the imperialist division of the globe to their advantage, which allowed them, through the exploitation of their colonial domain, to pay certain costs in exchange for the preservation of "social peace," the reformist bureaucracy continued to play its role in the service of the democratic imperialist bourgeoisie.
10. With the declaration of the new imperialist war, reformism, reduced since the advent of fascism to the "democratic" countries, placed itself automatically and without the least hesitation, without the least internal friction, on the ground of the unconditional defence of the "democratic fatherland," against the rival fascist imperialist camp. And this time all the more so, since reformism found, in the person of the Stalinist bureaucracy of the Third International, a new partner, and a champion at least as fervent as itself of the policy of the sacred union.
However, this war will leave no appreciable economic and social base on which the reformist bureaucracy can once again consolidate itself. The old reformist organizations will no doubt attempt, in Europe, financed and protected by the native bourgeoisies and above all by American imperialism, to save capitalism once again, threatened as it is by the gigantic revolutionary wave that the liquidation of the war will raise; they will nonetheless fail inevitably in the face of capitalism's absolute incapacity to grant the slightest appeasing reform, and in the face of the irresistible surge of the masses.
11. The opportunism of the Soviet bureaucracy resembles that of the reformist bureaucracy in that these two parasitic workers' bureaucracies have both resolved their "social problem" thanks to the development of the productive forces, respectively in the capitalist countries and in the USSR, at the expense of the great proletarian mass.
But whereas the economic base of the reformist bureaucracy in the capitalist countries becomes ever more restricted, the material means placed at the disposal of the Soviet bureaucracy, thanks to its uncontrolled administration of the USSR's planned economic system, are virtually unlimited, and have enabled it to acquire a mechanical strength that far surpasses that which reformism knew in its best period.
The policy of the Soviet bureaucracy is consequently absolutely determined by its social conditions, namely the constant concern to maintain itself as a parasitic and plundering caste at the expense of the total and definitive emancipation of the proletarian masses in the USSR and in the capitalist countries.
12. The Stalinist bureaucracy, which early on seized the apparatus of the former Comintern, developed and consolidated itself in the capitalist countries, on the one hand thanks to subsidies from the Kremlin, and on the other hand, in certain of them ("democracies"), thanks to the same sources as the reformist bureaucracy: the superprofits of imperialism.
The development of the Communist parties, in the years immediately before the war, took place through their continuous infiltration into the petty-bourgeois strata and into the state apparatus (parliament, municipalities) and the trade unions. The inevitable consequence of this evolution was the strengthening of their dependence on national imperialism, at the expense, to a certain extent, of their traditional dependence on the Soviet bureaucracy.
Such was the case of the American CP, whose leader Browder, a loyal electoral supporter of Roosevelt, declared that, in a war between the USA and the USSR, he would defend his own country. Such is the case of the French CP, part of whose leadership went over to Hitler (Gitton), while the other part tied itself closely to Algiers, to the Franco-British bourgeoisie.
13. But in general the Communist parties, especially after the advent of Hitlerite fascism and the threatening prospect of the new imperialist war, became an appendage of the Soviet bureaucracy, in its game of foreign policy, through which it sought to secure the diplomatic aid of this or that imperialist bourgeoisie. They thus lost all political autonomy and, through their total bureaucratization, all capacity for progressive reaction. Mere instruments in the hands of the Soviet bureaucracy, they agreed to accommodate themselves, in the metropoles and the colonies, to the policy of whatever national imperialism was allied with the USSR.
14. In this state of affairs, the existence of the Comintern became a superfluous luxury, if not an inconvenient obstacle, to the normalization of relations between the USSR and imperialism.
The war accelerated the nationalist transformation of the Communist parties and finally tore them away from any internationalist axis.
The Comintern, politically dead for a long time already, was even formally dissolved at the moment when the interests of the foreign policy of the Soviet bureaucracy, as determined by the evolution of the war, demanded it.
15. Since this date, which put an end to Lenin's former International, the incorporation of the Communist parties into the normal political game of the national bourgeoisies achieves new and rapid successes every day. At the moment when the imperialist war is entering its final phase of liquidation, which will inevitably be accompanied by a gigantic revolutionary crisis of the capitalist regime, the Communist parties are submitting entirely to the tutelage of bourgeois policy, and are ready to take part even in the exercise of its power (Algiers, Yugoslavia, Italy), or are dissolving themselves in order to merge into the governmental parties (America).
This fact closes the cycle of the evolution of the Stalinist Bonapartist bureaucracy which, before its coming downfall, is obliged, by the necessities it has itself created — the war and the consequences that will flow from it — to adjust its policy definitively to that of victorious imperialism, and to restrict its independence to a minimum. New significant oscillations to the left by Stalinism are possible only in the case, unlikely today, of an open and concentrated attack on the USSR by the whole of imperialism.
16. Under the pressure of the necessities of the Stalinist bureaucracy, as they will result from this final phase of the imperialist conflict and its liquidation — namely, to end the war victoriously in the shortest possible time, to conclude a peace as advantageous as possible for the USSR, and to maintain it as long as possible in order to permit the reconstruction of the Soviet economy — the Stalinist parties will move by leaps and bounds towards ever closer collusion with the democratic bourgeoisie of the European countries, and above all with those layers of it that will be most disposed, for their own interests, to support in some way the diplomatic aims of the Soviet bureaucracy.
A new significant leftward orientation is thus absolutely excluded from the possible oscillations of Stalinism. On the contrary, a new period of Popular Front policy, carried to extremes and combined with the most odious repression, in the manner of Spain, of the genuine revolutionary forces, is the only path along which the Stalinist bureaucracy will move before its overthrow.
17. Between the two wars, a certain number of currents broke away, on confused bases, from the Second and Third Internationals. The London Bureau first, then the International Workers' Front, brought together the most important of them, without ever, however, being anything other than fraternal associations of disparate parties: the cooperation of these organizations rested not on the basis of a common programme, but on an opportunist rapprochement between different heterogeneous tendencies, coming from every corner of centrism, which continued to play with every colour of the opportunist rainbow and to evolve each in its own direction.
If a certain number of elements from these organizations joined the ranks of the Fourth International individually, the organizations as such, for want of a solid theoretical basis and a favourable social composition, proved incapable of evolving as far as genuine Marxism-Leninism.
The war proved fatal to most of these organizations. Some had to disappear as a result of their political heterogeneity and their social-democratic methods of work, as was the case with the French PSOP. Others betrayed, such as the POUM, whose leadership defends conceptions of national union, and also M. Pivert, whose good offices were not accepted by General de Gaulle, to whom he had offered them.
The Fourth International
The formation of the Fourth International
18. The Fourth International emerged from the movement of the International Left Opposition, in which the proletarian wing of the Third International crystallized after the death of Lenin. Between 1923 and 1933, for a full ten years, the movement of the Left Opposition expressed in its platform the application and development of Marxist-Leninist doctrine, under the new historical conditions of the post-war imperialist epoch, of the rapid decline of capitalism, of fascism, and of the degeneration and progressive bureaucratization of the USSR and the Communist International.
19. Born first within the Russian Bolshevik Party as the political tendency opposed to the bureaucratic opportunism of the Stalinist faction, it became, after 1927, the year in which the crisis of the Bolshevik Party broke out, an international ideological current which was historically the unique expression of the consistent revolutionary Marxist movement in this period.
20. Its numerical stagnation, its defeats, its political isolation, were in the final analysis only the reflection of the stagnation, the defeats and the failures of the proletarian movement as a whole. The victories that the Stalinist bureaucracy in particular won against it were obtained only through the abusive use of the mechanical strength of the bureaucratic apparatus, advantageously camouflaged behind the revolutionary prestige of the USSR before the masses; and thanks also to their lack of experience, to their moral and ideological weakening consequent on the long series of defeats they suffered, of which the great organizer was precisely the Stalinist bureaucracy.
21. Until the advent of German fascism to power, the International Left Opposition fought for the rectification of the Communist International on the basis of the policy expressed in its first four congresses. This attitude was justified in part by the attachment of the great proletarian masses to the official Communist parties, by their insufficient experience of the nature of Stalinist bureaucratic centrism, as well as by the fact that the latter remained sensitive, to a certain extent, to the pressure of the working class in the USSR and in the capitalist world, and capable at moments of reacting in the indicated direction — although naturally in a manner far less consistent and altered by its bureaucratic nature — to the programme of the Left Opposition.
But "the ignoble capitulation of the Comintern in Germany, tacitly accepted by all its sections, openly posed the question of the necessity of building the Fourth International" (Trotsky). The Comintern had shown itself politically dead, in the most decisive historical test of the post-war period, and the only possible way out for the revolutionary movement, if it did not wish to accept political suicide, was to engage resolutely on the road of reconstructing the international organization of the working class.
22. The movement for the Fourth International, begun in 1934, was the necessary continuation of the International Left Opposition, under the new conditions of the worsening capitalist crisis, the feverish preparation for the new world war, and the definitive decomposition of the Third International.
23. In 1938, faced with the prospect of the rapid approach of the war, and on the basis of a solid ideological and political programme as well as a limited but by no means negligible number of cadres formed in almost every capitalist country, the Fourth International held its first founding congress. The proclamation of the Fourth International was an imperious necessity, dictated, on the one hand, by the absence, on the international scale, of any revolutionary organization, and, on the other hand, by the imminent outbreak of the imperialist war, in which it was necessary to provide the masses with a correct political line as well as a pole of attraction that would facilitate the ideological and organizational regroupment of the revolutionary forces that the war would inevitably release.
The Fourth International remains the expression of the revolutionary process of our epoch, which admits of no interruption, linking its future to the fate of the labour movement during the present imperialist war and to the gigantic revolutionary crisis which, at its close, will decide the fate of humanity for an entire epoch. The constitution of the Fourth International in 1938 did not in any way signify that its parties henceforth considered themselves as the definitive parties of the working class. Thus the International that same year invited its French section to enter the centrist party, the PSOP. But the International wished to demonstrate thereby that mere doctrinal assertion is powerless to make Marxist-Leninist doctrine penetrate among the masses in motion, and among their vanguard as well, and that it is by participating in the struggles and movements of the masses, striving to have an effect on them as a party, that Bolshevik-Leninist militants can play their role as promoters of genuine mass parties. This is why the document that emerged from the International Conference of 1938 was precisely the Transitional Programme, which opened to the militants of the Fourth International the road to direct intervention in the mass movement. Today the systematic application of this programme and its adaptation to present struggles is the touchstone that will distinguish sectarian parrots from genuine Bolshevik-Leninists.
Weaknesses and errors
24. At the outbreak of the imperialist conflict, as was moreover to be expected, the masses, taken by surprise, disoriented, betrayed by the reformist and Stalinist parties, submitted to the pressure of the governmental apparatus and the chauvinist atmosphere of the sacred union. The weak sections of the Fourth International inevitably found themselves isolated and fought under particularly difficult conditions, without always being able to overcome the enemy's ideological influence within their own ranks.
25. One cannot, indeed, ignore the organic weaknesses inherent in the formation and historical development of the movement from which the Fourth International ultimately emerged, nor pass over in silence the political errors committed in the course of this war. Created in a general period of retreat for the labour movement and fragmentation of the revolutionary struggle, the Fourth International was inevitably handicapped in its immediate development.
Under the banner of the International Left Opposition there took refuge, at various times, not only the sincere revolutionary Marxist elements who opposed the opportunist policy of the Stalinist bureaucracy, but also petty-bourgeois anti-Stalinists, dilettante intellectuals and other disparate elements episodically attached to the revolutionary cause. The lack of constant, controlled active work among the masses, as well as of sound organizational methods that would harmoniously complement critical work, favoured this heterogeneous coexistence, and, in certain countries and at certain moments, deeply imbued the Opposition movement with a character of petty-bourgeois dilettantism and verbalism, whether opportunist or sectarian.
26. The frequent crises, the intellectualism, the factionalism, which have often marked the development of this movement, are in part the consequence of this defective social and political composition, which for a long time prevented the advantageous exploitation of the real objective possibilities offered to the political and organizational development, first of the Left Opposition, and then of the Fourth International. Always looking at the purely political side of its critical work with regard to Stalinism and the other opportunist and centrist tendencies in the labour movement, our movement has often lost sight of the problems relating to our own organization, to its social composition, to its constant practical work, controlled among the masses, to the recruitment, selection and education of members, and to precise methods of organization and functioning.
27. Opportunist or sectarian tendencies thus infiltrated our own ranks, and manifested themselves on various occasions, even on the purely political plane, through deviations and errors expressing petty-bourgeois influence.
28. The permanent crisis of leadership of our movement throughout this period, manifested by the incapacity to form a relatively stable, homogeneous leading team, endowed with a personality of its own other than that of L. Trotsky, was at once the result and, to a certain extent, another cause of the general powerlessness of our tendency.
The particular conditions of L. Trotsky's existence, which kept him outside the real life of our sections, prevented, on the other hand, a collective, mutually controlled and effective work of leadership, capable of giving a more political than administrative solution to the questions repeatedly posed by the crisis of the Opposition's forces in the various countries.
29. It was especially during the present war that the movement of the Fourth International underwent its most difficult and decisive test. On the basis of internationalist principles, it was necessary to defend itself, on the one hand, against the danger of contagion from the nationalist and patriotic epidemic that, at the outset, seized hold of the masses, and, on the other hand, against the terror of the bourgeoisie.
Under the pressure of the conditions created after the defeat of French imperialism in France and elsewhere, a certain wavering could be observed in the internationalist conduct of certain sections, in the first place the French section, which often expressed, through its day-to-day policy, the nationalist influence of the petty-bourgeois masses, exasperated by the defeat of their imperialist masters.
The position taken by the French section on the national question, and the theses issued in the name of the European Secretariat of the Fourth International, controlled at that time exclusively by French comrades, represent a social-patriotic deviation which must once and for all be openly condemned and rejected as incompatible with the programme and the general ideology of the Fourth International.
Instead of distinguishing between the nationalism of the defeated bourgeoisie, which remains an expression of its imperialist preoccupations, and the "nationalism" of the masses, which is nothing but a reactionary expression of their resistance against the exploitation of the occupying imperialism, the leadership of the POI regarded as progressive the struggle of its own bourgeoisie, did not distance itself from the outset from Gaullism, and contented itself with giving it a more "revolutionary" terminological form. By placing the French bourgeoisie, imperialist and defeated, on the same footing as the bourgeoisie of the colonial countries, the leadership of the POI acquired a completely mistaken conception of the national question and spread dangerous illusions as to the character of the nationalist organizations, which, far from being able to constitute hypothetical "allies" for the revolutionary proletariat, will reveal themselves as the counter-revolutionary vanguard of imperialism.
Likewise, starting from the entirely correct point of view of the necessity for the revolutionary party to mingle with the struggle of the masses and to wrest broad layers of the working class from the harmful influence of nationalism, the leadership of the POI allowed itself to be drawn into dangerous ideological and tactical concessions, and failed to understand that the first condition for winning the masses lay in the limpid, revolutionary language of the internationalist class struggle, as opposed to the confused and treacherous language of social-patriotism.
It must be added, however, that if this condemnation of a right-centrist deviation is called for, the Fourth International must equally condemn with the utmost energy the sectarian "left" deviation, such as it manifested itself, for example, through the policy of the CCI in France on the national question, which, under the pretext of keeping intact the internationalist heritage of Marxism-Leninism, obstinately refused to distinguish the nationalism of the bourgeoisie from the movement of resistance of the masses.
By condemning the struggle of the proletarian and petty-bourgeois masses for their everyday interests as "reactionary and nationalist," simply because this struggle is directed against the occupying imperialism and under the cover of petty-bourgeois slogans, sectarianism precisely paralyses revolutionary efforts to combat nationalist ideology, and automatically cuts itself off from the real struggle of the broad masses. However, the social-patriotic deviation was, from the outset, energetically countered by the healthy resistance of the revolutionary base of the French section, as well as by the rest of the international organization.
The perspectives of the Fourth International
30. The Fourth International alone openly conducts its Bolshevik self-criticism, and it alone inflexibly defends the historical interests of the proletariat and of socialism; it thereby acquires, in the struggle, in which it has up to now sacrificed a considerable number of its best and most valiant militants, the most striking historical justification for the timeliness of its proclamation and for the necessity of its existence. Around it, the reformist, Stalinist and centrist organizations rot in the stagnant waters of the marshes of the sacred union, of extreme chauvinism, of confusion and of complete theoretical and political incomprehension. The revolutionary influx, which is beginning to gush forth from all the fissures and breaches that the war is provoking ever more abundantly throughout the whole structure of the capitalist edifice, will ultimately and inevitably pass outside the framework of the old organizations.
31. The Fourth International, which today lives in the consciousness and practice of a small number of vanguard militants, will tomorrow be the confluence of all the revolutionary processes that will take place among the masses, and which, by diverse paths, according to their origin, the experience acquired, and the moment, will in the end make the ideas and programme of the Fourth International their own. Its real forces, which are already scattered, above all among the untouched masses, and which are seeking one another, regrouping into small or large nuclei, into tendencies, factions, organizations or parties, mingled with the forces of our present sections where these exist, without them where they do not, will crystallize tomorrow around its banner. The formation of tomorrow's revolutionary parties will indeed be the outcome of a more or less long series of successive regroupments of the present forces of the Fourth International with the new forces that will spring from the revolutionary movement of the masses.
While it is not excluded that the old reformist, Stalinist and centrist organizations will experience, for a short period, a more or less significant passing development, one cannot conceive, however, that the revolutionary surge of the masses could confine itself for long within the opportunism and bureaucratism proper to these organizations, and within the treacherous policy that they will continue to apply in order to spare capitalism its revolutionary overthrow.
32. The new parties of the Fourth International will recruit their strongest contingent from among the young revolutionary forces that will spring from new sources outside the old organizations. New elements, isolated or grouped, will evolve, under the pressure of the revolutionary conditions that the liquidation of the war will create, and, in the absence of any other pole of attraction, towards the programmatic positions of the Fourth International. This evolution will no doubt be marked at first by gropings, hesitations, and a greater or lesser ideological confusion among these new centrist tendencies breaking away from the mass movement.
33. The Fourth International, while maintaining the firmest ideological attitude towards these centrist currents, must appreciate their progressive character and strive by every means to facilitate their definitive passage into its ranks. It must in particular avoid taking a professorial, sectarian and dogmatic attitude towards these currents, and show, through its practical work, through its serious and sincere self-criticism, through its healthy internal regime, that it possesses all the political guarantees of a proletarian tendency called by history to play the role of a centre of assimilation for all progressive revolutionary currents.
To accomplish this task, the Fourth International is obliged, from now on, to complete its ideological and organizational preparation and to give serious attention in particular to everything concerning the social composition of its sections, recruitment, the education of members, and the methods of internal and external organization and functioning.
34. It must ruthlessly root out from its ranks the dilettante and verbalist elements who, through their petty-bourgeois mentality and practice, alter the revolutionary character of the organization and compromise its political prestige among the masses.
The tasks of the new stage
35. Having remained up to now the vanguard of the vanguard, the Fourth International has concerned itself chiefly with the problems of the general policy of the revolutionary movement, and particularly with the problems that mark it off as a tendency distinct from the other workers' currents. But the hour that is coming, with the liquidation of the present conflict, will be the hour of the transformation of the Fourth International into a mass organization.
This transformation implies, from now on, the transfer of our policy onto the concrete plane on which, starting from our general programme, we must attract, educate and organize the revolutionary masses in each country.
36. In the limited span of time that remains to us before the outbreak and full development of the gigantic revolutionary crisis that will spring from the present imperialist conflict, the Fourth International must accomplish a genuine internal revolution with regard to its conceptions concerning political work among the masses and the organization of the party.
This implies, in the first place, that a new conception of their activity must permeate all the militants of the Fourth International, and a boundless faith must animate them and convince them of the immense possibilities of work opening up before them, possibilities that will transform from top to bottom the physiognomy, the rhythm and the tasks of the present sections. The task of creating, from now on, the psychological climate and the mentality appropriate to the character of the revolutionary epoch that is opening is of primary importance.
37. The coming period will be marked by the tumultuous irruption of the masses into the political arena, by the rebirth of every class organization, by the use of the most diverse forms of struggle, from the strike to armed insurrection. All the labouring strata will enter into a cycle of feverish activity and struggle. The militants of the Fourth International, necessarily accustomed up to now to simple work of ideological preparation and limited agitation, will be called on tomorrow to carry out the most diverse tasks: agitators, tireless, ingenious, bold and persevering leaders and organizers of masses in revolt.
They will, moreover, only be capable of attaching themselves solidly to the various labouring strata by having, from now on, studied in each country all the particular questions posed by the specific situation of each stratum, tracing for each of them a clear political line and working practically in the direction of a genuine mass party. The trade-union, agrarian and colonial questions, and those of the national minorities and of the urban petty bourgeoisie, must, in each country, be studied concretely and linked ingeniously to the central problem of the struggle for workers' power and the socialist revolution.
38. The principal attention, however, must be directed towards winning over the proletarian masses, who still hold in their hands the main levers of industrial production and economic life. Each organization of the Fourth International can have no other measure of its real progress than the infiltration and the gains achieved in working-class circles. To achieve this fundamental goal, which alone will raise the sections of the Fourth International to the rank of proletarian organizations, which will radically alter their present defective social composition, and which will subsequently make it possible to influence the other labouring strata of town and country, each organization of the Fourth International must, from now on, elaborate a concrete, adequate plan and direct, passionately and with perseverance, the entire daily activity of its militants towards the factories.
It is only in this direction that the social composition of the sections of the Fourth International will be transformed from top to bottom, and that it will become possible to build organizations genuinely linked with the best part of the working class and composed of an absolute majority of genuinely proletarian members.
39. Not only politically but organizationally as well, the sections of the Fourth International must, from now on, commit themselves to mass work and the resolute abandonment of every sectarian tendency, of every conservatism, and of every attachment due to the force of inertia and to old habits more or less rooted in a definitively bygone past.
40. Tomorrow's party, built on the ideological foundation of the Fourth International, with its present cadres and those who will emerge from the revolutionary movements of the masses, must be a party of proletarian composition, of Marxist education, of illegal structure, and of internal functioning based on sound principles of democratic centralism.
The party will recruit its forces above all, and in an absolute majority, from among the advanced layers of the proletariat. Under no circumstances should the percentage of non-proletarian members exceed a limit fixed once and for all. Those who acquire the title of party member must obligatorily pass, beforehand, through a sufficient period of ideological and practical preparation and moral vetting. A precise programme of general Marxist education and concrete political education must be established by each organization for its candidate members.
The youth organization must be distinct from the party while collaborating closely with the latter. The party must remain a vanguard organization of the working class, an elite capable, as a whole, of leading the working class towards its historic goals. It is indeed a thousand times preferable to be content with a party organization limited in the number of its members, but all of whom will in general be capable of jointly elaborating the party's policy, than to build a numerically far stronger organization, but at the expense of the ideological and political level of its members.
The party, despite its restricted numerical strength, can exert its influence on the working class through the multiple organizational forms taken by its sympathizers (trade-union, artistic, intellectual, Red Aid, etc.).
41. The party, the true general staff of the working class in the hard battles that are approaching, and in which the bourgeoisie will employ every means of cunning, repression and terror to overcome the revolt of the masses, must be built on an illegal basis, even where, apparently and episodically, the situation permits the greatest legal activity. In certain countries, the pre-war democratic climate created, even within our own ranks, a mentality of negligence and laxity proper to reformist organizations. In the terror that accompanies the war today, we have more than once had to pay a heavy price for this harmful mentality. Each section of the Fourth International must constantly review and improve its illegal organization, and ruthlessly weed out from its ranks the dilettante elements, insensitive and indifferent to this fundamental aspect of the revolutionary character of our organizations.
42. The party must, as a whole, be capable of periodically assuming the tasks of leadership and execution. No specialization within it should tend towards the formation of a team of leaders, constituting its central committee, practically unremovable for want of other capable cadres, and of a more or less amorphous and passive mass of members.
The tendency must, on the contrary, be to bring the totality of party members into executive posts, and to maintain the general ideological and political level of the party as high as possible, by recruiting and educating its members with particular care.
43. Reacting against the decentralization and abusive indiscipline of the pre-war social-democratic parties, the Third International placed the emphasis on centralism and firm discipline, which must characterize the internal regime of revolutionary parties. However, the distortion of Leninist doctrine by the epigones, who bureaucratized the proletarian organizations and erected into a principle the uncontrolled leadership of the labour movement from above, obliges the Fourth International to resume the struggle for an internal regime in conformity with proletarian democracy. This implies "the supremacy of the mass over its delegates," and that the necessarily centralized leadership should nevertheless be exercised through the will and active participation of all in the common political elaboration.
The guarantees of victory
44. Only an alert intelligence and an unshakeable faith in the immense revolutionary possibilities that the liquidation of the war will create, as well as in the ideological power of the programme of the Fourth International, will be able to overcome the forces of resistance, inertia and conservatism — the necessary heritage of a bygone epoch — which will still hamper our action and prevent us from resolutely breaking out of our stagnation towards the mass movement.
Twenty years of struggle by the Bolshevik-Leninists must tomorrow result in placing the Fourth International at the head of the gigantic revolutionary upsurge of the masses. But this process will nonetheless not be automatic. It will remain entirely determined, right up to the last moment, by our conscious and untiring effort to be, each time, equal to events and to new tasks.
It is only at this price that the Fourth International, strong in its programme, which sums up the entire experience of the revolutionary movement, and strong in its methods of organization and work, can look to the future with entire confidence. Placed at the head of the proletarian masses at a moment when the rhythm of history will not cease to accelerate, it will strive this time with all its strength to make the proletariat assimilate the historical experience of events and to lead it inflexibly towards revolution and socialism.
In Quatrième Internationale, nos. 6-7, April-May 1944