DATE: 2 April 1948 ISSUING BODY: Second World Congress of the Fourth International
TO THOSE WHO WERE NOT THERE
Those who built our movement in the most difficult years; those who valiantly advanced "against the stream," standing up to the most formidable reactionary pressure humanity has ever known:
Marcel Hic and A. Léon, who, in the midst of the Nazi occupation, rebuilt the European Secretariat and laid the foundations for the consolidation of our world organization;
Léon Lesoil, who for two decades was the most faithful companion of Leon Trotsky in the struggle to build Bolshevik parties in Europe, and particularly in his own country, Belgium;
P. Pouliopoulos, who for a quarter of a century was the most powerful revolutionary thinker and militant of the indomitable Greek proletariat, educator of an entire generation of first-rank Marxists;
Chen Chi-Chang, leader of the Chinese Trotskyist movement, whose life is a faithful reflection of the unending martyrdom of the colonial proletariat;
Ta Thu Thau, who built the first organization of the Fourth International in the Far East, whose heroic life and boundless devotion have already entered into the legend of the Vietnamese proletariat;
P. Tresso (Blasco) and Nicola di Bartolomeo (Fosco), who, in the hour of the worst defeats, joined the ranks of the Trotskyist movement and thereby prepared the premises for a new revolutionary upsurge of the Italian proletariat;
Walter Held, who represented the best traditions of the German vanguard, unconquered despite the collapse of 1933;
V. Widelin, whose internationalist work among the soldiers of the Wehrmacht in the occupied countries remains one of the greatest feats of the Fourth International during the Second Imperialist War;
E.S. Jackson, one of the pioneers of Trotskyism in England;
Henk Sneevliet and his comrades who, despite the political errors that had temporarily estranged them from the Fourth International, did their duty as internationalist revolutionaries to the end in occupied Holland;
The hundreds of German, Austrian, Polish, French, Belgian, Vietnamese, Chinese, Greek, Bulgarian and Soviet militants who, known or unknown, demonstrated in action their unshakeable attachment to the program of the Fourth International; all those who, murdered by the Gestapo, the Japanese imperialist police, the GPU, or Stalinist terror; dead in the camps, on the islands and in the penal colonies, fell beneath the bullets of the executioners or beneath the weight of exhaustion;
And, first and foremost, the greatest of them all, Leon Trotsky, without whom this world congress would not have taken place.
The delegates who have come from all over the world to this assembly, the most representative of the revolutionary movement, gather in moved reflection before their sacrifice and, as proletarian militants, commemorate their imperishable memory by devoting all their efforts to the achievement of the goal for which they all fought: the world communist revolution!