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p The "Fourth International" was set up with the greatest of ease and no effort whatsoever by Trotskyites who, in the main, did not represent anyone except themselves. It came about on a September day in 1938, when a score or so of people met in a small smoke-filled room in a Paris suburb. The meeting appeared to be no more than a reunion of people of various beliefs who had decided to get together for a chat over a cup of coffee. When they dispersed, they announced they had set up an "international.”

p Curiously enough the “founders” of the "Fourth International" were rather secretive about their affairs; after the conference they issued a communique saying they had met in Lausanne, Switzerland, instead of in Paris.

p Other details concerning the birth of the “International” were also kept secret. Up to now, there has never been any public statement about the total number of Trotskyites in the “International”. In bequeathing his archives to Harvard University, Trotsky stipulated that the secret material of the "Fourth International" 7 was not to be published until 1980, and that " historians must not have access to it. The ideological mastermind of the "Fourth International" was apparently anxious to make certain that, along with other information, the number of his followers in 1938 was not disclosed.

p There were no more than a handful, that much is clear. Besides, most Trotskyite groups broke up as soon as they were formed and those that managed to keep together a little longer were torn by strife and quarrels, and kept breaking up into smaller groups. You could count the members of such “mini-organizations” on the fingers of your hand.

p Who were these men who formulated the political platform of international Trotskyism? This is no idle question. After all, present-day Trotskyites sing the praises of the founders of the "Fourth International" and regard the "theoretical propositions" formulated at the time as their long-term programme of action.

p In the 1930s Trotskyites were mainly men and women expelled from, the ranks of the Communist parties for their subversive activity. What they hated most was the Soviet Union and the Communists. They were so blinded by hatred that they were incapable of rational thinking or taking objective stock of world developments.

p A little history will explain why they were so embittered.

p Let us first go back to the 1920s. Soviet Russia had just emerged victorious from its lifeand-death struggle against external and domestic counter-revolution. Weakened but undaunted, it put away the gun and took up the spade 8 and the pick to build a new world from the ruins.

p The Communist Party adopted the course of socialist construction, guided by Lenin’s precept that Soviet Russia had all that was necessary to build a socialist society. This line was opposed by Trotsky and his handful of adherents, who at the time emerged in the Communist Party of Soviet Russia and in the Communist parties of several other countries. The Trotskyites accused the parties of "breaking with Marxism," of being "nationally limited," and "politically blind/’ Trotsky insisted that socialism could not be built within the framework of one nation. In a postscript to the Peace Programme in 1922 he wrote: "An upswing of the socialist economy in Russia will become possible only after the proletariat triumphs in the major countries of Europe.”

p Trotsky’s line would have imperilled Soviet Russia’s revolutionary gains. According to his logic, the country had to wait for a revolution in other countries and to do nothing until then to strengthen the socialist elements in its socio- economic life. Trotsky ignored the fact that this would inevitably have led to a revival of various capitalist elements and the remnants of the exploiting classes, who were bound to try to consolidate their positions. This could have given rise to the restoration of capitalism, which would have thrown the entire world revolutionary movement back many years.

p Indeed, that what would have been the case had the Soviet people and the Communists of the world accepted the “recommendations” of Trotsky and his adherents. History is the best judge, 9 and it has proved that the Communist Party’s Leninist policy w.as the correct one. The experience of sociialist construction in the Soviet Union has become a valuable gain for the international Communist movement. Indeed, would it have been possible to rid mankind of fascist enslavement, had it not been for the politically monolithic Soviet Union with its mighty and highly developed socialist economy?

p Such advances as the transformation of the Communiis’t movement into the most influential force of day, the formation of the world socialist system, the spread of the national liberation movement and the ever-growing attraction of the ideas of scientific socialism on a world-wide scale, all began in the 1920s, when the Soviet people undertook their peaceful offensive to scale the heights of socialism.

p Trotsky, who loved to pose as an oracle and a prophet, proved incapable of understanding the tendencies of world social development. Today, looking back on that period from the standpoint of the 1970s, one comes to realize the obvious fact that the Communists were very wise and politically astute to expel the Tro’tskyite whiners and capitulationists.

p Would anyone dare to censure a group of mountaineers who had just started ascending a steep slope if they decided to leave behind the misfits who, on the quiet, had been acting as trouble-makers and creating dangerous situations so as to prevent the others from going ahead ?

p And that is precisely what Trotsky and his associates tried to do, using every means to prevent the Soviet people from advancing along the socialist path. They began by trying to stalemate 10 the efforts of the Party and the Soviet people by starting all sorts of discussions and setting up factions and groupings, and followed it up with open anti-revolutionary and anti-Party action. They engineered anti-Soviet demonstrations, printed slanderous leaflets and appeals in underground printing shops, and set up illegal Trotskyite centres.

p This was in no sense an accidental "fall from grace," this was the logical result of anti-Party activity by Trotsky and his followers for many years.

p Let us briefly go over the main stages the Trotskyites went through.

p Take the 1903-17 period. In Russia, the Bolshevik Party, the first Marxist-type party in history, was in the process of consolidation, gaining in strength and vitality. It was then that the strategy and tactics in the struggle for Russia’s revolutionary transformation were being determined. Lenin, the founder of the Bolshevik Party, threw himself heart and soul into the task of charting the ways to effect the world revolution.

p Lenin came to the brilliant conclusion that in the epoch of imperialism the socialist revolution could initially win out in a few countries or even in one country.

p That was the conclusion which enabled the Communist Party to mobilize the working class to carry through the socialist revolution in Russia. Lenin’s theory of revolution also presented a clear-cut idea of the world revolution as a series of national revolutions following each other at different intervals of time and helping more and more countries to free themselves from imperialism.

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p Lenin’s theory of socialist revolution and his faith in the proletariat was opposed by Trotsky, who put forward ideas which would have deprived individual national contingents of the working class of any concrete programme of action and destroyed their self-confidence in their own powers.

p Trotsky’s "permanent revolution" theory held that no revolution can succeed unless it is worldwide, or at any rate European. He insisted that any revolutionary action would fail unless it became a part of a series of synchronized revolutions taking place in various countries.

p In 1906, Trotsky insisted that if a revolution were to win ’out in Russia, its future would hinge on the possibility of a world-wide or European onslaught on capitalism. And what if this failed to take place?

p In that case, Trotsky declared, the revolution in Russia would be crushed by the joint forces of the imperialist powers. He wrote: "It is hopeless to think that a revolutionary Russia could stand up in face of a conservative Europe.”

p Besides this pessimistic attitude Trotsky made various insulting statements about the working class of Russia (which he declared was " insufficiently prepared" for revolution), about the peasantry (which, he alleged, would stab the proletariat in the back), and claimed that revolutions could succeed anywhere except in Russia.

p Thus, Trotsky cannot be accused of inconsistency in his views on revolution. There is a direct connection between his statements about the impossibility of socialist construction in Soviet Russia and lack of faith in a revolution being successful there. One springs from the other.

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p While Lenin’s theory of socialist revolution has always fired the revolutionary enthusiasm of the national contingents of the working class, Trotsky’s schemes of permanent revolution have always deprived the working class of any given country of a concrete programme of action for every telling aspect of the struggle: both before and after the revolution.

p Trotsky’s concepts were objectively designed to disarm the working class ideologically in every country. In a letter addressed in 1928 to the Fourth Congress of the Comintern, Trotsky flatly declared: "In our epoch, the epoch of imperialism, when world economy and world politics are controlled by capitalism, no Communist party can formulate a programme which would more or less proceed from the conditions and tendencies of its national development.”

p What, then, was the way out? How did Trotsky regard his idea of permanent revolution? What did he propose ?

p He claimed that on assuming power a revolutionary proletariat had to mount a war against the rest of the capitalist world, fighting until full victorious or its ultimate defeat. Only in this way, carried forward by the "red bayonets" of the revolution, could it sweep across the globe, Trotsky insisted, or go down in defeat right after its triumph. There was good reason why Trotsky told the 7th Congress of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in 1918: if the revolutionary proletariat is still incapable of meeting imperialism in decisive battle, "then say that for the revolutionary proletariat Soviet power is too heavy a burden, that we have come much too soon, and that we must go underground.”

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p Accordingly, Trotsky tried to urge the working class of Russia to go in for all kinds of risky ventures. Within a few months after the Great October Socialist Revolution, in early 1918, he tried to impede the conclusion of a peace treaty between Russia and Germany, thereby bringing the country to the brink of disaster. In August 1919, he sent the Central Committee of the Party a letter substantiating a "strategic plan" for " revolutionary wars." He declared that "the road to Paris and London lies via the towns of Afghanistan, the Punjab and Bengal," and suggested that a "cavalry corps (30,000-40,000 riders) be formed with the idea of "launching it against India.”

p For all its apparent Leftism, the " revolutionary wars" concept is just another oapitulationist strand in the notorious "permanent revolution" theory. It sprang from the same lack of faith in prospects for the internal development of the revolution. After all, Trotsky’s proposed "raids into the enemy rear" would merely intensify world imperialism’s attacks on Soviet Russia. The provocative and venturous nature of Trotsky’s “recommendations” are quite apparent when we recall that the Soviet Republic was then caught between the hammer of external and the anvil of internal reaction.

p Trotsky and his followers were resolutely rebuffed by Lenin and the Communists whenever they tried to impose their ideas on the Party, since such ideas were diametrically opposed to the basic tasks of the revolutionary movement. On the eve of the October revolution, Lenin and his followers in no uncertain terms exposed Trotsky’s assertion that the working class could not take power in one country. Immediately after the 14 revolution, the Party condemned the Trotskyite insistence that the proletariat would be unable to maintain state power in Russia. In subsequent yetars, the Leninists resolutely dissociated themselves from the handful of Trotskyites who strove, on the basis of the selfsame "permanent revolution" theory, to divert the Party and the Soviet people from the tasks of socialist construction.

p Trotskyism and Leninism also took a fundamentally different view of the basic tasks involved, in organizing the proletarian party. Through out its history, Trotskyism opposed the Leninist principles of Party life iand exhibited an anarchist distaste for Bolshevik organization and discipline. Trotskyism urged that the Party be transformed into a conglomerate of hostile factions and trends, and fought fiercely against its becoming the militant vanguard of the working class capable of leading the proletariat to triumph in the socialist revolution and heading the construction of the new, socialist society.

p Trotskyism took many twists and turns: at one time it openly attacked the Party, at others it pretended hypocritically to favour unity and offered to act as “mediator” between opposed tendencies in the revolutionary movement; finally Trotskyism, posing as an advocate of Leninism, tried to kill its revolutionary essence. Like a chameleon, Trotskyism changed colour, adapting itself to the current political situation.

p When Trotsky still belonged to the Communist Party, Lenin once told Maxim Gorky: "He is with us, but he is not one of us." Lenin resolutely rejected the Trotskyites’ efforts to break up the Party and to turn it into a debating society. 15 It was Lenin who wrote the historic resolution "On Party Unity," adopted by the 10th Party Congress in 1921. This resolution explicitly prohibited any factional struggle. Lenin wrote: "Non-observance of this decision of the Congress shall entail unconditional and instant expulsion from the Party."   [15•1 

p This was the precept the Communists went by in expelling the Trotskyites from their ranks, when the latter, on Lenin’s death, mounted a frontal attack on the Party and tried to substitute Trotskyism for Leninism. The ideological and organizational defeat of Trotskyism was not just the result of action by the Parity leadership or a narrow circle’of Party representatives. No indeed. All local Party cells, all Communists without exception, had their say regarding the policies and practices of Trotskyism. At the Party meetings held in 1927, over 99 per cent of the Communists voted for the Party policy and only 4,000 persons, less than one per cent, supported Trotsky’s views.

p The 15th Congress of the Party, held in late 1927, adopted decisions that put on record this defeat which the Party as a whole had inflicted on Trotskyism. The Congress stressed that the Trotskyite opposition "had taken the path of capitulation to the forces of the international and domestic bourgeoisie and had objectively become a third-force instrument against the regime of the proletarian dictatorship." Trotskyite views were deemed incompatible with Party membership.   [15•2 

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p For the Soviet Union and the enlire international Communist movement, the ideological and organizational defeat of Trotskyism was of historic importance. Remarking on this fact, William Z. Foster, wrote: "In this fight not only was the fate of the revolution in Russia at stake, but also that of the world Communist movement. A victory for the Trotsky forces would have been a decisive success for world reaction."   [16•1 

p As a result of the persistent and purposeful struggle by the Communist parties their ranks were cleared of Trotskyites. In February 1928, the 9th Plenary Meeting of the Comintern’s Executive approved the decisions of the 15th Congress of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks), stating that: "Henceforth, adherence to the Trot skyite opposition and solidarity with its views cannot be compatible with membership of the Communist International.”   [16•2  This resolution was fully approved by the Sixth Congress of the Comintern.

p Mamy Trotskyites, in different countries, expelled from the Communist and Workers’ parties in the 1920s and the 1930s cast around for new forms of anti-Communist struggle. Hence the decision to set up what they called the "Fourth International.”

What were the Trotskyite slogans in 1938? What were the aims at the time?