Programatical Document of La Marx International December 2019
The international Reagroupment of the Revolutionaries is task number one. It is necessary to set an orientation to take concrete steps for that task that we have defined as number one, of a strategic and vital nature to fight the battle to resolve the crisis of revolutionary leadership. The crisis of the revolutionary leadership lies specifically in the fact that there is a crisis in Trotskyism, that the Fourth International has almost completely dispersed and disintegrated, that it practically does not exist as such. There is no organized IV international, nor recognized or with any authority over sectors of the world vanguard. We do not intend to hide the facts, but to present them as they are, without fear of showing it that way to the different generations of revolutionaries who approach us.
We need to set the strategy based on the analysis of the world crisis of Trotskyism, to fight for the Reconstruction of the Fourth International. For this battle, which is strategic, our diagnosis is that the crisis of the Fourth International is so serious that in order to march towards its reconstruction, a previous step is necessary, which is the Regrouping of the Revolutionaries.
We need a base of militant cadres, groups and organizations that form a platform and starting point for the reorganization of a Socialist International, which does not exist today. This step is fundamental in the strategic path of Reconstruction of the Fourth International. These steps that we must take are crucial to advance in the resolution of the crisis of revolutionary leadership.
What does the crisis of the Fourth International consist of today? In that most of the currents and directions that claim to be Trotskyist are undergoing a process of social democratization. This process of social democratization implies that these groups break with the program of the Fourth International, break with the method and tradition of the Fourth International, adapt to the bourgeois democratic regime, and capitulate to the counterrevolutionary apparatuses.
The scientific definition of the crisis: Revisionism or Pabloism
This process of social democratization has triggered a disintegration and atomization of Trotskyism and an agonizing situation of the Fourth International. This behavior of the overwhelming majority of the forces that claim to be Trotskyists is the expression of the serious crisis of the Fourth International, and the final product of a long process of crisis.
Delving into the tradition and history of the Fourth International, we scientifically define this phenomenon as Revisionism or Pabloism. Pabloism is assuming that the counterrevolutionary leaderships can fulfill some “progressive” role , and it is no longer necessary to build the Fourth International.
It is called Pabloism after Michel Pablo, the Greek leader led the Fourth International in 1951. Under the impact of the “Cold War”, the arms race, the threats of imperialism of a military attack on the Soviet Union, the leadership of the Fourth International , headed by Michel Pablo and Ernest Mandel, stated that the parties of the Third Communist International, led by Stalin, were going to take a progressive course under the pressure of imperialism, and were going to take power and develop the socialist revolution throughout the world.
The “Pabloist” orientation was that the parties of the Fourth International had to enter the PCs of the world, they had to make agreements with the leaders of those parties. It must be remembered that at that time the Communist Parties were part of some of the most important capitalist governments with ministers and officials. That is to say, Pablo’s orientation stated that the Fourth International had to be integrated with capitalist fronts and governments, and this almost destroyed the Fourth International.
This is how Moreno explains it: “The year 1951 divides the history of our International into two: before and after Pabloite revisionism. As of that date, when its leadership is taken over by revisionism, our International enters into a crisis, it disintegrates. .. His policy of “sui generis entryism”, his analysis that the cold war would force the communist parties to go to civil war and workers’ revolution…were Pablo’s attempt to smuggle into from our ranks a… policy of treason and demobilization… Pabloism had devastating effects on our International. Not satisfied with capitulating to Stalinism, they began to capitulate to any leadership or apparatus that controlled the mass movement…” (1)
Pabloism is Revisionism, because it is a “Revision” of what was proposed by Trotsky, who affirmed that the Third International, under the leadership of Stalin and Stalinism, was no longer revolutionary, it was counterrevolutionary, and therefore it was necessary to fight those organizations building as an alternative, the Fourth International. If what Pablo affirmed was true and the Third International became “progressive”, then what Trotsky had proposed was wrong. It was not necessary to build the Fourth International, but the right thing to do was to make agreements with the leaders of the counterrevolutionary organizations, which under imperialist pressure” were going to become “revolutionary.”
In 1953, James Cannon called with an “Open Letter” to confront and defeat Pabloism. Cannon was the main leader and founder along with Leon Trotsky of the Socialist Workers Party of the United States (in English, SWP) and the Fourth International. That is why his call had great historical importance, and just as the year 1951 went down in history for being the one in which revisionism arose, 1953 is the year in which a current arises that has the objective of confronting revisionism: Orthodox Trotskyism. .
What we are seeing today in the organizations that claim to be Trotskyist is a new “wave” of Pabloism, which we can call “21st century revisionism.” The groups of the Fourth International affirm that at the world level “the right is advancing” , that “the coup d’état is coming “, that ” fascism is coming at the global level” , and that there is a “conservative wave” at the world level.
They affirm that Trump, Bolsonaro, Añez, are the fascism that is coming at us and will crush us. And so to stop the CIA, the Pentagon, etc. we have to make agreements with Bernie Sanders, with Jeremy Corbyn, with Putin, with Xi-Jinping, with Lula, with Evo, with Maduro, that we have to support the Putin-Maduro bloc. – Evo- Lula, that China is going to confront the US, etc. It is all quackery with pseudo-scientific pretensions.
XXI Century Pabloism is evident in the Bolivian Revolution of 2019, when revisionist Trotskyism says it is a “coup d’état” and makes agreements with Evo, Lula, Alberto Fernández, the PJ, the PT, Bernie Sanders, etc. to support Evo Morales. They make agreements and public acts jointly with Castrochavismo, which according to them would be the “Progressive Field”. This “21st century Pabloism” threatens to liquidate the remnants of the Fourth International.
Revisionism implies a course of social democratization that the revolutionary organization describes until it becomes a centrist organization, and finally a reformist one. The crystallization in a reformist or social democratic organization is the inevitable course with which the process of social democratization that detonates revisionism culminates. The revisionist organizations of the 21st century break with the program, method and tradition of the Fourth International, and cease to be Trotskyists.
Since 1953, leaders such as James Cannon, or Nahuel Moreno confronted the revisionism of Pablo and Mandel, building the orthodox Trotskyist current that fought to defend the principles of Marxism, a current of which we feel part and followers. We are now going to see the different stages that the crisis of Trotskyism and the Fourth International went through.
The first stage of the crisis of the Fourth International: Struggle against revisionism
The first stage of the crisis of the Fourth International encompassed the entire post-war period, it was that of the struggle of Trotskyism against the revisionism of Pablo and Mandel. This period lasted until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and began with the Bolivian Revolution of 1952.
This is how Nahuel Moreno explains it: ” The synthesis of Pablo’s betrayal took place in Bolivia. In this country, the Bolivian POR (Revolutionary Workers’ Party), a section of the International, led by Pablo’s hand, committed one of the most tremendous betrayals. ..
…In Bolivia, the working class, educated by Trotskyism, carried out at the beginning of April 1952 one of the most perfect workers’ revolutions known: it destroyed the bourgeois army, it constituted workers’ and peasants’ militias as the only real power in the country , and organized the Central Obrera Boliviana to centralize the labor movement and the militias…”
“…The bureaucracy that led the COB handed over the power that was in its hands to the bourgeois nationalist party, to the MNR (Revolutionary Nationalist Movement). Bolivian Trotskyism was a power, it had great influence in the labor and mass movement, it had participated as a co-leader in the workers’ and popular insurrection that had destroyed the army…”
“…The International Secretariat (IS), led by Pablo, took the treacherous and reformist line of critically supporting the bourgeois government…The Pabloite revisionist principle was always the same: the MNR, pressured by the mass movement, was going to be forced to make a socialist revolution” (2)
Revisionism detonates a process of social democratization, which culminates when the group that adopts the Program of the Fourth International abandons it to become a reformist group. To complete this course, they must repeat the same path that was developed by the organizations that broke with Marxism in the 19th century, led by Karl Kautsky, August Bebel and Eduard Bernstein.
These leaders led the Second International to break with Marxism, and become a reformist, social democratic international. But Kautsky, Bebel and Bernstein led that course in the name of Marxism, basing themselves on the prestige of Marx and Engels, passing off their capitulating positions in the name of Marx and Marxism.
This is the explanation why the current leaders who broke with Trotskyism continue to call themselves Trotskyists. They carry out the same course as Kautsky, Bebel and Bernstein: by calling themselves Trotskyists they have a better chance of passing on their capitulatory positions.
This is how Nahuel Moreno explains it: ” This centrist current…is a fundamental part of that same revisionism…which in form does not break with Trotskyist formulations…If it formally defends some Trotskyist positions, it is for the better to smuggle and pass off revisionist positions. There is, in fact, a division of tasks between these two nuances, a relationship very similar to that between Bernstein and Kautsky…” (3)
The second stage of the crisis of the Fourth International: The decade of the 90’s
With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the second stage in the crisis of the Fourth International began. Throughout the 90’s, the largest Trotskyist currents broke out: The USec, the CI, The Militant, and the LIT, which gave rise to a whole series of smaller currents.
In the postwar period, after Pablo’s expulsion, most of the currents regrouped in the Unified Secretariat (USC). Another group of currents remained in the International Committee (IC), the first regrouping organized against Pabloism. But the USec, under the leadership of Mandel, developed one capitulation after another, became guerrilla and began to suffer one outburst after another, which caused currents and sectors of the USec to move away, first the SWP of the United States, then Nahuel Moreno. that broke with the SU and formed the LIT.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the USec underwent a spectacular transformation. In 1991, the 14th Congress adopted the line of forming anti-capitalist parties such as the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste (NPA, New Anti-Capitalist Party), eliminating the slogan of Dictatorship of the Proletariat from the Trotskyist program.
And I call for the formation of anti-capitalist parties throughout the world. This is how the anti-capitalist parties arose in Europe that gave rise to Syriza in Greece, and Podemos in Spain. The anti-capitalist parties went on to integrate electoral coalitions with the remnants of Stalinism in Europe, and renounced the revolutionary strategy.
The LIT, the current founded by Nahuel Moreno exploded in the 90’s. Several organizations like the MST, the UIT, IS, the PTS, the New MAS emerged from there, most of which broke with Morenoism and Trotskyism. Groups such as the PSTU in Brazil, as well as the Socialist Left or the MST in Argentina carry out the tactic of Kautsky, Bebel, or Bernstein of continuing to formally vindicate Morenism, or Trotskyism, but in the process of breaking with the Fourth International, as the Bolivian Revolution of 2019 showed.
A similar course suffered the ICFI, the other current around which a sector of the Fourth International grouped itself to combat Pabloism. The ICFI disintegrated first with the crisis of the WRP in England, and then the crisis of the OCI in France led by Lambert, which became the Workers’ Party, which, after breaking with the Trotskyist program, practically dissolved.
Ted Grant, who promoted The Militant, was expelled from the ICFI in the post-war period, a current that had a great role in the fight against Margaret Thatcher, but also exploded in the 90’s when Peter Taafe developed the Socialist Party of England and Wales, and founded another current international call CIT.
This entire stage of the crisis of Trotskyism was crossed by a central fact of the class struggle that was the Fall of the Berlin Wall and the beginning of the fourth world stage of the class struggle. Faced with the fall of the Wall, most of Trotskyism capitulated to the world campaign that “Socialism Failed”, which led its leaders to abandon Marxism in various ways.
The fall of world Stalinism deepened the crisis of the revisionist groups of Trotskyism. This showed the serious damage that Pabloism had done to post-war Trotskyism. The Trotskyist movement had been made up of groups that followed Stalinism like a shadow, and therefore, when Stalinism began its collapse, they also collapsed along with Stalinism.
The third and current stage of the crisis of the Fourth International
With the disappearance of the great post-war Trotskyist currents, the current stage of the crisis of the Fourth International is characterized by the crisis and disintegration of smaller organizations. This entire stage of the current crisis of the Fourth International is crossed by two central facts of the class struggle: The global crisis of capitalism and the Revolutions of the 21st Century. In the 21st century there is no Michael Pablo, nor Ernest Mandel who organizes and structures revisionism as an organic current.
The current crisis of the Fourth International occurs in the framework of the opening of the Fourth World Stage of the class struggle, the stage of the political revolution. Therefore, in this third stage of crisis of the Fourth International, the great post-war Communist Parties led by Stalin do not exist, that enormous counterrevolutionary apparatus that controlled the mass movement, which was swept away by the revolution with the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The parties and leaders of today’s counterrevolutionary groups, the Bernie Sanders, the Evo’s, the Lula’s, the Correa’s, the Maduro’s, etc. next to post-war Stalinism are a joke, they are organizations a thousand times weaker. However, Pabloite revisionism continues to exist, embodied in different figures and organizations.
This is how Nahuel Moreno explains it: ” Although Pablo is the one who has taken this revisionist deviation to its ultimate theoretical and political consequences, revisionism is not limited to him. It is a much broader current that has been in charge of maintaining, since then, in a permanent crisis to our International…”
“…it is a front without principles, made up of different nuances and currents… Given this character of a front without principles, revisionism has at its head different figures and leaders characterized at each stage of its development…” (4 )
At this stage all the small organizations deepen their course of revisionism and social democratization process. The US SWP, the party founded by Leon Trotsky, carries out a line of critical support for Donald Trump. The US ISO broke up to support Bernie Sanders.
Peter Taafe’s CWI exploded. The Militant publicly supported the government of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. The LIT capitulated to Castrochavism in the Bolivian Revolution of 2019. Mandelism led to various capitalist governments such as Greece and Brazil where they had officials in the Lula government. Sectors that broke with the LIT join a popular front with the bourgeoisie in Brazil. In Argentina, the FIT groups such as the PTS, PO, IS, vote laws with the bourgeoisie in Parliament.
The central feature of the crisis of the revisionist groups is the process of adaptation to the regime, disintegration and dissolution of these small groups to the extent that they are becoming openly social democratic organizations. The center of these organizations is the participation in the bourgeois elections, while in the unions, as well as in the mass organizations, they exhibit their adaptation to the union bureaucracy, and to the reformist apparatuses.
Revisionism regresses theoretically and breaks with Marxism
Another characteristic of the revisionist groups is that they have not elaborated practically anything, nor have they made practically any significant contribution to Marxist theory. Every time they open their mouths they express a deep process of theoretical involution and rupture with Marxism, they repeat like parrots the “fashions”, theories, charlatanism and false ideologies transmitted by the bourgeoisie, senile Stalinism, Castrochavism, the think, thank “progressive” members of the US Democratic Party, such as CLACSO, or become spokespersons for the frauds and proposals of the London or Paris Economic School, etc.
Their elaborations are based on denying the existence of a world revolutionary process, and therefore that the conditions “are not ripe” for revolution. Nor do they invent anything in this field, they simply limit themselves to repeating what Kautsky, Bebel and Bernstein, the leaders of Social Democracy, or Stalin and Bukharin, the leaders of Stalinism, always said. The revisionist groups deny the existence of the world crisis of capitalism, or deny its character; They deny the Revolutions of the 21st Century, they adopt the vision that the world situation is a kind of black night in which fascism and coups are coming.
For these revisionist groups we live in a stage of the class struggle marked by a “historic defeat” of the working class. By adopting the Theory of conditions “not ripe” for the revolution, they take Stalin’s “Theory of Socialism in One Country ” as their own, because they see a whole stage of alliances with “progressive bourgeois sectors” as necessary , “to confront to fascism and the right” .
In this way they adopt the “Theory of Progressive Bourgeois Fields”. Revisionist groups devolve theories formulated by post-war intellectual groups, Foucault, Marcuse, the Frankfurt School, Adorno, Habermas. Some groups argue that capitalism is in a period of development of the productive forces, other groups that imperialism no longer exists, some groups say that to make the revolution the “Cultural Revolution” is needed from the universities, the media and the cultural propaganda, and attribute this line to Gramsci.
Other groups adopt the Keynesian program, and present it as Marxism, adopt “Keynesian Business Cycle Theory” and present it as “Long Wave Theory”, disguising it as Marxism. Most groups adopt “Decoupling Theory” launched by imperialist circles from the London Economic Schooll.
Others make the self-management and autonomist theory of Subcomandante Marcos, Tony Negri, Heinz Dieterich, Michael Hardt and Naomi Klein their own, building cooperatives for the unemployed, or recovered factories, or various forms of assistance. All this talk, quackery, and false ideologies are presented in “Marxist” or “Trotskyist” garb.
The revisionist groups abandon the Transitional Program, and adopt it the structure of the “minimum program” and the “maximum program” of social democracy that Trotskyism faced, offering the Transitional Program as an alternative. By involuting social democratic groups, the groups that call themselves Trotskyists break with the Transitional Program.
But this only deepens its crisis, also a product of the fact that its pseudo-Marxist talk and verbiage is being brutally beaten by the reality of the crisis of capitalism, as well as the Revolutions of the 21st Century. These great facts of the world class struggle are strengthening the entire Marxist Theory and the classic Marxist analysis of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky and Nahuel Moreno.
The objective bases of the evolution from Trotskyism to revisionism
The reasons that explain the ongoing process of social democratization that detonates revisionism are the enormous changes that have caused the global objective situation. The combination of the world crisis of capitalism with the world revolutionary process accelerates the turn to the right of all the counterrevolutionary leaderships, and also of all the revisionist groups. This is what explains the progress towards social democratization, and the disintegration into multiple small currents on an international scale.
The revisionist groups evolve into reformist groups just at the precise moment when the world crisis of capitalism liquidates and threatens all “reformist” projects. With the development of the world crisis of capitalism there is no space, no loopholes to develop reforms or improvements of any kind.
On the contrary, we are in the presence of a brutal attack on the living conditions of millions, which does not give room for negotiations, nor “truces” liquidate all parliamentary, reformist or union illusions. By renouncing the revolutionary project, and adopting the reformist one, the revisionist groups deepen their crisis hit by the crisis of capitalism
A component of the world revolutionary process that aggravates the crisis of the revisionist groups is the women’s revolution. Thousands of women, trans, lesbian, and youth activists find that left-wing groups are sexist, defend abusers, or oppose women publicly denouncing abusers, or defend the legalization of prostitution.
The consequence of this is that the groups that claim to be Trotskyist are rejected by thousands of fighters and leaders of the Green-Orange Revolution, which brings with it valuable leaders and cadres leaving these organizations, deeply disillusioned.
The revolutionary rise is more and more working class, the revolutions are urban, centered on the workers. This aggravates the crisis of the groups that claim to be Trotskyists because they refuse to intervene in the mass organizations, they are looking for new social subjects, they have expectations of the guerrilla, the picketer, the intellectual, the general, the commander. They refuse to demand that the mass organizations fight for power, they despise them as we saw in the Bolivian Revolution of 2019.
The process of social democratization of Trotskyism expresses the class pressures of imperialism and the world counterrevolutionary front on the workers and popular organizations. Faced with the world revolutionary process, imperialism grants limited, where it cannot prevent it, only 2 loopholes for political activity: trade union activity, and parliamentary activity. The process of social democratization expresses the adaptation of the leaders who claim to be Trotskyists to these pressures from imperialism.
The revisionist groups limit their actions to taking advantage of these limited loopholes that imperialism adapts in the union organizations to the guidelines of the bourgeois state. The union leaders who have been in office for many years, and do not carry out a policy of transforming the unions, adapt to the structure imposed on them by the bourgeois state, and become bureaucratized.
The openly social-democratic turn of the leadership of the revisionist groups is expressed in the fact that they prioritize parliamentary activity, to the detriment of the fight for the leadership of the workers’ and popular movement. To cover up their social democratic course, they raise ultra-leftist slogans, dress up as reds, hold “combative” plenary sessions, but all of this is a cover to cover up their adaptation because they tend to become bureaucratized, and they adapt to the regime in that way.
To the extent that as a result of the parliamentary intervention the coffers of the Trotskyist organizations are filled with money from the income of the parliamentarians, the course to the right accelerates, the organizations increasingly renounce the fight for the leadership, in the struggles, in the unions and in the mass organizations. Therefore, in the mass organizations, these currents adopt an ultra-leftist policy, as a loincloth for their adaptation to the regime.
The income from the bourgeois state leads these organizations to set up a disproportionate apparatus in relation to the number of militants, and the weight with the mass organizations. The social democratic structure advances to the extent that the number of renters, civil servants, publications and cultural and intellectual activities that depend on the bourgeois state grows.
The party loses autonomy from the bourgeois state and is deeply dependent on it, it ceases to be a conspiracy apparatus, at the service of arming the masses, strikes, self-organization or picketing, and becomes a social democratic apparatus.
Revisionism imposes a Stalinist regime and expels many valuable militants
To the extent that they advance to revisionism and the social democratic turn is accentuated, the internal regime of the Trotskyist organizations becomes more anti-democratic. When sectors of cadres and militants appear who perceive the opportunist course and seek to modify it, they are brutally repressed by the revisionist leaderships. They impose a bureaucratic, Stalinist centralism, they reform the statutes in an anti-democratic way, they prevent debates, they impose sanctions, expulsions, which gives rise to divisions, ruptures, and crises.
As a result of this process, thousands of militants are “quietly” moving away from these organizations. Some currents or comrades draw from all this the mistaken conclusion that then the Trotskyist organizations do not have to intervene in the elections, nor have deputies, nor direct unions or union federations. And you don’t have to have a device or rent it because that leads to bureaucratization. All these conclusions are wrong.
The history of the revolutionary currents shows that it is necessary to build an apparatus and have professionals to lead the insurrection and the strikes, which cannot be done without a strong organization. The deputies and union leaders are indispensable tactics to dispute the masses.
The problem is not intervening in the elections, nor having deputies, nor directing unions, nor having an apparatus or renting. What destroys the party regime is the intervention of the bourgeois state in the party structure that leads to the bureaucratization of its leaders. And for the party to maintain a healthy method, the leadership must expand the democratic pole of the internal operating system, which allows greater control of the middle cadres and the party’s base over the leadership.
We calculate that in recent years thousands of militants have broken with the revisionist groups. We have to act boldly on this crisis, without sectarianism, to recover those cadres and militants. We must address them and offer them our materials, leaving behind the past and the confrontations that we may have had in other years, and debating the present and how to rebuild revolutionary Marxism. We must be very patient with these comrades who leave these organizations very beaten and confused.
For a New Zimmerwald: The Need for a Principled Rally Pole
Our strategy is the Reconstruction of the Fourth International, which has been seriously destroyed by Pabloite revisionism. But it would be a mistake to give us the task of Reconstructing the Fourth International as a present task. If we gave ourselves that orientation, we would quickly go towards a crisis, because today we have no one with whom to rebuild the Fourth International. As in a big bang, all the revisionist groups are moving away at high speed from the IV International, it would be in vain to search for groups with which to rebuild the IV.
The task we have set today is the Regrouping of the Revolutionaries. Now we have planned to regroup the groups, militants, and personalities or leaders who resist the revisionist course. Those groups that resist the process of social democratization of revisionism need international support and coverage, because isolated, developing a national-Trotskyism, they are destined to disappear. In order to materialize this Regroupment, we need to carry out a process of delimitation of all the revisionist groups, and fight for the emergence of a revolutionary pole.
That we propose that the task set out today is the Regrouping of the Revolutionaries, does not mean that we abandon the strategy of the Reconstruction of the Fourth International. On the contrary, it implies a serious plan based on recognizing the state of serious disintegration suffered by the IV, its virtual disappearance. It would be wrong, as many groups do, that as soon as the agreement with some groups is finalized, we proclaim ourselves “the Fourth International” rebuilt. That would not be serious.
That is why we do not propose as a current orientation to go out and Reconstruct the Fourth International. We set ourselves a humbler goal to start down that path, that of beginning to group, organize, relate to groups that resist the revisionist process. We need a base of militant cadres, groups and organizations that form a platform and starting point for the reorganization of a Socialist International, which does not exist today.
This orientation of the Regroupment of the Revolutionaries is also the fruit of drawing conclusions from our historical experience. When the revisionism of Kautsky, Bebel and Bernstein destroyed the revolutionary character of the Second International by supporting the imperialist governments in the First World War, Rosa Luxemburg said that the Second International had been transformed into a “rotten corpse”. Lenin and Trotsky repudiated the leaders of the Second International, and the idea of a meeting of all the leaders who maintained the revolutionary position was then imposed.
That meeting was held between September 5 and 8, 1915 in Switzerland in a small town near Bern, called Zimmerwald. The revolutionaries who opposed the First World War regrouped there, including Lenin, Trotsky, James Connolly from Ireland, John Maclean from Scotland, among others. Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were unable to attend because they were imprisoned in Germany, but they sent letters of support. The meeting was very small, only 38 people attended in four carriages. This motivated the famous joke of Lenin: “All the revolutionaries fit in a four carriages” that later became popular as “All the revolutionaries fit in an armchair” .
Pictures of the Zimmerwald Conference
Thanks to this orientation, the “Zimmerwald left” emerged, the connections between the groups that had been severed were reestablished. Isolated groups, who were skeptical or in crisis, who did not know what was happening, broke their isolation and found new channels to function.
A new international did not arise immediately, but the Regrouping achieved at the Zimmerwald Conference laid the foundations for what, after the Russian Revolution, was the emergence of the Third International. What we must now carry out is a “new Zimmerwald”, a new international regrouping that allows the reorganization of the militant groups and currents that resist revisionism. The need to carry out this Regrouping cannot be postponed, the first step towards the Reconstruction of the Fourth International
Our strategy continues to be to rebuild the Fourth International
In turn, there are thousands of new activists and leaders leading the revolutions taking place around the world. These activists are not Trotskyists, but they tend to take revolutionary positions. Currents or organized groups have not yet emerged that allow us to apply the FUR tactic, but we cannot rule out their emergence in the future. Meanwhile, we must also have a policy towards this litter of new activists that crosses all trade union, democratic, feminist, indigenous, immigrant, LGTB, etc. organizations. all over the world.
We propose to all of them that they join the Revolutionary Rally that we are promoting. But we are also raising the need for a Socialist International that organizes and coordinates the revolutions and struggles that take place throughout the world. They do not know Trotskyism, nor the Fourth International, but they feel the need for an international organization to coordinate and unify the struggles, and carry out international campaigns.
At this time there is a very important political-social phenomenon throughout the world, which is the radicalization of sectors of the masses, a “turn to the left” of sectors that begin to hate capitalism, and seek to approach Marxism and socialism. For this reason, the slogan that we build a Socialist International can be attractive to many leaders who seek socialism and Marxism, without knowing very well what it consists of.
The slogan that we build a Socialist International is a propaganda slogan, it is not something that is raised as present, nor in the immediate future. But it is a slogan that allows us to tell these activists who consider themselves revolutionaries but are not Trotskyists, that we must build a common international organization, which is socialist, to face together the challenge of the fight against capitalism.
But even if we pose the Regrouping of Revolutionaries as a present task, and the call for a Socialist International as a propaganda slogan towards activists around the world, we must consider all of these as tactical steps on the path of our strategy of rebuilding the Fourth International.
We must not forget for a moment that this is our strategy. There are currents that affirm that since the groups that claim to be Trotskyists have committed so many disasters, that something else has to be built, that the Fourth must not be rebuilt, but ” refounded”, or build the Fifth International or do something else.
All those assumptions are wrong. We ratify the strategy of the Reconstruction of the Fourth International not on a whim, but because of a scientific conviction. This is how Nahuel Moreno explains it: “…the foundation of our International was the greatest success of Trotsky and of our world movement…It responds to the same need…to firmly unite all revolutionary Marxists around a program that synthesize everything learned by the world Marxist movement since the Communist Manifesto and especially since the Russian Revolution…”
“…To defend these conquests of Marxism, synthesized in Trotskyism and its program, from the counterrevolutionary attack along the lines carried out by Stalinism and the other counterrevolutionary apparatuses to erase them from the historical memory of the workers and their vanguard, it was essential to achieve a strong international organization on the part of the revolutionaries” (5)
For this reason, the tasks of the Regrouping of the Revolutionaries that we must carry out are tactics at the service of the strategy of the reconstruction of the Fourth International. All the orientations that we carry out, and events, everything that we do, is at the service of building this regrouping pole at the service of the international regrouping of the revolutionaries. This is the orientation that we propose for its realization.
Notes:
(1) Nahuel Moreno. Update of the Transition Program. Revisionism tends to destroy the International
(2) Nahuel Moreno. Update of the Transition Program. Revisionism tends to destroy the International
(3) Nahuel Moreno. Update of the Transition Program. Revisionism tends to destroy the International
(4) Nahuel Moreno. Update of the Transition Program. Revisionism tends to destroy the International
(5) Nahuel Moreno. Update of the Transition Program. The Foundation of the Fourth International
