The Fourth International

When the German bosses brought Hitler to power in order to crush the German Communist and Social Democratic parties and trade unions, not one section of the Communist International questioned the disastrous policy of the Comintern's leadership. Trotsky and his followers in the International Left Opposition declared the Comintern dead for the purpose for which it had been founded, leading the working class to revolution. Just as Lenin and the Bolsheviks recognised the need to form a new International after the Second broke its fundamental pledge to resist imperialist war, now Trotsky and his small band of supporters saw the need to assemble the forces for a new revolutionary International.

On 3 September 1938, 30 delegates from 11 countries gathered in the home of the veteran revolutionary Alfred Rosmer, outside Paris, to adopt a new international programme and to formally found the Fourth International. It represented a tiny grouping compared to the previous three Internationals at their foundations. Only the US section had a membership in excess of one thousand. A handful of others - France, Belgium, Indochina, Poland, had a few hundreds each. Most of the others counted their membership in dozens. The reason for this was isolation within the workers' movement. This was due not to a wilful sectarianism but to the huge machinery of slander and brutal repression organised by the Stalinists.

This was true inside the Soviet Union, where the Great Purges of 1936-1938, and then again in 1940-41, wiped out upwards of ten thousand Trotskyists and members of the Left Opposition. This murder machine hunted Trotskyist militants to their deaths in Spain and in western Europe, too. In addition, the threat of fascism, Stalin's formation of an alliance with the Social Democracy and the "popular front" with "progressive" bourgeois forces contributed to their isolation. Even if many on the left did not believe the Stalinist lies that the Trotskyists were Hitler's agents, they had no desire to put themselves in the firing line by defending, let alone joining, the Trotskyists...

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