Theses on the Crisis of the Fourth International and the Tasks of Consistent Trotskyists

Adopted by the Congress to Reconstitute the International Trotskyist Opposition
29 October 2022

1.

A truly revolutionary International, dedicated to the overthrow of capitalist society and the construction of a socialist society, must necessarily be based on the political program and practice of revolutionary Marxism. On the theoretical, strategic and tactical bases elaborated in the first place by Karl Marx, Frederich Engels, Rosa Luxemburg, Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, and by the political movements that had them as leaders. Updated based on the historical development of society and the experience of the workers’ movement, but always starting from themselves and their general content, still valid today. In this sense, the only current consistent reference for a truly revolutionary International is Trotskyism, which represents the revolutionary Marxism of our time.

Orthodox Trotskyism rests on the firm foundations laid in the documents elaborated — following the line of the theses and resolutions of the first four congresses of the Communist International — by the first three international meetings of the Fourth International: the Conference of the Movement for the Fourth International (1936); the Founding Congress (1938); and the Emergency Conference (1940).

In the documents of these international meetings, the general programmatic, strategic, and tactical lines are indicated which, as developed and brought up to date on the basis of the historical evolution of the subsequent decades, still constitute the political foundations of orthodox Trotskyism.

2.

The death of Leon Trotsky and World War II struck hard blows at the International. Not only did the war mean the cessation of direct relations among the different sections, but repression eliminated many of the International’s most important leaders, in particular in Europe.

The International Secretariat, under the leadership of the Socialist Workers Party of the United States (SWP/US), was able only partially to fulfill its responsibilities of political and organizational leadership of the international Trotskyist movement.

Nevertheless, the Fourth International met the test of the war, politically and organizationally, for example, by holding its clandestine European conference under Nazi occupation in February 1944, and between 1943 and 1946 completely reorganizing itself, relocating its administrative center to France.

3.

In the period following World War II, notwithstanding a certain growth in membership and increase in the influence of almost all its sections, the International did not become a mass organizing center, as, before the war, Trotsky and the entire Trotskyist movement had erroneously predicted would happen. The International attempted to deal with this fact by substituting a voluntarist orthodoxy for dialectical method: under the leadership of Pablo, the International acted as if the crisis of proletarian leadership were approaching resolution and the development of the International as a mass organization could be easily realized, possible relatively quickly.

At the same time, the principal section of the International, the SWP/US, using as a pretext the reactionary Voorhis Act, which prohibited any American organization from maintaining an international affiliation, and starting from an ultra-optimistic view of the prospects of the class struggle in the US (the so-called American exceptionalism of the 1946 theses), was shifting to a position of privileging national action with respect to the rest of the movement. In taking this stance, the SWP expressed what were actually federalist positions on questions of international organization.

Only the British section (Revolutionary Communist Party, RCP) maintained a balanced assessment of the situation, grasping the reality of world capitalist recovery and the not-accidental expansion of Stalinism, and therefore the difficulty of significant development of the International in the next period. Few other groups (in part the one headed by Nahuel Moreno in Argentina) shared the position of the British.

It should be added that in the only situation in which the Trotskyists, having broad mass support, could have set themselves the task of leading a revolutionary process, that of Vietnam, they were physically massacred, on one side, by the Franco-English imperialist reaction, on the other, by the Stalinists, a minority in the working class, but a majority among the peasantry and the subproletariat (1945).

Nevertheless, despite all its mistakes, the International continued to base its politics on orthodox Trotskyism. The theses of the Reorganization Conference (1946) and the Second World Congress (1948), although containing errors, should be included as part of the historic legacy of our movement.

4.

The first serious opportunist failure on the part of the International occurred in 1948 on the occasion of the break between Yugoslavia and the Kremlin.

Instead of limiting itself to defending Yugoslavia against any possible military attack by the USSR, the majority of the International (once again against the British section and some minorities in other sections) considered Tito’s break with Stalin as an expression of the revolutionary potential of the Yugoslav Communist Party. The Yugoslav CP was characterized as “left-centrist” and was regarded as moving towards Trotskyism, while over and over attempts were made to reach agreement with either the Yugoslav CP or with pro-Tito forces in capitalist countries. These policies were maintained until 1950. Clearly this involved a total misunderstanding of the nature of the Titoist bureaucracy, resulting from the desire to find, at any cost, a shortcut to reaching the masses. Still, the desire, however illusory, to win the Yugoslav CP to a full revolutionary international program, and the 1950 condemnation of its alliance with imperialism (a vote in favor of UN military intervention in Korea), make clear the difference between the policy of 1948-1950 and classical Pabloism from 1951 forward. The opportunism of 1948 opened the way to Pabloite revisionism but definitely did not reach the depth of the opportunism of actual Pabloism.

5.

Pabloite revisionism, which emerged at the end of 1950 and triumphed at the Third World Congress in 1951, represented an opportunist deviation of a centrist type. Drawing a false lesson from the unexpected events of the postwar period (the consolidation and expansion of Stalinism with the creation of deformed workers’ states through the social transformations in the countries occupied by the “Red” Army and in the victorious revolutions in Yugoslavia and China; the cold war; and the failure of development of the Fourth International), Pabloite positions went so far as to deny the necessity of the struggle to build mass Trotskyist parties in all the countries of the world. The role of the revolutionary instrument was, in effect, assigned to the ruling bureaucracy of the USSR and the Stalinist parties, driven to assume this role by the revolutionary pressure of the masses and confrontation with imperialism and the “inevitable” formation and possible triumph of internal centrist tendencies. The sections of the Fourth International, placed within the Communist parties according to the strategy of “entrism sui generis”, had to limit themselves to functioning as small groups for discussion among cadres, in order to aid the objective development of the revolutionary process under the leadership of the Stalinists. In this way, disappointment over the lack of success in achieving transformation into a mass organization led to political liquidationism.

6.

The counterposed theses presented at the Third World Congress (1951) by the majority of the French section, although containing some mistakes and lacking a balance sheet of the previous errors, constituted a defense of orthodox Trotskyism against Pabloite revisionism. The defense of its position cost the majority of the French section expulsion from the International in 1952.

7.

The emergence of ultra-Pabloite internal tendencies, which carried liquidationism to its extreme conclusion, drove the British section (from which the old leadership group of the 1940s had now been excluded by an opportunist tendency led by Gerry Healy) and the SWP/US to launch, in 1953, the struggle against Pablo. Conducted on the basis of the SWP’s federalist conceptions, and so on the basis of relations among the separate national leaderships, this struggle did not come near to achieving all the results which were possible.

On 16 November 1953, using Pablo’s bureaucratic methods as the reason, the SWP, with an open letter, broke with the Pabloite leadership on the eve of the Fourth World Congress, so refusing to wage a struggle to win the majority of the International to opposition to Pablo (even thinking that the prestige of the US section would bring the majority to its side without the need for a congressional fight). One week later, on 23 November, the expelled majority of the Parti Communiste Internationaliste (PCI/France), the English section, the Swiss section, and the SWP founded the International Committee of the Fourth International (IC), which declared Pablo and his International Secretariat removed from power, proclaimed itself the new leadership of the movement, and invited Trotskyists all over the world to group themselves under its banner. This call received a positive response from a few sections of the International (China, Canada), from the faction led by Moreno (Argentina), and from minorities in a few other sections. The refusal of the anti-Pabloites to wage a struggle to win the majority, combined with incorrect tactics at the moment of the split, meant that two-thirds of the International remained with Pablo.

8.

In practice, the International Committee, based on organizational federalism, did not in any way represent a Bolshevik response to Pabloism. It proved incapable of drawing the right lessons from the crisis of the International. The successive policies of its different organizations clearly demonstrated that the International Committee itself — even if obviously in a less serious form than the Pabloite International Secretariat — suffered from opportunist deviations of a centrist type, which its federalist character could only exacerbate.

Already in 1954 this could be said for the French section, in which the majority sector, led by Pierre Lambert, tended to develop opportunist positions towards reformist trade union sectors, both social-democratic and “pseudo radical-libertarian” in the union “Force Ouvriére” (FO). It expelled or forced out the most coherent sector of the PCI (Majority), a sector which then gradually flowed back towards Pabloism. At the same time, confronted with the Algerian revolution, it adapted to nationalism, denying the need for a fight for an independent Trotskyist party in this struggle and supporting one of the two organizations into which it was divided, the Algerian National Movement (MNA), which, moreover, was totally defeated in the fratricidal clash with the other petty-bourgeois nationalist organization, the National Liberation Front (FNL), to which the Pabloites completely capitulated.

In the same year, the organization headed by Moreno in Argentina made a 180-degree turn with respect to the positions it held until then (correct, with a touch of sectarianism) towards Peronism, shifting to adaptation to and support for this not even radical bourgeois nationalist movement, exalting Peron, inserting itself into the Peronist movement, and extending this support to all the bourgeois Bonapartes, even on the right, absurdly seen as progressives and anti-imperialists. Thus the morenistas came to support the initial successes of the reactionary dictator of Cuba, Batista, considered anti-imperialist, against the movement led by Fidel Castro, seen as a man of US imperialism (sic!). Even on the level of the revolutionary party, Moreno revised the Leninist position on the vanguard party, inventing the perspective of the so-called Revolutionary United Front (FUR), that is, a programmatic bloc between Trotskyists and left-centrists, which could replace the functions of the vanguard party.

The SWP, despite the difficulties of the McCarthy period and its clear weakening in the working class, tried to keep itself on the ground of consistent Trotskyism, but the crisis of the American CP after the XX Congress of the CPSU and the events in Hungary in 1956, pushed it onto the ground. of a hypotheses of regroupment with semi-Stalinist and progressive petty-bourgeois formations. Although this hypothesis failed, it marked the party’s policy thereafter by pushing it towards minimalism, the abandonment of workers’ centrality, and democratism. The reality of the Cuban revolution finally led it to adapt to these forms of radical, then Stalinized nationalism.

For the fourth most significant organization of the International Committee, an oddly opposite phenomenon occurred. “The Club,” as the entrist organization led by Healy was cryptically called, had adapted since 1949 to centrist sectors of the Labour movement, merging with them and placing itself on minimalist terrain. It was thus the most opportunist of the organizations that gave birth to the IC in 1953. But in this case, contrary to the US, the crisis of the British CP in 1956 freed many valuable militants from Stalinism. Healy’s group managed to capture several hundred of them. This pushed the organization to the left and led in 1958 to the birth of the important Socialist Labor League (SLL) which went on to develop a really methodologically Trotskyist entrism in the Labour Party (LP), which led to its gaining a majority in the youth organization of the party (for which it was expelled from the LP in 1964).

In the early 1960s. The SLL could have built itself up as a consistently Trotskyist organization with several thousand militants. Unfortunately, the paranoia of its principal leader, Gerry Healy, led it to turn into a military barracks organization. Any dissident tendency or militant was quickly expelled. In this context, many individually abandoned the organization, and many others who could have joined it were repelled by the methods they saw used. Furthermore, Healy replaced the materialist method of analyzing reality, and the programmatic bases of adhesion, with a strange voluntarist-idealist Hegelianism, according to him the basis of Leninism. He also developed ever more abstrusely catastrophic positions on the crisis of capitalism, the imminence of the revolution, and the centrality in all this of Britain, of the SLL and of himself personally. This led to the progressive abandonment of the method of transitional demands, towards a “maximalist” sectarianism (more similar to that of third period Stalinism than to Trotskyism). The analysis of Cuba as a bourgeois Bonapartist regime ruling a state capitalist economy was in this framework.

9.

The reunification achieved in 1963 between the Pabloite International Secretariat and a wing of the International Committee led by the SWP/US, was the product of capitulation by the SWP to Pabloism, originating in the SWP’s own ongoing shift to the right. A fundamental element in this shift had been the impact of the Cuban revolution, which the SWP analyzed in impressionistic rather than Marxist terms, going so far as denying, at least with regard to Latin America, the necessity of the struggle to build mass Trotskyist parties, and openly abandoning the Leninist strategy of proletarian revolution. At the same time, the International Secretariat, which agreed with the SWP and its allies (Palabra Obrera of Argentina, the name of the morenista group conducting an entry into Peronism, Partido Obrero Revolucionario of Chile, etc.) on the analysis of the Cuban Revolution and Castroism (which was presented as a revolutionary Marxist current, although with theoretical limitations), continued to be based essentially on the entire policy of liquidationist Pabloism. In fact the International Secretariat had discarded only a few elements of Pablo’s analysis (for example, the imminence of a third world war) which had obviously been shown to be false, while its fundamental positions remained the same as in 1951, in fact with a more open capitulation to petty-bourgeois nationalism in the colonies and former colonies (particularly the FLN regime, seen as a workers’ and peasants’ government, to be supported uncritically) — positions which were connected to an impressionistic evaluation of the new period of capitalist development which followed the war. From 1964 on, this evaluation would lead to the theory of “neocapitalism” with the consequent underestimation of the actuality of the socialist perspective and the revolutionary role of the proletariat in the imperialist countries.

Despite such areas of political agreement, the 1963 reunification represented an unprincipled bloc, insofar as a number of fundamental political issues (such as entrism “sui generis” in Stalinist and social-democratic parties in Europe), on which profound differences persisted between the International Secretariat and the wing of the International Committee led by the SWP, were not confronted, in order to avoid disturbing the process of unification, while in essence an agreement was established which guaranteed the reciprocal independence of the original Pabloites with regard to Europe and the SWP with regard to the US.

It is in this context that in 1964 the organizations belonging to the Latin American Secretariat of Orthodox Trotskyism (SLATO), led by Moreno, also entered the International Secretariat. These included the Chilean POR, which abandoned consistent Trotskyism — which it had defended until then, even clashing with the positions of Moreno — and joined with Castro-Guevarist sectors to form the Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR), from which they were expelled in 1969 for refusing to support the strategy of the guerrilla “foco” à la Guevara.

Significantly, it was precisely in the period immediately preceding and following this reunification that important splits took place from the right wing of Pabloism: the split in 1962 of the faction of the International Secretariat led by J. Posadas (significant in Latin America), still attached suprahistorically to all the formal aspects of original Pabloism, including the imminence of a third world war, and evolving toward openly pro-Stalinist positions; the expulsion in 1964 of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), numerically the most important section and the only section of the United Secretariat with a large mass base, which had gone over to counterrevolutionary reformism, entering the bourgeois government of Sirimavo Bandaranaike; and in 1965 the split of the Revolutionary Marxist Faction, led by Pablo himself, at the time an adviser to the Ben Bella government of Algeria, which carried to an extreme the position of the United Secretariat (USFI) on the priority of the colonial revolution over the proletarian revolution in the advanced capitalist countries and capitulated to Khrushchevism, among other things supporting the USSR in polemics with China, over against the rest of the USFI.

10.

The struggle within the International Committee against the capitulation of the SWP was conducted primarily by the Socialist Labour League (SLL) of Britain and the Parti Communiste Internationaliste (PCI/France, which in 1963 would become the Organisation Communiste Internationaliste [OCI/France]). This struggle, however, was not based on a genuine balance sheet of the experience of the postwar Trotskyist movement or of the International Committee itself. In effect the SLL and OCI combined sectarian attitudes (on the unification itself — refusing to participate in the reunification in order to fight Pabloite revisionism within a united International, as would have been correct to do — as well as on the character of the Cuban state) with the maintenance of essentially left-centrist politics.

The International Committee, maintained by the SLL and OCI with the support of a few other organizations (Greece, Hungary, and a left minority in the SWP), although attempting in its initial period (1963-1966) to draw certain lessons from its own past history, did not have a qualitatively different political character from the International Committee of 1953-1962.

11.

The Third Conference of the International Committee (1966) decisively blocked any possibility of its evolution to the left. In fact, the Conference reaffirmed the federalist character of the organization (a rule requiring a unanimous vote for a proposal to be adopted) and signaled the suppression of serious political discussion with the exclusion of the Spartacist League of the US for expressing generally correct positions on a number of fundamental questions, including the nature of Pabloism and the crisis of the Fourth International, the origin of the deformed workers’ states and the character of the Cuban state, and the evaluation of international economic and political perspectives.

The essentially bipolar condominium of the SLL and OCI established at the 1966 Conference contained in embryo the premises of the split of the International Committee into two counterposed blocs. The deepening of the differences between the two blocs’ policies (the OCI’s adaptation to international social democracy, its opportunist spontaneism, and its conception of the united front as a general strategy; the SLL’s national Trotskyism, verbal sectarianism — in particular regarding the Labour Party question — and idealist conception of the relationship between party and class) in fact provoked first political paralysis and then the definitive breakup of the International Committee in 1971.

12.

The USFI also revealed itself to be an unstable structure. At the end of the 1960s an acute factional struggle developed in the USFI, which, in reality, recreated the division between the old Pabloite component, on the one hand, and the SWP and its allies, on the other hand. The first component, the majority, adapted to the petty-bourgeois “gauchisme” which dominated the radicalized sector of the student youth. It adopted a line of vanguard guerillaism for Latin America. And subsequently, during the 1970s, it theorized the “imminence of the decisive clash”, in which the role of revolutionary leadership would be played by the so-called “new vanguard with mass influence”, that is, the confused mixture of spontaneist and centrist organizations built from the youth radicalization.

To this the SWP and its allies — among which the Argentinean Socialist Workers Party (PST, the new name of the organization led by Moreno) acquired more and more importance — counterposed the defense of formally “orthodox” positions. This was, in reality, an expression of a deeper adaptation to the political framework of bourgeois democracy and a more classic revisionism, as shown during the Portuguese revolution of 1974-75 and the Argentinean crisis of 1975-76.

This factional fight developed in unexpected ways in the second half of the 1970s. On the one hand, the Argentinean PST, clearly more determined than the SWP to lead a struggle against the USFI majority and rejecting the more openly opportunist positions of the SWP, built its own international faction, the Bolshevik Faction (BF). On the other hand, the SWP made a change of line, shifting to a completely Castroite position and deepening this until it finally broke with the USFI in 1990.

The sharpening of the factional fight in the USFI led to a split by the Bolshevik Faction in 1979 over the adaptation of the USFI majority to the leadership of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) and its consequent open condemnation of the activity of the Nicaraguan and other Latin American Trotskyists who had intervened in Nicaragua on the basis of the policy of the Bolshevik Faction.

13.

The crisis of the Fourth International provoked more and more organizational division (which we do not examine in detail in this document) but did not mean a complete passage of the forces of the Trotskyist movement to the ground of reformism and the acceptance of capitalist society or bureaucratic rule.

In fact, few organizations of any importance broke decisively with the perspective of international socialist revolution: the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) of Sri Lanka, which entered the People’s Front Government of Bandaranaike in 1964; the Posadaist “Fourth International”, now reduced to a political ghost, which shifted to a semi-Stalinist position following its support for the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968; the majority of the Brazilian section of the USFI “Socialist Democracy” (DS, inside the Workers’ Party, PT), when faced with the unveiling of the reformist nature and bourgeois character of the politics of the PT government and its leader maximo Lula — while the major part of the left of the PT broke and left the party — fully adapted, receiving in exchange ministries and other government and sub-government positions; the Nava Sama Samaja Party (NSSP) of Sri Lanka, born in the 1970s as a left split from the LSSS, which totally degenerated after 2015 to create an organic political bloc with a conservative bourgeois party.

Some other organizations, without shifting to the ground of reformism or of full Stalinism, have broken with their Trotskyist origins. They represent, at their present stage of development, organizations of a centrist type. The most important examples of these are three parties of a few hundred militants in the USA: the above-mentioned Socialist Workers Party; the Workers World Party (WWP), which was born in a split from the SWP/US at the end of the 1950s and is characterized by pro-Stalinist positions; and the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), which split from the WWP in 2004 and has similar pro-Stalinist positions.

However, the great majority of organizations that present themselves as Trotskyist have gone through a more limited process of political degeneration, which has led them to express politics of a centrist or left-centrist type without having broken their links with the Trotskyism. These organizations live a contradiction between their claim to Trotskyism and the centrist character of their policies. Taken together with the forces remaining on the ground of consistent Trotskyism, they form the world Trotskyist movement, the present Fourth International.

The Fourth International, as a united revolutionary Marxist organization, or even organizationally divided into two factions, as in the 1950s, is certainly dead, but there remains an international Trotskyist movement which, divided into a multiplicity of separate organizations, national and international, must be considered the terrain on which to develop an international political and organizational struggle to arrive at the refoundation of the revolutionary Marxist International, Leninist and Trotskyist.

14.

The major centrist forces of the international Trotskyist movement are those listed below.

A. The Fourth International (ex-United Secretariat of)

The United Secretariat of the Fourth International (USFI) a few years ago changed its official name, taking back that of “Fourth International,” with an operation which, in the context of the current situation of the Trotskyist movement, was abusive and incorrect. It remains the political heir of liquidationist Pabloism. This is expressed, first of all, by its denial of the need to build mass-based Trotskyist parties in every country as necessary instruments for the victory of the socialist revolution. Absolutely consistent with this, the USFI’s goal is not the building of a mass Fourth International, but rather the building of a so-called “New Revolutionary International”, without a complete and consistent programmatic basis.

In reality, the USFI continues the old Pabloite project of liquidating the Trotskyist movement into a confused centrist amalgam or even left reformism. The failure of this project is due to the fact that the various “partners” sought by the USFI, even when they really existed and were not merely figments of its imagination, were not interested in an international perspective, even of a centrist or left-reformist type, because that went far beyond their nonrevolutionary programmatic and political horizons.

For seventy years the Pabloites have searched for mythological “centrist trends evolving to the left” with which to fuse, but they have never found them, because the trends either were, in reality, more or less nonexistent, like the “left currents” in the Communist Parties in the 1950s or the “new vanguards with mass influence” in the 1970s, or were not evolving to the left.

This Pabloite policy led the USFI to adapt itself politically, programmatically, and organizationally to various centrist and left-reformist forces. The type of adaptation has varied from one period to another. So, from 1968 to the mid-1970s the USFI capitulated to the confused forces of the spontaneist centrist organizations produced by the “New Left” youth radicalization. But at the end of the 1970s the USFI changed direction and began to adapt politically to the social-democratic and Stalinist leaderships of the mass movements.

The leaderships of the USFI and its most important sections once more began to see their relationship with the working class as necessarily mediated by the leaderships of the mass parties and trade unions or by particular sectors of these leaderships. From this derives the myth of the “unity of the proletariat”, interpreted as the need for strategic unity of the organizations of the workers’ movement, unconditional support for the formation of national or local “left” governments — for example, the initial attitude of the USFI’s French section, the LCR, toward the Mitterrand government in France in 1981 — and adaptation to the reformist left of the trade unions in various countries.

This policy has continued in the framework of the new situation of general crisis of the international workers’ movement. The opportunist policy of the USFI particularly addresses itself to the left reformists. Examples are the uncritical support the USFI gave to the former leader of the French Communist Party, Juquin, in 1988 and to the Green Voynet in 1995, and its attitude toward the reformist majority of the Workers’ Party (PT) of Brazil and toward the leadership of the Italian Party of Communist Refoundation (PRC), presenting this reformist party as an example to follow and its ultra-opportunist leader Bertinotti as a quasi-revolutionary, to the point of supporting (even with a loyal vote in parliament and even after having been forced to break with the PRC) the center-left imperialist government of Prodi. Similarly, support for bourgeois governments was given by the sections of the USFI in Denmark and Portugal. In none of these cases, unlike in Brazil (where the entry had been direct, with a minister), was there any break or criticism on the part of the International. However, it should be remembered that before and even more than the Italian PRC, the USFI’s reference point had been the Brazilian PT, also seen as an example to be internationalized for liquidating the Fourth International into such an amalgam.

In the oppressed nations the USFI maintains an adaptation to the policy and the ideology of the radical petty-bourgeois nationalist movements, as shown, for example, by its uncritical political support from the experience of Algeria in the early 1960s, to the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua in the years following the 1979 revolution, even going so far as to present the latter as the regime of a proletarian dictatorship in the framework of a healthy workers’ state.

In all the nonproletarian mass movements the USFI, on the basis of the false theory of the right to complete autonomy of movements, adapted to the dominant petty-bourgeois ideology and positions.

In the period of the existence of the degenerated and deformed workers’ states the USFI leadership adapted to the reformist oppositional forces, continuing in fact to deny the perspective of a real political revolution and, from an opportunistic, gradualist viewpoint, relying on “liberal-progressive” bureaucratic forces or politically petty-bourgeois leaderships of anti-bureaucratic movements.

The revisionist positions of the USFI majority are based on the objectivist conception of the revolutionary process that Pabloism developed at its origin. This conception involves an undervaluation of the decisive role of the conscious, subjective factor — the Trotskyist party and its program — and the need for a conscious, organized, and determined struggle to develop revolutionary socialist consciousness in the masses. This objectivism necessarily means the misrepresentation of the active Trotskyist perspective of permanent revolution as a sort of objective and more or less automatic process.

But in its process of development the revisionism of the USFI leadership has gone so far as to challenge some key elements of revolutionary Marxism. These include the role of the vanguard party as a necessary instrument for socialist revolution and the understanding of proletarian democracy as counterposed to any form of bourgeois democracy.

The revisionist development of the positions of the USFI leadership was shown clearly in the attitude it took toward the crisis of international Stalinism. After decades of adaptation to Stalinism under the pressure of the petty-bourgeois attitude dominant in the official workers’ movement and also among the masses, the USFI shifted to a Stalinophobic attitude. The USFI showed itself incapable of developing a policy based on the intransigent defense of collectivized property in the means of production and on the counterposition of the perspective of the democracy of workers’ councils to both the bureaucratic dictatorship and the shift toward formal democracy of the bourgeois type. On the contrary, the USFI leadership has fallen into a fully centrist democratism, confusing bourgeois and proletarian democracy and applying formalistic criteria to the problem of the self-determination of the republics of the former USSR and Yugoslavia.

Beginning with the international crisis of Stalinism, the politics of the USFI have shifted further to the right. Far from taking from the events as a confirmation of the Trotskyist prognosis and an opening, even on the basis of a serious defeat of the proletariat, of a new opportunity for the Fourth International, the USFI has drawn liquidationist conclusions, confusing the fall of Stalinism with the defeat of the socialist perspective. Thus, under the pressure of reformist and petty-bourgeois democratic “public opinion”, it has come to speak of the closing “for a historical phase” of the perspective of socialist revolution and to characterize the strategic perspective for the workers’ movement in the next phase as a utopian “radical democracy”. Although joined to formally more “orthodox” elaborations, this is the essential frame of reference of the USFI today.

This aggravates further the negative function of the USFI, as evidenced by the fact that, while its politics move more and more away from Trotskyism and while this moving away is even affirmed openly, the USFI still maintains the pretence of presenting itself formally as “the Fourth International”. Thus the content and the form of the historical perspective of the Trotskyist International are mocked at the same time, and the pretence is maintained instead, with the aim of preventing its refoundation on a consistent basis. In this is expressed one of the most antirevolutionary aspects of the USFI and its nature as an obstacle to the development of the international revolutionary Marxist project.

Inside the United Secretariat, thanks to a more democratic (and also more anarchic and federalist) functioning, various left-wing factions or tendencies have developed, which have subsequently ebbed or split.

Today, however, on substantially consistently Trotskyist bases, a left faction present in various countries (the most important national section is the Anticapitalism and Revolution tendency of the New Anti-capitalist Party [NPA]) has been established under the name of Tendency for a Revolutionary International (TRI), which presented a programmatically correct text at the world congress of the USFI.

Furthermore, there are comrades who are more properly close to or on the positions of the ITO. They are, first of all, the Radical Socialist (RS) organization of India (close to our positions) and the Refoundation and Revolution (R&R) tendency of the US organization Solidarity, which was part of the ITO until its dissolution in 2004, when it became the US section of the Coordinating Committee for the Refoundation of the Fourth International (CRFI) and which takes full part in our process of reconstitution.

B. The Committee for a Workers International (CWI)

The Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI) developed as the international projection of the British “Militant” Tendency (MT), led historically by Ted Grant, starting from the significant success the MT had in its “entrist” work in the Labour Party from the 1960s to the 1990s.

The MT had its origins in the majority faction of the British section of the Fourth International in the 1940s, the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP). In the international congresses of 1946 (Reconstitution Conference) and 1948 (Second World Congress), the RCP developed a generally correct critique of the political analysis of the International leadership, in particular on the questions of the capitalist recovery in the West and the expansion of Stalinism in the East.

The faction led by Grant had been marginalized in the International, because, ironically with respect to the future, it had not followed the policy of total entry into the Labour Party (LP) proposed by the International Secretariat and applied with its support by a large minority led by Gerry Healy, which had separated in practical activity from the RCP. In fact, since the attempt to build a minimally significant party to the left of the LP proved to be completely impossible, and indeed the RCP was progressively weakening, its old majority dissolved it in 1949, reuniting with the entrist faction and accepting its policy. As soon as possible, however, Healy under various pretexts expelled Grant and the few dozen militants who had remained closely tied to him. Because of this, the Grant faction was not directly involved in the split of the Fourth International in 1953. In the second half of the 1950s, however, two unexpected events occurred. The Pabloite International Secretariat was left without a section in Great Britain. Grant’s group offered, without consideration of past and present divergences, to become one, and the IS, just as opportunistically, accepted (1957). The second unexpected event was that in 1959 Grant drew up a text called “Balance Sheet of Entism,” in which he overturned the positions held in the 1940s, passing over to supporting a hypothesis of strategic entrism for an indefinite period. and not only for Britain. Clearly, with these two decisions, the Grant group moved from Trotskyism to centrist revisionism.

For more than ten years after that, a contradictory relationship existed between the group led by Grant and the Pabloite International Secretariat (subsequently the United Secretariat). After the mid-1960s the Grant group separated from the USFI, and what became the Militant Tendency, from the name of its newspaper, had its own autonomous development, first as a national organization and subsequently with its own international extension, being known by the “popular” name International “Militant” Tendency (IMT).

The IMT was characterized by a general strategy of decades-long “strategic entry”, first into the British Labour Party and then, internationally, into forces of a social-democratic type. In this period the IMT expressed extremely sectarian positions toward the other forces of the Trotskyist movement, calling them “the sects at the margins of the worker’ movement”.

The IMT’s strategic entry strategy produced a policy of adaptation, partly formal, partly real, to reformist positions, for example, on the nature of the bourgeois state and the necessity of a revolutionary mass insurrection to destroy it. Developing a spontaneist conception of the “socialist consciousness” of the working class, the IMT openly criticized the Leninist conception of the party expressed in What Is to Be Done? Claiming to apply the method of the Transitional Program, the IMT has tended in reality to limit itself to general propaganda, without trying to transform transitional demands into agitational slogans, where possible.

The IMT developed a serious adaptation to imperialism, particularly to British imperialism, masked by a demagogic “socialist” and “internationalist” rhetoric. This is shown clearly in its attitude toward the Irish question. The MT demagogically and moralistically condemned the actions of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), equating the IRA activists with Loyalist paramilitaries and calling them “green Tories”. In the Malvinas war in 1982 the IMT took an effectively dual-defeatist position: no support to Britain, but for “workers’ sanctions against Argentina” and for the abstract hypothesis of a “socialist war” against Argentina. The IMT refused to give consistent support to the Palestine liberation struggle.

At the beginning of the 1990s, the CWI made a left turn. The basis of the turn was the long process of expulsion of MT supporters from the British Labour Party, including the two MPs elected to Parliament. The turn was realized through a faction fight which put the former leader Ted Grant, who remained linked to the totality of the old positions, in a small minority. The large majority of the British section lined up against Grant, under the leadership of Peter Taafe. In most of the other national sections the balance of forces was more equal, although even there a majority lined up with Taafe.

The left turn was caused by a break with the policy of entrism in the Labour Party and in various social democracies on the international plane, with the constitution of independent organizations, in first place the Socialist Party (SP, previously Militant Labour, [ML]) of England and Wales (in Scotland there is a separate section). The turn also brought to an end the absolute sectarianism toward the other revolutionary Marxist organizations.

On other grounds, however, the turn has been very partial. The most evident change is that the CWI has developed a serious attitude toward the struggles of the specially oppressed, although that only brings it to positions that the majority of the far left has been expressing for many years. The CWI opposed the Gulf War and the more recent imperialist mobilizations against Iraq, but it has not modified its position on Ireland. Its recent willingness to work with other political forces is positive, but this exposes the CWI to the pressures of forces not only to its left but also to its right. In general, the CWI continues to express a tendency to adapt to democratist positions, particularly on the questions of revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat. And it continues to express strong elements of adaptation to the level of spontaneous consciousness of the masses.

Limits which do not seem to have been overcome with the recent developments that have led to a dramatic crisis and split from the CWI itself (see point D. on the International Socialist Alternative).

C) The International Marxist Tendency (IMT)

The old minority of the CWI formed the International Marxist Tendency (IMT) in 1992, under the leadership of the elderly Grant (who passed away in 2006) and Alan Woods. It defended all the old revisionist positions of the CWI. It also totally capitulated to the Bonapartist regime in Venezuela headed by Chávez, presented as a great revolutionary socialist leader. In this total capitulation, in addition to renouncing the principles of permanent revolution and class independence, Woods went so far as to theorize the existence of a state that would be neither bourgeois nor worker, but nevertheless revolutionary and a step towards a workers’ state.

Since the international capitalist crisis of 2008, the IMT has moved to a kind of optimistic catastrophism. It thus demonstrated that it did not understand that, as Trotsky in particular brilliantly examined, there is no direct relationship between economic crisis and revolution, but that revolution is the product of the explosion of capitalist contradictions — social, economic (therefore also of crises, but not always and not necessarily), and political. In this framework, a global radicalization of youth has been invented (present in some countries, but not in many others, in particular in Europe). In this situation, the IMT has achieved a small and very partial evolution to the left, even ceasing to practice, in some countries, strategic entry into social-democratic or, in general, reformist parties.

However, this does not change the essential. Despite its claims, the IMT remains an organization that revises Trotskyism in a centrist sense, that separates itself from many principles and methods of Marxism in a fundamental way.

D) The International Socialist Alternative (ISA)

The CWI suffered a grave crisis in 2018-19, starting from a very sharp internal clash that saw the split of at least half of its militants. The origin of the crisis was the clash between the majority of the International Secretariat (IS) and that of the International Executive Committee (IEC). Behind this was the confrontation initiated by the leadership of the principal and “historical” section of the CWI, the Socialist Party of England and Wales (SPEW), against the leadership of the important Irish section (also Socialist Party, SP), which has a parliamentary presences well.

The fundamental political basis of the clash was around the questions of the centrality of the working class and the maintenance of the traditional political bases of the CWI. The majority of the IS accused, not without elements of reason, the Irish section and its international supporters (including the most important section of the CWI after the SPEW, Socialist Alternative [SA] of the US) of abandoning both, privileging mass movements without a directly proletarian character (feminist, LGBTQ+, etc.), adapting to them and reflecting their petty-bourgeois ideology. In reality, there was also another problem, the questioning by the majority of the International Executive Committee of the running of the international organization by the Secretariat in a top-down and Anglo-centric, even if formally democratic, manner.

The character of the clash led to a dramatic, major split (accompanied by other minor ones) in 2019, without the realization of the hypothesized world congress. In the congress it was probable that the old Secretariat would find itself in a minority, albeit slight, which hastened its decision to break, by proclaiming its faction as a refounded CWI. While talking about a minority split by the supporters of the IS, the other main faction decided, presumably considering the revisions in line with respect to the past, to change its name and call itself the International Socialist Alternative (ISA, its acronym in English).

As mentioned, the adaptation to petty=bourgeois movementist positions appears to be a real characteristic of this revisionist organization. In addition, it seems, in reference to the subsequent split of some small sections, that the levels of top-down control and restriction of democratic debate are worse in the ISA than in the old CWI, accompanied by moralistic codes of behavior for militants, expressions of ideological positions outside those proper to the simple communist ethics of revolutionary Marxists.

E. The Fourth International (Reproclaimed, Lambertist)

After the break with the Healy sector of the International Committee (which exploded on its own in the mid-1980s, ceasing to exist in the previous terms), the current directed by Lambert formed the Organizing Committee for the Refoundation of the Fourth International (CORQI ). Since then the Lambertist current has had various international experiences and names, up to the point of proclaiming the reconstruction of the Fourth International in 1993. What is certain is that the Lambertist current (in which practically all the national sections are strictly subordinate to the French section, marked by a profound national-Trotskyism) has progressively gone more and more to the right.

Lambertist politics are characterized historically by capitulation to international social democracy; political adaptation to the trade unionist level of consciousness of the working class; transformation of the tactic of the workers’ united front (and the anti-imperialist united front in oppressed countries) into a permanent strategy; Stalinophobia; political-economic catastrophism with the perpetual theory of “imminent revolution”; the absurd theory, contradicted previously by Trotsky’s texts of the 1920s, as well as by common sense, that the productive forces have ceased to grow since 1913; and the assumption of “democracy” (bourgeois) and the defense of nations, including imperialist ones (e.g., in relation to the European Union), as a strategic programmatic axis,

The Lambertist organizations are characterized by a complete lack of any real internal democracy, especially in the French section. Its leaders are notorious for slander campaigns and gangster methods used against political adversaries, particularly on the occasion of the major international splits of the predecessors to the CIR: the Organizing Committee for the Reconstruction of the Fourth International (CORQI, 1972-1980) in relation the splits that gave life to the organization led by Varga in 1972-73 and the Fourth Internationalist Tendency in 1979; and the short-lived bloc with the morenista tendency in the Parity Committee (1979-1980) and the Fourth International (International Committee) (QI[CI], 1980-1981).

Developing more and more anti-Leninist positions, Lambertism, like the other revisionist tendencies, liquidates the perspective of building Trotskyist parties in every country and building a mass Fourth International.

Thus it tries to create the conditions for unifying the so-called “legitimate tendencies of the workers’ movement”, claiming to base itself on the tradition of the First and Second Internationals, in counterposition to the “organizational sectarianism” of the Third International.

In developing this perspective, it combines extreme opportunism — linking itself with tendencies and organizations marginal on an international scale and essentially reformist or semi-reformist, like the Venezuelan MIR — with the most demagogic bluffs. Thus in January 1991 the CIR, with only its own forces plus some tiny reformist and petty-bourgeois allies, proclaimed a so-called Workers’ International Alliance for the Workers’ International and a continental section, the European Workers’ Alliance.

In France in November 1991 the PCI proclaimed, on a minimalistic and semi-reformist basis, a so-called “Workers Party”, which was supposed to unify the consistent Trotskyists, anarchists, socialists, and communists. This Workers Party was nothing more than a structure bureaucratically controlled by the PCI, which regrouped essentially its own members and strict sympathizers plus a small number of individual worker militants deceived by the Lambertists’ demagogy.

This absurd and ridiculous position continued in the further transformation of the French Lambertist organization into the Independent Workers Party (POI), in which formally the section of the International is only the Internationalist Communist Current (CCI), which obviously has by itself the absolute majority of the members of the POI.

In 2015 it underwent a major split, which saw the break of over a third of the militants, including the three members of the National Secretariat. Faced with electoral failures, the majority of the Central Committee, against the Secretariat, wanted to focus all the party’s work on trade union intervention (in general, rather opportunist, particularly in the social-democratic union Forza Operaia [FO]). In addition, there was an old hostility between the majority of leaders and leading cadres from the generation of 1968 or earlier and the successor designated by Lambert (who died in 2008), the general secretary of the POI, Daniel Gluckstein, who had been with the Pabloites in 1968 and had unexpectedly joined the Lambertists, with an important split, only in 1980.

From the POI split the Independent Democratic Workers’ Party (POID) was born. On the ground of pure image the POID appears less sectarian than the POI, but essentially nothing has changed. The POID remains the party of all the “legitimate tendencies of the workers’ movement,” and the formal organization of the Trotskyists within it is the Internationalist Communist Tendency. The central reference slogan of the POID remains that of the POI, that is, “For the Republic, Democracy and Socialism.” And when the POID established its international organization (taking the name of the Organizing Committee for the Refoundation of the Fourth International [CORQI]), gathering there too a minority of world Lambertism, it placed as the first article of its program, “The productive forces of humanity stopped growing in 1913. and this opened the phase of the socialist revolution” (sic!, with all due respect, obviously, to Marx, Engels and the Paris Commune).

F. The International Socialist League (LIS)

The International Socialist League is an international grouping that was formed starting from one of the fragments of Argentine and international morenismo. Having strengthened after the end of the military dictatorship in Argentina in 1983, morenismo formed an organization called Movimento al Socialismo (MAS) with several thousand militants, albeit on the basis of a distorted and very “attenuated” Trotskyist program. The same thing happened in the same period in Brazil, with the establishment of the “Convergencia Socialista” (CS) current of the Workers Party.

As seen above, the morenista tendency has always been characterized by wide variations and contradictions in its political positions, both throughout its history and in different countries at the same time. It has in practice carried out an extremely broad range of different perspectives: from the most marked adaptation to the trade union bureaucracy to anti-trade unionism; from open support for a popular front policy to the rejection of all united front tactics towards petty-bourgeois reformist or nationalist organizations; from the embellishment of Stalinist regimes to forms of Stalinophobia.

The basis of this chaotic zigzagging is given by an accentuated opportunistic unscrupulousness, the true and proper ideology of morenismo, which has made it a chameleonic current unable to develop the process of building revolutionary parties on serious Trotskyist bases.

This zigzagging revisionist policy continued after the break of the morenista current with the United Secretariat (1979) and the establishment, after the short period of a bloc with Lambertism, of the International Workers’ League (1982, better known by its initials in Spanish and Portuguese, LIT). The Argentine MAS, like its predecessors, had indeed a record of consolidated centrist politics, characterized, despite some oscillations and turns to the left, by adaptation to the union bureaucracy, bourgeois nationalism and populism, and by masking the revolutionary nature of its program. Furthermore, for many years the MAS followed a policy of electoral and political blocs with the Argentine Communist Party, also in this case with some zigzags. Starting from an erroneous conception of the united front, the morenistas transformed their bloc with the Communist Party from a specific tactic for concrete goals into a strategy, despite the politically reformist and organizationally bureaucratic character of the Communist Party itself.

But after Moreno’s death (1987) the latent contradictions exploded, also as a consequence of the fact that the MAS believed that Argentina in the late 1980s was on the eve of a revolutionary explosion in which the MAS really could take the power. The impact of the non-realization, even in partial form, of these absurd perspectives could only be disruptive. Morenismo shattered into several organizations. The furthest to the right and probably the most significant (with a thousand militants) was the Socialist Workers’ Movement (MST), which, along with the rightmost sectors of the LIT (important in Brazil), founded the International Workers’ Unity (UIT) in 1997.

The MST continued the MAS policy of political-electoral blocs with reformist, petty-bourgeois, and leftwing Peronist forces, not as a tactical choice, but as a strategy to place itself on the left of these blocs, transforming an eventual electoral alliance (moreover, within the given framework, absolutely opportunist) into a left=reformist political bloc without a class characterization (Movimento Progetto Sud). In the course of the development of the revolutionary crisis of the early 2000s, the majority of the MST correctly (although with elements of adaptation) participated in the piqueteros (organized unemployed) movement. This action clashed with the sectarian positions of a large minority of the party, which eventually split, constituting Izquierda Socialista (IS). The split had the support of the majority of the UIT.

This left the MST for several years without its own international organization, at least from a formal point of view, maintaining only a telematic network with a few organizations, particularly in Latin American, approaching, but never entering, the United Secretariat. In this period, in stark contrast to other organizations of morenista origin, it had a position of full adaptation to chavismo, exalting the so-called “Bolivarian revolution.”

The MST has made a partial left turn in recent years. It broke with the forces of the center-left and joined the front of the other main Argentine Trotskyist organizations, the Left and Workers’ Front (FIT), which in the 2021 elections took 6 percent of the vote.

In addition, on the international plane, it in fact broke with with chavismo, with its Venezuelan section (Marea Socialista) opposing President Maduro from the left.

This small turn, however, did not change the revisionist and centrist character of the MST politics. In fact, in the FIT it immediately posed the problem of a broadening of the FIT towards more moderate forces, while the battle against Maduro was fought, in large measure, in the name of “original chavismo.”

In this framework of partial modification, the MST and its allies broke with the USFI and gave impetus to a regroupment operation that mainly involved two organizations. The first was the Pakistani organization The Struggle, formerly a section of the International Marxist Tendency, which had developed a long process of “strategic entry” in the progressive bourgeois Pakistani People’s Party (PPP). The Struggle had been expelled from the IMT in 2016, because the International, as part of the above-mentioned “catastrophic” vision of the world situation, had wanted the Pakistani organization cease its entry into the PPP, and it had refused to do so (only to exit the PPP two years after the break). The second was the Socialist Workers’ Party (SEP) of Turkey, coming from the “Cliffite” tradition of theorists of the state-capitalist character of degenerated and deformed workers’ states.

The International Socialist League (LIS) was born from this regroupment in 2019. Although in the devastated context of the international Trotskyist movement a hypothesis of regroupment, rather than division, appears positive, it seems that this is not a unification really on a common programmatic basis, but rather of convenience, unless such a basis is provided by a perhaps probable “colonization” of the LIS by the MST. In any case, the LIS presents itself, like the MST, as a revisionist organization with politics of a centrist type.

G. The Internationalist Communist Union (Lutte Ouvrière)

The Internationalist Communist Union (UCI) is the international projection of the French organization Lutte Ouvrière (LO) with small groups, the most important of which are in Haiti and in the “French” departments of Guadeloupe and Martinique.

The LO originated from a group formed in France during World War II on sectarian positions (the Communist Group-Class Struggle, after World War II the Communist Union), which in 1944 refused to unify with the other Trotskyist tendencies in the new French section of the Fourth International.

LO’s politics are characterized by an economism rejects the method of the struggle for transitional demands and only occasional makes use of the transitional program. This economism is accompanied by an abstract popular propagandism on the communist perspective, partly positive, but not connected dialectically — that is, with the transitional method — with daily struggles. LO has a myth of building a “genuine workers’ party”, wrongly identifying the cause of the crisis of the Fourth International — a crisis that it considers to have originated in the period of the formation of the Fourth International — in the petty-bourgeois composition of the organization. This conception shows LO’s national outlook, because, although the French section had this objective problem at the end of World War II, other sections had a much larger proletarian composition — for example, the British RCP, the Belgian section, the SWP/US, the Bolivian POR, and the LSSP of Sri Lanka — and this prevented neither the crisis of the Fourth International nor the national degenerative processes.

On the basis of those positions, LO adopted non-Leninist methods of intervention, organization, and internal functioning. Its politics are characterized by a constant underestimation of the level of social crisis and class struggle and by a misconception of the potential that the political-social crises offers to the workers’ movement. This was particularly true in the revolutionary crisis of May 1968 and continued in each successive rise of the mass movement, in which all the centrist limits of LO’s politics came to light.

LO has traditionally had a semi-state-capitalist analysis of the degenerated and deformed workers’ states, recognizing the USSR as a degenerated workers’ state — a characterization which it still proposes ahistorically for the states produced by its explosion — but considering the deformed workers’ states as state-capitalist.

LO’s workerist positions lead it to abstain from many political struggles. This has extremely negative consequences for its positions on special oppression, especially women’s oppression and lesbian/gay oppression. With regard to these, LO largely reflects the reactionary positions of backward sectors of the masses.

Despite the centrist limits of LO’s politics, its capacity to develop abstract communist propaganda, the coherence of its constant independent electoral presentation, and its maintenance of a clear opposition to social-democratic and Stalinist reformism led LO to gain, beginning in 1973, an electoral success that consolidated, between 1995 and 2002 reaching 5-6 percent of the total vote (about 1,500,000 votes). But LO has been unable to exploit this important success for the construction of a true revolutionary party of the proletariat. In fact, it has ridiculously minimized the significance of its success in order to safeguard its present political-organizational reality and not put in question its own organizationally anti-Leninist and sectarian characteristics.

Moreover, it began to zigzag between sectarianism and opportunism: On the terrain of opportunism, for example, it appeared in 2008 in the local lists together with the reformist “plural left” to try not to lose, with this unprincipled ploy, its presence in administrative institutions, as was probable due to the drop in votes.

LO’s overall politics, far from real revolutionary practice and common sense, made it impossible for it to face the difficult political challenges of the last decade, in the first place the birth of France Insoumise of the social-chauvinist and reformist demagogue Mélenchon, once a Lambertist “infiltrator” in the Socialist Party and later a Mitterrand minister. Today LO is organically weakened, but above all it has lost the big electoral support of the past, getting results below 1percent.

15.

In addition to the revisionist tendencies we have indicated, there are many other tendencies. Some are national organizations, in some cases with a relatively significant role in their own country, and some are international tendencies, formally or informally constituted.

The most significant of these forces are located on the left of the Trotskyist movement and place themselves — sometimes with limits and errors — on the ground of consistent Trotskyism.

A. The Partido Obrero (PO, Argentina) and the Coordinating Committee for the Refoundation of the Fourth International (CRFI)

The Partido Obrero of Argentina was until a few years ago the main organization of the Coordinating Committee for the Refoundation of the Fourth International. Born in 1964 with the name Politica Obrera, it had been the second Argentine Trotskyist organization, placing itself clearly to the left of the centrist revisionism of morenismo.

At the end of the 1960s it joined the important Partido Obrero Revolucionario (Masas) (POR [Masas], after its newspaper), which had historically remained independent of both the International Secretariat and the International Committee. It then followed the POR into the Lambertist International (CORQI), from which it was shamefully expelled with a corollary of political slander in 1979 (when Lambertism attempted the above-mentioned maneuver of unification with morenismo). In this case as well, the POR solidarized with PO, and together with a few other South American organizations brought to life to the Fourth International Tendency (TCI).

Although clearly aligned to the left of centrist revisionism, the TCI was affected by the positions and the political nature of the POR, which behind an orthodox and sometimes ultraleft demagogy hid a real politics closer to an ideological and sectarian left-Menshevism, as seen in its attitude of renunciation (the exact opposite of the Leninist method) in the revolutionary processes in Bolivia of 1952 and 1984.

The political-programmatic errors of the TCI derived from a conception of the anti-imperialist united front in the dependent countries that tended to hypothesize the presence within the front even of leftwing bourgeois-nationalist forces, a conception that had importance in the opportunist attitude of the POR in the revolution of 1952. On the electoral question, its positions oscillated from the conception of electoral presentation as an expression of a united front — and not, like the traditional Trotskyist position, of revolutionary Marxist propaganda (albeit in a flexible way) — to an opposite one, of sectarian abstention (the POR rarely appears in elections in Bolivia and, as regards external support, just consider that it and its present very small international current called for abstention in Chile in 2021 between Kast and Boric).

The TCI and the POR, first of all, expressed completely sectarian positions towards the revisionist organizations of Trotskyism, classifying them tout court as “counterrevolutionary,” renouncing in sectarian terms some fundamental interpretative categories of revolutionary Marxism, such as that of “centrism”.

Another area of important error is analysis of the capitalist crisis and the development of the mass movements. The TCI tended to have a catastrophist view of the economic-financial crisis of capitalism. Equally and linked to this, it tended to overestimate the significance of the political crisis and the response — actual or potential — of the masses to the capitalist crisis. In this area too it was somewhat dialectical and was far from the hyperoptimistic views developed in the past by other tendencies of the Trotskyist movement (for example, the morenista tendency, with which the PO polemicized with theoretical acuteness in this area in the 1980s and 1990s). But these analytical errors need to be critiqued on behalf of a more coherent and dialectical approach to reality as a basis for elaborating correct tactics for the activity of consistent Trotskyists.

A positive leap for the PO took place in the early 1990s, when it and some organizations related to it (the Partido de los Trabajadores [PT] of Uruguay and the Partido da Causa Operária [PCO] of Brazil) broke with the Bolivian POR (leading to the dissolution of the Fourth International Tendency), with correct criticisms, in particular of its renunciatory and substantially opportunist attitude in revolutionary situations. And above all, the concrete attitude of the PO in the class struggle appeared to be consistently Trotskyist (beyond a few errors, such as the electoral block on one occasion with a Maoist force).

For this reason, in 1994, as the ITO, we decided to send a delegate to Argentina to propose to the PO to unify our two tendencies. In this central attention to the PO, then much weaker than today (2022), there was also a precise knowledge of the party and its character. This had first matured in a common “critical” presence in the Lambertist CORQI of the PO and our Italian comrades who would participate in the subsequent developments that led to the ITO. Then in initial discussions in 1979-82 to verify the possibility of unification between the TCI and the then Trotskyist International Liaison Committee (TILC, from the initials in English), a predecessor of the ITO. The discussion was also difficult because of the monstrous military dictatorship in Argentina, and ended due to the crisis of TILC in 1982-84.

The PO and its top leader Jorge Altamira, the real “big boss” of the party (in terms that surprised us and led some comrades of the ITO to raise objections to the hypothesis put forward), partially and slowly accepted our proposal. This led to the birth in 1997 of the Movement for the Refoundation of the Fourth International (MRFI). The MRFI saw the coming together of three different experiences, that of the PO and the Latin American organizations linked to it, that of our ITO, and that of the Workers Revolutionary Party (EEK) of Greece, which came from the tradition of the Healyite International Committee.

This regroupment was completely principled, in the tradition of the orthodox Trotskyist method. Having indicated the essential points for the regroupment (the “four points”), the Movement objectively posed itself as an intermediate phase towards the Refounded Fourth International.

Unfortunately, Jorge Altamira’s understanding of the consistent method of the fight for the refoundation of the Fourth International was unknown. Moreover, the MRFI was not established on a democratic-centralist basis, but on a federalist basis. But above all, Altamira thought that the process must essentially pass through the winning of significant organizations or currents of both the Trotskyist and centrist (or sometimes even reformist or left-Stalinist) movements, convinced essentially on the basis of the dialectical and theoretical abilities of Altamira himself and the development, certainly important, of the PO in Argentina. He did not understand — beyond criticism, at times formally exaggerated, of the revisionists — that the majority of them were headed by self-centered groups or cliques. Or that one of the fundamental aspects of the fight for regroupment and refoundation (besides, obviously, concrete intervention in the class struggle in countries where they are present with some force) is factional struggle inside the centrist or left-reformist forces, even starting from very small groups of comrades and propaganda activity. In fact, the only relatively important gain was, through the EEK, that of the Revolutionary Workers’ Party (DIP) of Turkey.

So for Altamira, in contradiction to his catastrophic analyses, times could always be long. Thus the MRFI was maintained with a totally federalist functioning until 2004. In that year Altamira, also on the basis of the development of the PO, starting from its role in the revolutionary situation in Argentina in 2001-2002, decided to carry out the transformation of the MRFI into a democratic-centralist organization, the Coordinating Committee for the Refoundation of the Fourth International (CRFI). Although quite chaotic, the congress was the only moment in the history of the MRFI / CRFI in which there was a significant political discussion (with the presentation by the majority of the comrades of the former ITO of seven important amendments, of course rejected, to the CRFI program). Naturally, at the very moment of the opening of the congress we dissolved the ITO (and this explains why the amendments were not all presented by all the delegates from ITO).

However, the congress was not the premise for the development of the serious functioning of the CRFI. Meetings always ended with resolutions, generally catastrophic, generally generic. Even the publication of the International Journal El Obrero Internacional was interrupted. No translations of texts, no real international bulletins. No international action was seriously undertaken. So Altamira continued, in his political analysis, his constant empiricism, little related to the principles and history of the Trotskyist movement (naturally, always in a concrete revolutionary Marxist framework), even developing a polemic (absurd for a Leninist and consistent Trotskyist) against “democratism.“ Thus, also in this case, given that even the birth of the CRFI did not attract significant international attention and that the a-Trotskyist centrist contacts (e.g., in Brazil and Bolivia) capitulated to reformism, Altamira quickly passed to a passive attitude towards the activity and the very existence of the CRFI.

The second congress of the CRFI, scheduled for 2007, never took place, and the little discussion that took place did not really involve all the militants of the various CRFI organizations (with the exception of the Partito Comunista dei Lavoratori [PCL] of Italy, the principal organization originating from the old ITO, which constantly had specific international conferences and specific points in its congresses dedicated to the situation of the CRFI, translating the maximum material possible).

The non-functioning became clearer starting from 2011, when the international bodies of the CRFI ceased to function, even if only formally, all and always by the unequivocal decision of Altamira. And even more clear in 2014, when, starting from Altamira himself, the evident was recognized, that is, that the CRFI, as a democratic-centralist organization, had long since ceased to exist.

In all international meetings the PCL constantly fought this situation, which it rightly defined as anarcho-Bonapartist functioning, but was unable to change it. This is also due to the contradictions and political cowardice of the other two main parties of the CRFI (after the de facto exclusion, formally incorrect, in large measure its own fault, of the Brazilian PCO), that is, the EEK and the DIP. Both opposed the attitude of Altamira and supported the need to carry out the second congress and to develop the discussion on organizational problems among the whole CRFI, but unable to develop a political fight with us, as expressed in a three-way meeting in 2013, in which they rejected our proposal to launch a joint tendency in the CRFI to try to rectify the situation. In this context, in 2014 or 2015, it would have been logical, without breaking with the framework, albeit largely fictitious, of the CRFI, to re-establish the ITO, returning to the situation of the MRFI. Not doing so was a mistake.

While the situation dragged on between the hypothesis of finally realizing the mythical second congress and the political discussion of this, the DIP in particular continued to zigzag between the hypotheses of a common fight and the withdrawal of the same hypothesis. Finally, in 2017, came Altamira’s exclusion of the PCL from the CRFI, completely against the statutes and without process, presumably based on the fear that we were (obviously not true) joining the Trotskyist Fraction (FT, led by the Socialist Workers Party [PTS] of Argentina).

The EEK and, above all, the DIP declared that they disagreed, but once again quickly capitulated. Thereafter, the positions of the two parties became more and more distant from ours, moving towards a “campism” (defense of Russia and China) and an adaptation to left-wing Stalinist forces.

At the same time, however, there was an epochal change in the PO. Unexpectedly defeated by a young PTS leader in the FIT primary for the presidential elections of 2016 and with a markedly diminished prestige, Altamira decided (with the evident purpose of later regaining his lost prestige) to exit from all the leading bodies at that year’s PO congress (the PO holds annual congresses). After a year, in 2017, he presented himself again with the usual attitude of “Capo Massimo,” harshly criticizing everything and everyone and, above all, the preparatory documents for the congress. But this time the overwhelming majority of the leaders of the PO, fresh from a year of altogether more serious activity without altamirista domination, rejected this method and the altamirista hypothesis of returning to the previous situation.

From that moment Altamira tried to create the conditions either to take back the party or to organize a split. Finally, at the 2019 congress, having gotten 23 percent of the votes on a document presented with the support of a few other old leaders, he carried out a break. After having sworn to the congress that he wanted to maintain the unity of the party, he asked for the right of public faction, incredibly affirming that he was thereby defending democratic centralism, which he had always ignored and violated, especially at the international level. Then realizing the creation of a new organization, demagogically called Partido Obrero (Tendencia) and today more and more known by the name of its newspaper Politica Obrera. Almost all of the CRFI (EEK, DIP, PT) has in fact sided with Altamira, albeit with uncertainty. But after some hypotheses of revival, the CRFI has plunged back into real political non-existence.

The break of the PO with Altamira is a very positive fact. Although no one can deny Altamira’s significant political abilities, which allowed the PO to grow continuously from 1964 onwards, his Bonapartist, erratic and empirical leadership, first of all on the international level, limited the possibilities of the PO to play an even more important role. And in any case, the persistence of this situation called into question, as in every analogous case, the future of the party. Fortunately, the PO had alongside Altamira a leadership of great political worth, who managed to preserve the party in this difficult situation.

But it is not only from the point of collective and democratic leadership that the break with Altamira had a positive aspect. Apart from secondary issues, there are two important political issues on which the majority of the PO clashed with Altamira. The first is the problem of typically altamirista conceptions of a catastrophic type. Without theoretically questioning them from a general point of view, the majority of the PO opposed the concept that in a context of crisis it was impossible to have a situation in which the bourgeoisie was the dominant force. The position of the majority of the PO represented, beyond all its possible limits, the questioning of the political center of the catastrophic conception that Trotsky fought all his life, that is, the direct relationship between capitalist crisis and revolutionary development.

The second important point was that of the central demand of the “Constituent Assembly” at all times, as a supposed transitional slogan. A position that Altamira, having criticized for decades — when (in a zigzag, as always) it was Moreno’s own — has for several years made his own, and in an increasingly central way. Rightly, the majority of the PO, without taking a position of rejecting, anywhere and in any situation, the “Constituent Assembly,” recalled that the progressive character of this slogan depends on the political and social situation. Sometimes it can simply be without any sense, at times (see Venezuela) it can be agitated by rightwing forces, because its realization would have reactionary results.

If the PO is able to be consistent in the development of the various positions that forced Altamira to break, it could play a fundamental role in the refoundation of the International. Finally, it should be noted that today an important area of political discussion with the PO and mutual verification of positions is that around the analysis of the world situation, in particular on the decisive point of the nature of China (and Russia), a point that affects the orientation of Trotskyists in the current world scenario.

As for the dying CRFI residue of Politica Obrera, the EEK and the DIP, if we cannot, in spite of everything, consider its components as “centrist,” these are forces that progressively move away from consistent Trotskyism. In particular, the most important, the Argentine one (probably a thousand strong), has gathered militants essentially on the basis of loyalty to the “big boss” while mixing opportunism and sectarianism.

B. The International Workers League (LIT)

The International Workers League (LIT) exists mainly in Latin America. As we have seen, its principal leading figure was Nahuel Moreno, and historically, its leading section was the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS,) of Argentina, which Moreno led. Today, instead, the center of the LIT has moved to the United Socialist Workers Party (PSTU) of Brazil, produced by the 1995 exclusion of the important morenista tendency from the reformist Workers’ Party (PT).

The LIT is the political heir of the old Bolshevik Faction of the USFI, constituted after the short period of formal unification with the Lambertist current from 1979 to 1981.

We have already seen the opportunistic and contradictory characteristics at the extreme of morenismo. The basis of this chaotic zigzagging was an opportunist lack of scruples, the true and proper “ideology” of morenismo, which has been a chameleonic current incapable of developing the process of building revolutionary parties on sound Trotskyist foundations.

On the central question of the building of the Fourth International as the leadership of the future international socialist revolution, the LIT, despite its criticism of the opportunism and liquidationism of the USFI, expressed confused and contradictory positions, which were also potentially liquidationist. For example, the LIT put forward in its 1986 International Manifesto the perspective of an “extra-Trotskyist” mass international, which would regroup diverse forces, in which the Trotskyists (meaning those with Trotskyist positions) might be a minority.

In the 1980s and 1990s the LIT was marked by an analytical approach to reality characterized by a hyperoptimistic evaluation of the situation in the class struggle and a catastrophist conception of the situation of capitalism. So, at the height of the difficulties of the international workers’ movement, it spoke of the development of a prerevolutionary or even revolutionary situation on a world scale. Confronting the developments in the East, the LIT picked out only the phenomenon of the fall of Stalinism (in itself positive) and not that of the capitalist-restorationist counterrevolution, the historical success of world imperialism. It spoke — in ambiguous and substantially non-Marxist terms, in the given conditions — of the “triumph of the democratic revolutions”, dreaming of nonexistent revolutionary mass movements and denying, for a phase, the process of capitalist restoration.

The clash with reality of the whole of these analyses and the perspectives that didn’t follow were the cause of a series of crises that struck jointly, upsetting both the LIT and the Argentinean MAS. As we have already seen, in recent years the LIT has given rise to diverse international organizations, all claiming the morenista tradition.

In Argentina the failure of the absurd hypothesis advanced in the mid-1980s of a revolutionary development in which the leading role would be played by the MAS, in alliance with the Communist Party or without it, led to the explosion of this party — once numerically the strongest in the international Trotskyist movement — into a good dozen organizations of varied consistency, of which the most significant today is the Socialist Workers Movement (MST) of which we will speak later.

At the end of the 1990s the leading group of the LIT (centered around the Brazilian PSTU) evolved positively, beginning with a break with the previous hyperoptimistic approach, recognizing the process of capitalist restoration in the East and, therefore, the defeat of the proletariat on this ground. It also reaffirmed, against movementist and revisionist positions developing inside the Argentinean MAS (or rather what remained of it), a general defense of the traditional Leninist and Trotskyist positions. The PSTU finally broke with its preceding adaptation to the popular front, which led it briefly to join the “Frente Brasil Popular”, the first form of inter-class alliance realized by the PT with “progressive” petty-bourgeois sectors.

The whole of this development has led the LIT to a break with what remained of the Argentinean MAS. This break occurred when the latter — under the influence of the Italian organization Revolutionary Socialism (SR), which for years was a section of the LIT — put in question the very fundamentals of Leninist and Trotskyist theory and, therefore, of revolutionary Marxism, with the development of movementist “libertarian” positions (in words, since the Italian SR has a totally repressive internal regime), revising the traditional Trotskyist analysis of the Stalinist and “democratist” bureaucracy and defending and developing the most negative past LIT analyses of the major world events of the last historical period.

After this, the positive development of the LIT was, unfortunately, interrupted and even turned back towards “classical” morenismo. The LIT has thus returned to evaluating every mass movement as progressive, regardless of its character. So it was in Ukraine with the Maidan Square movement, in Venezuela with the movement against Maduro, in Brazil itself with the one against Lula and Dilma. This last position led to a split (unfortunately, of a clearly centrist character) of the PSTU, which lost 700 of its approximately 1700 militants there.

Moreover, the LIT, as it was before, with respect to the Argentine MAS of Moreno, remains today more a political extension of the PSTU than a real international organization, as well as, naturally, considering itself, beyond the phrases, as the unique nucleus of the Fourth International. It is, therefore, the umpteenth “international faction” that does not really set itself the task of the reconstruction of the International.

C. The International Workers Unity (UIT)

The International Workers Unity (UIT) was born in 1996 through the fusion of the most important of the organizations originating from the crisis of the Argentinean MAS, that is, the Socialist Workers Movement (MST), a few organizations connected with it (essentially in Latin America), and the small current — of distant “Lambertist” origin — centered around the Revolutionary Workers Party (POR) of Spain, led by Anibal Ramos.

The split of the MST in 1992 was the fundamental base of departure of the explosion of the MAS. The MST took with it, in particular, the majority of the trade union cadres of the party and its representative in the national parliament (Luis Zamora). Compared to the MAS in progressive decomposition, the MST has represented a relatively stable organization, which has sought to reproduce the old traditional morenista politics, above all in their opportunist aspects. In particular, the MST has resumed and maintained a strategic bloc with the Argentinean PC under the name United Left (Izquierda Unida [IU]), with an ambiguous policy toward the forces of the Argentine center-left.

In fact, these were the reasons that led the MST and its international supporters (particularly strong in Brazil, where they formed the minority of the morenista current in the PT, opposed, at the time, the break with the PT that gave rise to the PSTU) to break to the right from the LIT in 1996, and to set up the UIT. In doing this they just repeated the catastrophic analyzes of the previous period and announced as a great victory the collapse of the political-social system of the regimes of the Eastern European countries, starting from the USSR, confusing the two aspects (precisely political and social) of the events and speaking of “great democratic revolutions carried out by the proletariat.”

In the early 2000s, the MST split in two. The minority (a very large minority) formed a new organization with the name Socialist Left (IS). The IS questioned the more moderate positions of the MST, in particular with respect to the piquetero movement and the strategic alliance with the Argentine CP. A minority in Argentina, the IS, however, found itself to have the support of the majority of the International, so the UIT remained centered around it and the Brazilian current.

The UIT, like the LIT, has not been able to distinguish between progressive and reactionary movements, also supporting the latter, from Ukraine to Venezuela and other countries.

Given the lack of positive development of the positions of the LIT, logic would suggest that there be a reunification of the two organizations. The main obstacle is the different choice of the two organizations in Brazil. The PSTU has a more “orthodox,” even sectarian, conception of the vanguard party, which it feels is already realized with itself. It maintains its control over a small (in particular for Brazil) vanguard trade union confederation Conlutas (about 200,000 ), all the more significant as the PSTU has very modest electoral results (sometimes below 0.1%). While the Brazilian section of the UIT is deeply inserted inside the Socialism and Freedom Party (PSOL), a centrist organization with a parliamentary presence, born from the confluence of the different trends that quit or were excluded from the PT following the governmental experience of President Lula, totally subordinate to the national and international bourgeoisie.

With its overall politics that — undialectically — mix hyperoptimistic and catastrophist analyses of the real situation and its concrete opportunism in many situations, the UIT is the political continuator of morenismo, and the historical critical judgment on this current of the Trotskyist movement cannot fail to touch this organization too. However, the fact that it broke with the clearly centrist MST affected its politics. While on the one hand, it supported reactionary movements in different countries in pure morenista style, on the other hand, on the terrain of Argentina it has tried in recent years, with the IS, to remain anchored to the left, in particular with its participation in the FIT. Also, in PSOL it is not part of the more moderate majority. In short, lacking a more zigzagging and opportunist king of chameleonism like Moreno, it no longer presents — pointedly unlike the Argentine MST — positions of a political bloc with nationalists, reformists or Stalinists, or even of a “popular front” type.

However, one thing is certain. The UIT is a dogmatically morenista organization ideologically (something of which even the other currents deriving from morenismo accuse it), and in reality it does not have any hypothesis of regroupment that is not on these bases, also aided by maintaining the anti-Leninist conception of the FUR. It will be able to play a positive role only if it is involved, as a non-hegemonic component, in a larger regroupment, of which it certainly cannot be at the origin.

D. The Trotskyist Faction – Fourth International (FT-CI)

The leftmost of the organizations resulting from the crisis of the old Argentine MAS was the Socialist Workers Party (PTS), which was the first important split of that party. It arose from the break in 1988 of a leftwing faction of the party, which among others included the majority of the broad leading group of the youth. This faction accused (not wrongly) the majority of the party of lacking internationalism and of national Trotskyism, because they believed that Argentina would inevitably be the center of the revolutionary situation in the world and that, consequently, all efforts should center on the development of the MAS and not of the LIT (in which, however, they had no support).

Initially, the PTS presented itself as orthodox morenista and indeed accused the MAS leadership of having abandoned the teachings of the “master.” Progressively, however, the PTS revised the history of its current and abandoned any reference to morenismo, with a real evolution on the level of political positions. With attention to the study of the historical positions of Trotskyism, the PTS expressed several times (for example, with respect to catastrophism or the united front) more orthodox positions than those of the empirical Altamira. Furthermore, always on the basis of the reference to the Trotskyist method, it began to develop interventions in various countries abroad, starting from very small propaganda nuclei and with entrist interventions, which effectively allowed it to build, almost from nothing, important organizations in Brazil, Chile and France (while Altamira, instead, also for banal questions of character, did not conceive of anything of the kind, being interested only in already organized groups of some consistency, an evidently absurd position for a Trotskyist).

However, the PTS, despite this success and having arrived, in general, on consistently Trotskyist terrain, had in fact more limits and defects than the PO, even at the time of Altamira.

In the first place, as seen, morenismo was not only a politically revisionist current but also a chameleonic and maneuvering one. If the PTS cannot be accused of political chameleonism, it certainly can and must be accused of maneuvering. Indeed, although other organizations of morenista origins are not exempt from this defect, the PTS is by far the worst of them on this ground. Just to give some examples. While an international leader of the PTS and FT declared (2016) to our comrades of the Italian PCL, that they were not interested in dividing the PCL, taking away a small group of supporters, which they hardly knew existed, he was organizing the process of splitting this group from the PCL.

In 2021 the situation in the French NPA made it clear that at the next congress (2022) the bloc of left currents would take an absolute majority over against the remaining Pabloite elements (which probably would have split) and changed the nature of the party. At this very moment the important FT current broke with the party by publicly declaring that it had been expelled from the NPA. The expulsion was a total invention. Despite the attempts of the FT militants, not one of their comrades had been expelled or even suspended, But despite the public denials of the NPA, they continued to affirm the total falsehood, to appear victims. The break had been decided by the PTS / FT precisely to avoid taking over the party with other currents, consistently Trotskyist or close to its conceptions, because then it would have been difficult to break with them (and, moreover, it thought it would be able to present one of its own leaders, a worker, young and of Maghreb origin, and exploit his candidacy in order to launch its own organization).

Because the PTS / FT, while declaring and arguing that it wants to carry out a process of revolutionary Marxist regroupment, both in Argentina and internationally, is totally sectarian and self-centered, and thinks it is the sole nucleus of the Fourth International to be refounded. It also re-proposes, at least on the political-organizational level, the national Trotskyism against which the PTS was born. It is no coincidence that we are talking about PTS / FT. Because, in fact, the FT is nothing more than the pure projection of the Argentine party. The FT is not based on democratic centralism. It holds “congresses” every year, but they are not real congresses, just meetings in which the various sections come to be “instructed” by the parent party.

We also add that if, from the point of view of classical Trotskyist theory, as we have said, the PTS / FT has been able to rediscover much of orthodox Trotskyism, thus breaking with the centrist revisionism of morenismo on the political level, placing itself, despite all its limits and defects, on the ground. of consistent Trotskyism, on the level of subsequent theoretical development, the PTS has revealed severe limits in knowing how to use the method and content of Trotskyism and, more generally, revolutionary Marxism, in the face of new phenomena. For example, despite having fully grasped the characteristics of the first phase of capitalist restoration in China, it then stopped, failing to grasp China’s development in an imperialist sense, denying this reality with insubstantial arguments.

In recent years, the leadership of the PTS / FT (starting with its principal leader, Albamonte, “the cult leader,” as in the tradition of morenismo and of other organizations, such as Lutte Ouvriére) has “fallen in love” with the original leader of the Communist Party of Italy, Antonio Gramsci. Like almost everyone, he turned not to Gramsci, a communist and revolutionary political leader between 1917 and 1926, but to his writings from the period of his incarceration in a fascist prison, collected in the Prison Notebooks, written between 1929 and 1935 in a situation in which, for obvious reasons, Gramsci could only write cryptically. Thus the term “modern prince” conceals that of “revolutionary Marxist party,” but it has been confused by thousands of “left intellectuals” of all types and political positions. The term “hegemony” conceals the terms “leadership of the proletariat” in the revolution or “dictatorship of the proletariat” with the revolution, but it was seen as a great new concept of the development of Marxism.

The PTS has been added to this game of overturning the thought of Antonio Gramsci. In particular, ruminating around the concept of hegemony. So it has developed a confusing theoretical shift to the right. This has recently been expressed in the “discovery,” like and more than Altamira, of the Constituent Assembly as a “transitional” demand everywhere in the world (e.g., in France and Spain), leading towards a democratism alien to orthodox Leninism-Trotskyism.

E. The Socialism or Barbarism Current (Nuevo Movimento al Socialismo – Argentina)

Socialism or Barbarism is an international current of modest size, centered on the Argentine organization Nuevo MAS and with a minor role of the Brazilian section, now positioned as a left opposition tendency within PSOL (the left split from the PT).

It is an organization that beyond the name, which can cause misunderstandings, is not the direct continuity of the old morenista MAS, even if some of its original militants come from that party and, above all, from the PTS. Established in early 2000, since 2004 it has matured and publicly declared its break with Moreno’s central positions. This with particular reference to the latter’s revision of the theory of permanent revolution, transformed from the program of action of revolutionary Marxists for the proletarian conquest of power into an objective process (“unconscious workers and socialist revolution”), and / or into a general scheme of revolution by stages that absolutizes and distorts the experience of the Russian revolution (the “theory of February and October”) in the service of of a minimalist and subaltern politics.

The Nuevo MAS rejects catastrophic economic-political analyses, recognizes the imperialist nature of China and Russia, takes a consistently Leninist defeatist position with respect to all imperialist poles, has rejected any support for mass movements of a reactionary nature, as in Venezuela. It does not seem to have a self-centered and sectarian position on the question of the refoundation of the revolutionary International. Given our recent knowledge of this organization, these and other aspects will naturally need to be deepened.

Nevertheless, this tendency seems to have a self-centered and sectarian position with respect to the question of the refoundation of the revolutionary International, rejecting thus far discussions with other Trotskyist organizations, even with apparently close positions, such as ours.

16.

Finally, there are small Trotskyist groups in the world, at times internationally connected with nuclei or individuals in other countries in international mini-factions, which are placed on the terrain of the Trotskyist program and, in general, of the anti-Pabloist tradition.

What characterizes them in general is an accentuated sectarianism, which explains, at least in the majority of cases, their isolation from the main forces that refer to Trotskyism. Some of them regroup valuable cadres, who could be important in building sections of the refounded revolutionary International in countries where there are no other organized forces of the international Trotskyist movement, or in significantly strengthening their scant presence.

In this context, it is not possible to make an exhaustive and specific list of these forces: in the future, or when conditions allow / recommend it, a discussion with each of them would be desirable to verify the possibility of involving them in whole or in part in a process of Trotskyist regroupment.

17.

The Fourth International has suffered a grave process of political degeneration and organizational fragmentation. As a united, organized revolutionary political force, as the nucleus of the international proletarian leadership, as the world organization of genuine revolutionary Marxism, it has obviously ceased to exist. This fact poses the fight for the international proletarian leadership in an extremely elemental form as the primary task facing proletarian revolutionaries today.

The first problem of international strategy that consistent, orthodox Trotskyists must, then, take up is the question of how actually to proceed in this elemental fight for the international proletarian leadership.

Despite its acuteness, and the political degeneration of its various fragments, the historical crisis of the Fourth International still differs qualitatively from the historical crises of the Second and Third Internationals.

In August 1914 the betrayal of proletarian internationalism by almost all the national social-democratic parties at the outbreak of World War I signaled the conversion of social democracy into a counterrevolutionary agent of the imperialists within the workers’ movement, whose primary political function was to prevent the revolutionary unity of the proletarians of all countries and the revolutionary seizure of power by the working class of any country. The social-democratic program of reforms, real and illusory, became primarily a means of inhibiting the militant development of the proletarian class struggle and tying the workers of each nation to “their own” bourgeoisie and the economic development of “their own” national capitalism. The essentially counterrevolutionary role of the social democracies was confirmed by their responses to the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the revolutionary situations that developed throughout the world in the aftermath of World War I.

In 1933 the most important section of the Third International outside the Soviet Union, the German Communist Party, thanks to the grotesque “third period” line of the Stalinist Comintern, proved utterly incapable of mounting a serious struggle against Hitler’s seizure of power. Instead of openly drawing the lessons of this catastrophic failure, the entire Third International pretended no serious political errors had been committed, while moving, initially behind closed doors, from the bureaucratic ultimatism and adventurism of the late 1920s and early 1930s to the crassly opportunist policies of popular-frontism in 1934-1936. Popular-frontism and global class-collaborationism became the fundamental strategy of the Third International, to which the actual organization of the Third International itself was sacrificed in 1943.

The incapacity of the German Communist Party or the Comintern to respond in any sort of communist fashion to the victory of Hitler led Trotsky in 1933 to turn from the strategy of fighting to regenerate the bureaucratic-centrist Third International to the strategy of fighting to build a Fourth International, seeing the Comintern as still bureaucratic-centrist but no longer capable of regeneration. And with the adoption by the Stalinist government and Comintern of policies openly endorsing the “right to national self-defense” of the “democratic” imperialists, the Comintern became itself, by the time of its seventh world congress in 1935, a counterrevolutionary force, in practice social-patriotic and committed to preventing world proletarian revolution.

In the aftermath of World War II, Stalinist parties betrayed the working classes throughout Europe and Asia, preventing or aborting revolutionary struggles. The bureaucratic extension of collectivized property in Eastern Europe and, eventually, East Asia and Cuba, did not alter the essential character of Stalinism as an international counterrevolutionary force.

The Fourth International has not gone through such a decisive transformation. Its degeneration and fragmentation have led to the development of a set of organizations which, with a few exceptions — essentially the LSSP of Sri Lanka and the Posadists — cannot be regarded as consolidated counterrevolutionary organizations within the workers’ movement. The international and national organizations presenting themselves as Trotskyist differ qualitatively from the essentially counterrevolutionary social-democratic and Stalinist formations.

The great majority of the forces which have degenerated from Trotskyism maintain politics which are generally revisionist and centrist — or, in a few instances, ultraleft-revisionist — without breaking openly and completely with revolutionary Marxism.

The Pabloites have distorted the Trotskyist program and adapted it to various nonrevolutionary petty-bourgeois and bureaucratic currents. They have subordinated or denied the role of Trotskyist parties as the necessary expression of the political independence of the working class, in favor of adaptation to these nonproletarian and nonrevolutionary forces. The organizations of the International Committee of 1963-1971 tended to combine national-Trotskyist adaptationism with extreme forms of national-Trotskyist sectarianism (Lambert most clearly characterized by capitulation to social democracy, Healy by collapse into crazy sectarianism).

But from both sides of the 1953 split and in the various fragments from the successive breakups — or previous breakups, as in the case of LO of France — organizations and tendencies survive whose opportunist and sectarian revisions of Trotskyism have not yet produced a complete and decisive break with the programmatic bases of revolutionary proletarian politics. These organizations continue to relate themselves positively, in various ways, to the Transitional Program of 1938. Programmatically they still advance, even though in some cases with many contradictions, the perspective of the proletarian dictatorship based on soviet democracy, still formally reject popular-frontism, still declare their commitment to proletarian internationalism, even while revising and distorting these principles and adapting to currents hostile to them. They are essentially centrist organizations, but centrist organizations of a special kind.

In continuing to proclaim their adherence, even in a distorted fashion, to the revolutionary program of Trotskyism, these organizations continue to attract militants breaking towards revolutionary politics from social democracy, Stalinism, and conventional forms of centrism.

The actual and potential role of these Trotskyist-centrist organizations as apparently revolutionary Marxist poles of attraction to advanced workers internationally and in the majority of individual countries, creates a highly contradictory, complex and historically unprecedented situation with fundamental implications for the strategic perspectives of orthodox Trotskyists fighting for the refoundation of the World Party of Socialist Revolution, which was the original Fourth International.

Not only do these organizations themselves vacillate between revolutionary and opportunist policies. In continuing to claim to base themselves on revolutionary positions, they retain the capacity to expose cadres, however inadvertently, to actual Trotskyist positions. Their constant vacillation between Trotskyist and revisionist policies tends to generate not only frequent splits but also frequent clashes of internal tendencies and factions, in which, over and again, some militants rise to the defense of at least some Trotskyist positions against revisionist ones.

All of this means that, even though, by and large, the leaderships of these organizations are hardened in their revisionist and adaptationist positions, these organizations, viewed as a whole on an international scale, tend: to contain militants who are moving toward orthodox Trotskyist positions; to be subject to a constant process of limited struggles for Trotskyist positions; and to display a constant tendency to draw toward themselves advanced workers searching, in reality, for the revolutionary alternative of Trotskyism.

For the orthodox Trotskyists to turn their backs on the advanced workers being drawn toward Trotskyist positions by the Trotskyist-centrist organizations and the militants fighting for Trotskyist positions within them, would be an act of sectarianism of historically tragic proportions.

All this is true also and above all because, since the crisis of 1951-53, there has never been a serious, consolidated and organizationally significant International faction capable of appearing on a world scale as the consistent and orthodox reference for all Trotskyists. The International Committee constituted in those years — to which, in any case, our critical support historically goes — was unable to be it, as we have seen. As for the ITO and the organizations that preceded it, they were too weak organizationally to be it.

As for the more important MRFI and CRFI, they also were too weak on a world scale. They could have developed in this sense, but as we have seen, political and organizational contradictions did not allow them to do so.

The task of orthodox Trotskyists is to develop an international tendency oriented strategically toward refounding the International through linking up with, supporting, and organizing every struggle for Trotskyism, every genuinely Trotskyist development throughout the world, whether independent or inside the major Trotskyist-centrist organizations.

With their own independent organizations, orthodox Trotskyists must develop exemplary work in the class struggle in ways that will make them genuine poles of attraction to advanced workers, as well as inside the Trotskyist-centrist groupings.

Within the Trotskyist-centrist organizations, Trotskyist factions must struggle for the political regeneration of sectors of these organizations, as broad as possible, basing themselves both on the political and theoretical struggle and on struggles arising from the problems of revolutionary intervention in the development of the proletarian class struggle.

In the sense that in many of the organizations derived from the crisis of the Fourth International and claiming to base themselves on the Transitional Program, a struggle for the International has taken place, is taking place, and must take place in the next period — in this sense, we must recognize and define the contours of a somewhat amorphous international movement in which consistent Trotskyists must fight to develop and unify all the genuinely Trotskyist forces in a refounded International.

By this perspective we do not mean that orthodox Trotskyists in any way identify or confuse their program with the concrete program and policy of either Pabloite or anti-Pabloite revisionists. Nor do we mean that any form of centrism or revisionism, can somehow in and of itself be treated as a consistent, revolutionary Marxist trend. Nor do we mean that these Trotskyist-centrist organizations derived from the crisis of the Fourth International should be the sole arena of the struggle to refound the International.

An international Trotskyist faction could decide to enter as a whole into one international organization of the Trotskyist movement, to work principally within a certain number of such organizations, to function primarily as a group of independent organizations, and so on — all depending on the real conditions best favoring the fight for the refoundation of the Fourth International.

What the recognition of the special character of these centrist groupings does mean is that orthodox Trotskyists must maintain a strategic orientation toward them. Further, their special character has a number of specific practical implications.

Within the Trotskyist-centrist organizations, we must promote the formation of orthodox Trotskyist factions, united on an international basis with each other — independently of the various international or national organizations in which they may respectively be intervening — and with the independent orthodox Trotskyist organizations, all the components together forming an international Trotskyist faction, organized on a democratic-centralist basis both internationally and in its national sections.

Such tactical considerations do not imply that there is a clearly established, guaranteed course of action which necessarily leads to the refoundation of the International. Nor, much less, that it is probable that we will actually succeed in regenerating any one or more of the extant “Trotskyist-revisionist” formations. However, only the flexible, dialectical strategy of such a struggle for political regeneration, combining independent work in the proletarian class struggle with factional intervention within the “Trotskyist-revisionist” organizations, will allow us to complete the actual complex process, however it may develop concretely, which — through splits, fusions, partial regenerations, and growth of independent work — will enable the consistent Trotskyist forces to win the political majority of the militants orienting to Trotskyism throughout the world and to refound the International as the World Party of Socialist Revolution.

Certainly, a whole series of practical alternatives for the development of the activity of consistent Trotskyists will present themselves. Trotskyists must be prepared to adjust their tactics to the concrete development of the struggle to refound the International and the concrete development of the international struggle of the working class — on the sole condition that they maintain the absolute political independence of the consistent Trotskyist forces.

Today the ITO is engaged fully in the process for the refoundation of the Fourth International undertaken starting from the birth of our current in the 1970s (in Italy with the Bolshevik-Leninist Group [GBL]; in the United States with the Revolutionary Workers League [RWL]; in Britain and Denmark with comrades in or linked to the Workers Socialist League [WSL]). It sees all the difficulties, in particular with the failure of the CRFI, but also the opportunities. It wants to go forward, trying to involve, on a principled basis, the widest arc of forces of the Trotskyist movement and also sectors originating from other forces of the proletarian vanguard that seek a revolutionary Marxist response to the defeats of the past and a perspective for the future.

A process to which, in any case, we are already fully committed. Thus we proposed to the Tendency for a Revolutionary International to immediately begin a process of unification, for which, in our opinion, the political bases exist. Unfortunately, the TRI rejected our proposal in favor of a simple declaration of fraternal relations, thus demonstrating, beyond the correctness of their general positions, the limits of their understanding of the need for the programmatic unification of consistent Trotskyists and the need for a rapid process on this ground. Provisionally accepting the decision of the TRI with regard to fraternal relations, we will continue fighting to convince them of the need for the unification of our forces.

And then we resumed dialogue with the Argentine Partido Obrero. This large organization (compared to the forces of Trotskyist organizations in the world), purged of the negative elements of the Altamirista tradition and firm on the positive ones (even today, as mentioned, we cannot consider Altamira and his faction to be centrist revisions), with a strong and collective leadership, could be central to the development of the process of refounding the International. We will do all we can, starting from the recently re-established fraternal relationship, to clarify with them perspectives, political positions, and also the existing differences, in the first place, as mentioned, on the imperialist development of China and Russia.

And again there may be smaller organizations (some of which we are in contact with) that could participate with us in this process.

It is in this sense that the ITO considers its current role important, however modest its forces. The ITO is neither the nucleus of the future refounded International nor the orthodox Trotskyist international faction, but rather a transitional regroupment structure of consistently Trotskyist militants in a struggle to develop, without opportunism or sectarianism, the fight for the International.

Although the development of the ITO is today important to this aim, it remains our firm intention to dissolve ourselves not only when the International is refounded, but also when the process toward the refoundation leads to a broader regroupment than ourselves, on a politically and organizationally consolidated basis.

In this framework, we recognize that since the founding of the ITO in 1992 — although the ITO has developed only in Italy, with the birth of the PCL — developments at the international level have enlarged the space of Trotskyism, phenomena which, if not theoretically orthodox, are clearly consistent in their intervention in the class struggle.

First, the Argentine PO, by far the best revolutionary Marxist political organization in Latin America, in 1993 finally broke with the sectarian-centrist Bolivian POR (Masas) and its assertion of the strategy of the anti-imperialist united front in any oppressed country, regardless of the class composition of the national society.

Then, the PTS — born, as we have seen, affirming morenista orthodoxy — on the eve of 2000 was able to overcome morenismo in name and in fact. Which also happened in 2004 with the Nuevo MAS.

In the early 2000s, a phenomenon of partial distancing, de facto, from the worst of the morenista tradition occurred first with the LIT and its pivotal party, the Brazilian PSTU, and later with the UIT and the Argentine Izquierda Socialista, after its break with the centrist MST.

These international currents are modest outside Argentina and Brazil, but they are present in various countries around the world. Taken together, and together with other minor or national organizations (such as the TRI in the former United Secretariat and the RWP of Russia, at a higher theoretical level), represent an area of about 10,000 militants, who, if unified on the basis of democratic centralism, could already reconstitute the World Party of Socialist Revolution, albeit on a very modest organizational basis, except in Argentina, where they would already constitute a party capable of posing the prospect of winning over the majority of the proletariat.

However, it would be wrong to think of limiting the political battle to the unification of today’s most significant consistently Trotskyist forces. Political and theoretical limitations, sectarianism, and self-centeredness of leading groups make it difficult for this perspective to succeed fully. Therefore, unification of consistent Trotskyists should be inserted it into the overall strategy of this text, though certainly as a central and potentially priority aspect.