December 2, 2023
In March 1997, a number of Trotskyist organizations from different countries — including the Partido Obrero of Argentina and the International Trotskyist Opposition (with main sections in Italy and the US), immediately joined by the Workers Revolutionary Party (EEK) of Greece — conscious of the need to break out of the impasse in the situation of the world revolutionary vanguard, launched, at a conference held in Genoa, Italy, a call for the refoundation of the Fourth International. For such a refoundation, aware that the dispersion of the Trotskyist movement had led to different experiences and tactics, they indicated the need for the organizations, international or national, and the militants who wished to take part in this process to agree, in word and deed, with a few fundamental points that constituted the basis of the truly revolutionary character of each of them.
On this basis, the Movement for the Refoundation of the Fourth International (MRFI) was formed, unfortunately not in a democratic-centralist form.
Unfortunately, faced with the first, inevitable failures of attempts to regroup with other Trotskyist forces, the PO and its “leader maximo” Jorge Altamira, de facto, let the battle indicated in the Genoa document lapse.
There was a small advance in 2004 when, partly in response to the great political and numerical development of the PO in the prerevolutionary crisis of the previous years in Argentina and, to a lesser extent, of the Italian section (which would shortly thereafter constitute the Communist Workers Party), of the EEK, and also of the Turkish organization (DIP), the old MRFI was transformed into the Coordinating Committee for a Refoundation of the Fourth International (CRFI), on a democratic-centralist basis, at least formally. But there too, the failure to develop rapidly toward the refoundation of the Fourth — and the elements of national Trotskyism always present in the PO and, especially, in the theoretical and practical thinking of Jorge Altamira — meant that the CRFI never functioned as a true international organization and, by a slow path, died, without even a formal dissolution.
Today, we have reconstituted the ITO. We do not consider ourselves to be either, obviously, the refounded International or, as of today, the Bolshevik Faction of the Trotskyist movement. We see ourselves as a small international regroupment struggling to regroup the first bricks of the faction that can — progressively, and also through revolutionary regroupment — advance toward the future International. For twenty years, we have been fighting the abandonment by the PO and Jorge Altamira of the Genoa Appeal, which — with a few changes related only to new developments in the international situation (China and Russia in particular), and with some clarifications — remains valid today, and which we therefore re-propose here.
In our view, China and Russia have become not only capitalist but also imperialist, in the Marxist sense. Some other Trotskyist organizations see China and Russia as capitalist “great powers,” not yet fully imperialist. If they accept the position of bilateral defeatism between China and Russia and the US and the other established imperialist powers, we regard this as an inconsistency on their part, but not an obstacle to refounding the revolutionary International.
Appeal
The ongoing changes in the world situation, in particular the deepening of the world capitalist crisis and the, albeit contradictory, development of mass movements, impose on all organizations that refer to the legacy of revolutionary Marxism the task of refounding a revolutionary International on the original programs of the First, Second, Third, and Fourth Internationals — whether it presents itself as the refounded Fourth International or it presents itself as the Fifth International — in order to offer the working-class vanguard of the world an orientation and organization by regrouping the best of the Trotskyist forces and militants in the world, alongside the vanguard of the struggle of the working class and the proletariat as a whole, and that of the various mass movements that are not directly proletarian (women’s, ecological, antiracist, anti-chauvinist, LGBTQ+, etc.). It being understood that no movement can transform itself into the revolutionary International by itself, and that revolutionary consciousness is never spontaneous in the masses, but must be brought to them, and also to their vanguard, from outside by the politically conscious, organized Marxist vanguard.
No existing organization can call itself — either by organizational strength or political line — the revolutionary International. In particular, neither the former United Secretariat (Pabolist-Mandellian) nor the so-called “reconstructed” Fourth International (Lambertist) are in any way the Fourth International of today, nor can they be reformed to become so.
In our view, the basis for a discussion on the refoundation of the Fourth International should indicate:
1. The validity of the struggle for world socialist revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat, with the destruction of the apparatus of the bourgeois state and the construction of a workers’ state on a national, international, and finally world scale, based, as the First Congress of the Communist International indicated, on the power of the workers’ soviets (councils).
2. The need to reaffirm the definition contained in the Transitional Program of any self-styled “progressive” government (popular-front, center-left, reformist left, bourgeois or petty-bourgeois nationalist) as a bloc with the “democratic” bourgeoisie, which reduces the party of the proletariat to an appendage of capital;
3. The recognition that the restoration of capitalism in Russia, China, and almost all of the degenerated/deformed former workers’ states by the Stalinist bureaucracy (as foreseen by Trotsky) changed the framework of the world situation. This with the emergence of two new imperialist states (or at any rate great powers), clashing with the old imperialist powers for control of world markets, primarily, but not only, in Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and South Asia. In the face of such a clash, and when it takes on a direct character, the position of consistent revolutionaries must be that of bilateral defeatism and an attempt to transform imperialist war into civil war against the bourgeoisie and its governments, in accordance with Lenin’s indications in World War I. Revolutionary Marxists reject all kinds of campism.
4. The elaboration of an anti-capitalist strategy based on transitional demands and the transitional method, that is, a method that creates a bridge between current demands and the program of socialist revolution. This bridge consists of a system of transitional demands that start from the present conditions and the present level of consciousness of broad layers of the working class and inevitably lead to one conclusion: the conquest of power by the proletariat.
Real agreement on these points can lead to the refoundation of the International, which can only be based, from its inception, on democratic centralism — which is not a goal to be achieved, but the unique and indispensable basis of functioning of every truly revolutionary Marxist organization.