International, Fourth

the name appropriated for itself by the international Trotskyist association established in Paris in 1938 by a small group of Trotskyists. The Fourth International divided into the International Secretariat and the International Committee in 1953. The Latin-American Bureau left the International Secretariat in 1962, followed in 1963 by a minority that later called itself the Revolutionary Marxist Tendency of the Fourth International. There are also groups such as For the Reconstruction of the Fourth International and the International Socialists. Each of these groupings, which are at odds with each other, declares that it alone represents the Fourth International.

The Trotskyist groups that call themselves the Fourth International publish journals (with extremely insignificant circulations), and issue propagandistic materials. The few Trotskyist groups that exist in a number of countries in Western Europe (Great Britain, France, Belgium, and others), in Latin America (Bolivia, Uruguay, Peru, Chile, Guatemala, and Brazil), and in the USA function as “sections” of one of these centers. The basis of the differences among the groupings of the Fourth International is essentially the question of the forms and methods of struggle against the world socialist system and the communist movement. Proceeding from these considerations, some Trotskyists, primarily those grouped around the Revolutionary Marxist Tendency and the Latin-American Bureau, support a certain “renovation” of Trotskyist conceptions of contemporary circumstances.

The groupings of the Fourth International everywhere support schismatic, anticommunist tendencies. Behind the screen of the pseudorevolutionary formula “all or nothing,” they either preach passive waiting for the coming revolutionary events or provoke adventurist acts, which are known to be doomed to defeat. They oppose united antimonopoly and anti-imperialist actions, and they oppose the struggle for general democratic demands in the capitalist countries.

The Communist parties expose the antirevolutionary essence of the policy of the Trotskyists and reveal the mechanics of the subversive activities they apply in the struggle against the communist movement.