Eight collections now open at redmole.org: Fourth International resolutions and congresses in English and French, the International’s periodicals from 1958, and four decades of British section papers.
Most of what the British left believes about the Fourth International it learned secondhand. Someone half-remembers a world congress resolution, someone else remembers a rival paper’s account of it, and the text sits in a box in a loft. Arguments about who said what get settled by whoever owns the photocopies.
As of this today a large part of that record is online, free and searchable, across eight sites at redmole.org. They are the product of about two years spent scanning, correcting and encoding Fourth Internationalist material. It began with work I did at the IIRE to find works by Ernest Mandel not available in English, like Ideology and Society.
The centre of the collection is fi.redmole.org, which carries the International’s resolutions, statements and world congress documents in English. Its French counterpart, qi.redmole.org, holds the conferences, congresses and resolutions in their French text. Where a translation and its original part company, readers can now check for themselves. The FI collection belongs to a wider project by the Fourth International to improve access to its historic documents. Resistance Books has endorsed it, and Pathfinder Press has given permission to use its translations of FI resolutions and documents and its FI readers. Without that permission much of the English-language record would have had to be retranslated from scratch by volunteers who, on the evidence of the last thirty years, would not have found the time.
Then the press. fipublications.redmole.org gathers the International’s English-language periodicals from 1958 to 1994: World Outlook, Inprecor and the publications that ran alongside them. International Viewpoint from 1983 to 2000 has its own site at iv.redmole.org, in full text. A scanned page can be read. Full text is different: it can be searched, quoted and linked down to the paragraph. The run has gaps. We are missing Nos. 5, 23, 27, 31 and 42 to 44, and if any of them are sitting on your shelves we would very much like to hear from you [write to duncan at red mole dot org.
The British papers make up the rest. socialistoutlook.redmole.org holds Socialist Outlook together with Socialist Viewpoint, International and Liberation!; socialistresistance.redmole.org covers Socialist Resistance from 2006 to 2021. And thornett.redmole.org collects Alan Thornett’s post-WRP political journalism, from the Cowley shop floor to ecosocialism. The obvious way to read that last collection is as one militant’s road from the car plants to the climate. It undersells it, though. Thornett’s writing is also the record of an argument the British section conducted with itself for years, about whether the ecological crisis rewrites the transitional programme or merely adds a chapter to it, an argument the current generation of ecosocialists is still having, mostly without knowing how much of it has been had before.
Why bother? Because the people now arriving in the Green Party and around Your Party bring inherited caricatures of every Trotskyist current, ours included, and most of those caricatures were drawn by people who had not read the documents either. Regroupment on the basis of what each tradition actually argued has some chance of holding. Built on folklore, it splits along the lines of the folklore.
All of this has been paid for by Red Mole’s paid subscribers. The next stage is Inprecor in Castilian, the magazine of the Liga Comunista Revolucionaria, drawing on extensive collections gathered by former members of the LCR in the Spanish state. [a fragile concept version exists: inprecor.redmole.org the site is live, but partial.] If you want the next tranche sooner, a paid subscription is what funds it.
None of this guarantees that anyone reads it. Collections like these tend to be visited by the same few dozen people who already knew where the boxes were, and putting a resolution online does nothing by itself to put it in front of a new member at her first branch meeting. How a searchable database becomes a movement that argues with its own history is a problem we have not solved. We suspect the answer lies less with the sites than with what branches decide to read together, which is a question for the branches, and one on which we would genuinely like to hear from readers who have tried something that worked.
The collections
Fourth International. Resolutions, statements and world congresses. fi.redmole.org
Documents de la IVe Internationale. Conférences, congrès et résolutions, dans leur texte français. qi.redmole.org
Fourth International press. World Outlook, Inprecor and their companions, 1958–1994. fipublications.redmole.org
International Viewpoint 1983–2000. Full text. Missing issues: Nos. 5, 23, 27, 31 and 42–44. iv.redmole.org
Socialist Outlook. With Socialist Viewpoint, International and Liberation! socialistoutlook.redmole.org
Socialist Resistance. 2006–2021. socialistresistance.redmole.org
Alan Thornett. Writings from the Cowley shop floor to ecosocialism. thornett.redmole.org
Inprecor en castellano. Revista de la Liga Comunista Revolucionaria (IV Internacional), nueva serie, 1979–1991. inprecor.redmole.org (conceptual site, still in progress).