TL;DR On 11 December 2025 the International Socialist League (ISL, whose British section publishes Workers Power) published the resolution on broad anti-capitalist parties adopted by its Third Congress in Istanbul. It has seven operative points. Six of them the Fourth International would sign more or less as written. The seventh, point 4, rejects “opportunistic orientations” that “turn Broad Anti-Capitalist Parties into a permanent strategy, abandoning the construction of the revolutionary party”, and names the USFI as the holder of that position. The word “permanent” is not in our documents. The 2010 congress calls the orientation “the current response we offer”, the 2018 congress calls the instrument “a transitional one” whose “goal must be to wage the battle to create a new political party”, and the 2025 congress calls it “a transitional form in the current level of politicization and radicalization” before restating the objective in the same passage: “Our strategic objective is the building of mass revolutionary parties and a mass revolutionary International.” So the stated charge is false. There is nevertheless a real disagreement in this resolution, and it is a good one. It sits in the ISL’s own point 7, against one sentence of ours from 2018. The ISL cannot have that argument, because it has got into the habit of describing our position in a shape we do not recognise, and you cannot argue with somebody you have replaced with a dummy.
I should say where I stand. I support the Fourth International, and last August I spent several weeks assembling the ISL’s case against it into a single document, count by count, for a Red Mole Guide. That is not a neutral vantage point and I am not going to pretend otherwise. It does mean I have read the League’s material at length rather than in fragments, and the Istanbul resolution is one of the better things it has produced. That is exactly why the fourth point is worth stopping on.
What the resolution actually says
Strip the preamble and the seven points run like this. Our strategy is to build revolutionary parties and a workers’ government. Given that strategy, stay open to any initiative or tactic that advances it. There is no single recipe, and “each case must be assessed specifically, based on the particular situation of class struggle, the way in which these phenomena develop, and the strength of our own forces to intervene”. Reject opportunism and reject sectarian abstention. Treat participation as temporary, because these parties have an “expiration date”. Adapt the tactic to circumstances, including full entry, partial entry, intervention from outside, or a lower profile where the regime of the new party is hostile. And if you go in, keep strict political and organisational independence.
The framing is careful too. The League identifies the family by four marks: these formations arise to the left of social democracy or the old communist parties, in conditions of crisis, on a radical reformist programme that questions capitalism without setting out to destroy it, and they win real audiences among the masses and the vanguard for a period. It runs a live inventory: PSOL declining under the pull of Lula’s government, Die Linke recovering, the DSA possibly reviving after Mamdani, a British formation emerging from the Labour splits, the FITU in Argentina stalled as an electoral front because it never became a party with tendencies.
Most of that is accurate. Some of it is sharp. The observation in point 6 about the British party, that a bureaucratic method was showing itself before the party was formally constituted, “with membership obstacles or exclusion of sectors”, was written a fortnight after the first Your Party conference and before the leadership contest of February 2026. It reads better nine months on than a good deal of the British left’s commentary did at the time. And the League is not talking about something it has watched from outside. It says plainly that it helped found PSOL. Whatever else this resolution is, it is not the work of people who think entry is a matter of principle either way.
The one word
Point 4: “Reject both opportunistic orientations”, “such as those of the USFI”, “that turn Broad Anti-Capitalist Parties into a permanent strategy, abandoning the construction of the revolutionary party.”
Two claims are packed in there. First, that we have made the broad party permanent. Second, that we have therefore given up building the revolutionary party. Both are testable against documents that are online, in English, on our own site.
The 2010 world congress: “Building broad anti-capitalist parties is the current response we offer to the crisis in the workers’ and left movement and the need for its reconstruction.” A current response is the opposite of a permanent strategy, and the sentence that follows refuses the second claim before it is made: “Of course, this does not eliminate our revolutionary Marxist, ecologist, feminist internationalist identity and our basic aim of defeating capitalism to create a new ruling order based on democracy and direct participation.”
The same 2010 resolution on what to do when we go into a reformist left party rather than found a new one, taking Die Linke as its case: “we do so with no illusions about the nature of these parties, and we build anti-capitalist tendencies linked to social movements, that fight electoralism, institutionalism, and any attempt to compromise with capitalism.”
The 2018 world congress, adopted 106 for, 6 against, 3 abstentions, states the objective in its opening paragraph, before any of the tactics: “This perspective commits the forces of the FI to being an integral and loyal part of building and leading these new parties, not simply aiming to recruit or wait to denounce eventual betrayals. Our strategic objective is the building of mass revolutionary parties and a mass revolutionary International.” Five chapters on it uses the other word: “very rapidly it becomes obvious that the political instrument is a transitional one and its goal must be to wage the battle to create a new political party.” And it requires that we keep our own machinery, “the absolute necessity of maintaining at national and international level the bodies of the Fourth International”, including “the possibility of making autonomous political decisions”.
The 2025 world congress, adopted 106 for, 14 against, 1 abstention: the orientation is “a transitional form in the current level of politicization and radicalization as outlined in our resolutions since 1995”, and the resolution then quotes its own 2018 formulation back, including that same strategic objective, word for word.
A form you call transitional is a form you expect to pass through. The documents name what they are transitional toward, and they name it in the same paragraph as the tactic. On the words as published, point 4 describes nobody in our International.
There is a smaller thing worth noting. We do not call ourselves the USFI. That label is external, and it carries a claim about custody rather than a description. Using it is not a crime. It is a sign that the League is arguing with a figure in its own tradition’s literature rather than with an organisation whose congress documents it has in front of it.
Where we agree, and it is most of the ground
Take point 3, that there is no single recipe and each case must be assessed on the concrete situation. That is our practice and it is why our sections have done opposite things in neighbouring countries in the same year.
Take point 5, that these parties have a limited life. Our own balance sheets are harder on our own projects than the League’s resolution is. The 2018 congress text records that “one of the most notable” failures was “the creation of the New Anti-Capitalist Party (NPA) by the French section in 2009, as well Left Unity in Britain in 2014”, and explains why: “the unexpected emergence of a left current from within social-democracy (the Parti de Gauche in France, the Corbyn phenomenon in Britain) which undercut the dynamic of these new projects.” When the League raises the NPA against us, it is raising an exhibit we entered into the record first.
Take point 7’s second half, on maintaining independence. Our 2018 resolution insists on keeping our own bodies and our own capacity to decide, which is what independence means operationally rather than rhetorically.
Take point 4’s second half, the rejection of sectarianism that refuses to intervene “as if it were a matter of principle”. No disagreement at all.
So the area of genuine common ground covers the status of the tactic, the necessity of concrete assessment, the refusal of abstention, the expectation that these formations will not last, and the insistence on independence inside them. That is a great deal of shared ground between two internationals that have been abusing each other for half a century.
Where we actually disagree
Put the ISL’s point 7 beside our 2018 sentence and the real argument appears at once.
The ISL: “Our strategy consists of gathering political activists around our current, fighting all necessary battles against the reformist course of their leaderships, and preparing to leave when the situation dictates it.”
The Fourth International: “This perspective commits the forces of the FI to being an integral and loyal part of building and leading these new parties, not simply aiming to recruit or wait to denounce eventual betrayals.”
Read them together and our sentence is almost a description of theirs. That is not an accident of drafting. These are two different accounts of what a revolutionary is doing in a room full of people who are not yet revolutionaries.
On the League’s account the new party is a field. You go in, you fight the leadership, you gather what can be gathered around your own current, and you leave with your gains when the adaptation comes. The adaptation is guaranteed in advance by the class character of the leadership, so the party’s own trajectory is not really your problem. On ours the new party is a construction, and you are one of its builders. You take responsibility for whether it wins its fights and whether it stays out of bourgeois governments, which means you can lose something real when it fails, and it means you cannot treat its failure as your vindication.
That produces different behaviour on an ordinary Tuesday night. On a disputed motion, in a branch that is not going your way, one orientation asks what strengthens the formation and the militants in it, and the other asks what strengthens your current’s position for the eventual exit. Anyone who has sat in those meetings knows the difference is visible from across the room.
The second real disagreement follows from it. The League says these parties “inevitably adapt to the bourgeois order”, and grounds the inevitability in the class character of the leadership and the reformist programme. We do not think it is inevitable, and our own balance sheets give contingent causes rather than a law: a rival left current emerging inside social democracy at the wrong moment, a charismatic leadership that outran its base, a failure to settle governmental policy before the offer of office arrived. If the collapse is a law, entry is extraction and nothing else. If it has causes, some of them are things you can fight about while you are inside, and losing is not the same as having been naive.
The root of it is 1977, not 1991
The League’s deeper story is that we were revolutionaries until the Soviet collapse frightened us into liquidationism. The dates do not support it. In 1977 Nahuel Moreno attacked the theoretical premises of the Transitional Programme in the Colombian journal Ideología y Sociedad, and on 30 September of that year Ernest Mandel answered him in the same journal. The subject under the surface was whether there is a real layer of militants in motion between the class and the party.
Moreno’s position, in the formula Mandel quotes, is that “there exist only two social categories, not three”. Where, he asks, “do the advanced workers fit? In what Marxist social category do they belong?” Mandel’s reply is contempt for the question: “What lamentable scholasticism! What incapacity to apply materialist dialectics to the analysis of social reality!” His own account is that “the entire method with which Comrade Moreno approaches the phenomenon of the ‘broad vanguard’ is vitiated at its root. Idealist scholasticism begins with the ‘classification of concepts.’ Historical materialism poses the question in a manner at once more practical, more realistic, and more scientific: Are there different levels of activity and consciousness within the real working class, and do they manifest themselves in the ongoing struggle?”
If the vanguard is a real formation, you build through it, and a broad party is one of the places where it assembles. If it is a slot in a filing system, the only vanguard is your party, and every hour spent building something else is an hour stolen. That argument is fourteen years older than the fall of the USSR and it was had when the Soviet Union looked permanent. What the League dates to a defeat is the organisational form of a wager made in a period of advance.
The hostile witness
The most useful document for the League’s case is one it does not cite, and we published it.
At the same 18th World Congress, a minority tendency called the Tendency for a Revolutionary International submitted a text arguing that most anti-capitalist currents had adapted to “the class collaborationist strategy of ‘broad parties’ and ‘left governments’”, that “trailing behind reformist parties has already cost revolutionary currents, and thus the working classes, too much”, and that the French section’s reasoning about a credible political outlet had carried it into support for the New Popular Front. That is the League’s argument, made inside our International, by comrades of ours, and it is on our website beside the resolution it opposed.
The majority carried 106 to 14. A body that had abandoned the construction of the revolutionary party would not be the body hosting a tendency named for the construction of a revolutionary International and then publishing its indictment in English with the count attached. The League has to read us as an organisation that settled this question decades ago in favour of dissolution. Our congress record is of an organisation still arguing it in the open and printing the losing side.
The regret
This is the thing I want to say plainly, because it is not a small point of scorekeeping.
The Istanbul resolution is the third or fourth ISL text I have read that gets our position wrong in the same particular way. In March 2018 Alejandro Bodart reported that we had decided “it is not useful to build ‘the revolutionary party today’ because ‘the revolution’ is no longer ‘on the horizon’”, when the sentence immediately before the one he is quoting says “when the revolution is on the horizon we will need a party capable of understanding and seizing that opportunity”, the same paragraph opens by calling the instrument “a transitional one” whose “goal must be to wage the battle to create a new political party”, and the resolution’s own first paragraph, 2,000 words earlier, states the objective about mass revolutionary parties. In January 2020 Gustavo Gimenez had Mandel’s heirs “diluting their Trotskyist forces into ‘broad anti-capitalist parties’” and running “a lax federation with no intention of making it a World Party for action”, which is a paraphrase of the document that calls the federation transitional and names what it is transitional toward. Bodart’s version of our triad is “New age, new program, new party”, which is a retranslation back out of Spanish; our English has always said “New period”. The Istanbul text misspells Zarah Sultana’s name.
I take these as haste rather than dishonesty. Somebody is working from a house summary of the International’s positions instead of from the resolutions, and the house summary has been copied forward since the 1970s without anyone checking it against the source. The resolutions are four clicks away in English, French and Castilian/Spanish. Nobody looked, because nobody needed to. A text that complicates your account of your rivals has no constituency.
The cost is not to us. It is to them. The ISL wants to recruit from exactly the layer of militants who have been inside Podemos or the Bloco or the NPA and have come out of it disappointed, which is to say the layer most likely to have read a congress resolution. Those people will check. When they check, the first thing they will find is that the position being denounced is not held by the organisation named, and the credibility of the other six points goes with it. An indictment that cannot survive contact with its own footnotes damages the prosecution.
And the real argument goes unfought. I would like to have it. I think the question of whether you enter a broad formation as a builder or as an extractor is the live strategic question of the next five years in Britain and in Germany. I am not certain we are right, but I know we need optimism of the will and pessimism of the intellect. The ISL’s point 5 has a serious empirical case behind it: Syriza in government is the strongest single fact either of us has to explain, and it is not on either of our sides, since it shows broad parties can fail both as social democracies and as settings for building revolutionary organisations. But that argument cannot start while one party to it is answering a position the other has never taken.
So here are the two sentences again, which is the whole of what I am asking for.
Theirs: “gathering political activists around our current, fighting all necessary battles against the reformist course of their leaderships, and preparing to leave when the situation dictates it.”
Ours: “being an integral and loyal part of building and leading these new parties, not simply aiming to recruit or wait to denounce eventual betrayals.”
Neither of those is a permanent strategy. Neither of them abandons the revolutionary party. They are two answers to the same question, and they will be tested in the same rooms over the same few years. Delete point 4 and the argument is available immediately.
Sources, all checked against the published texts on 16 September 2026. The ISL resolution is “3rd Congress of the ISL: Resolution on Broad Anti-Capitalist Parties”, lis-isl.org, 11 December 2025. The Fourth International texts are “Role and Tasks of the Fourth International”, 16th World Congress, 2010 (fourth.international/en/world-congresses/513/75); “Role and party-building tasks of the Fourth International”, 17th World Congress, 2018, adopted 106 for, 6 against, 3 abstentions (fourth.international/en/world-congresses/511/3); and “A resolution on party-building tasks for the Fourth International”, 18th World Congress, 2025, adopted 106 for, 14 against, 1 abstention (fourth.international/en/world-congresses/874/702), together with the TIR tendency text submitted to the same congress (fourth.international/en/world-congresses/874/704). Mandel’s On Some Theoretical Premises of the Transitional Programme: Subjectivist Scholasticism or Marxist Dialectics (30 September 1977) is quoted from the first English translation, published by Red Mole in 2026. The longer version of this argument, with the documents printed so a reader can test it against them, is Red Mole Guide No. 13, The Instrument and the Objective, 1977-2026.