The Fourth International was founded in 1938 by Trotskyists alone. It was not supposed to be.
The original project was a regroupment of every revolutionary force willing to break with both Stalinism and social democracy. Trotskyists were to be one component among several, and not the largest: some of the non-Trotskyist organisations in the conversation were numerically bigger than they were. The Declaration of the Four, signed by the International Communist League and three left-socialist organisations in Germany and Holland, committed its signatories to founding the new International. Trotsky said he was prepared to be in a minority inside it.
Then the others refused, and 1938 arrived with one tendency in the room. Moreau’s justification for going ahead is worth quoting against today’s arguments about waiting for better conditions: the currents who stayed out did not found an International of their own either, and most of them fell back to the right.
Anyone building a new left party in Britain right now is inside that same problem. A regroupment that needs everyone to arrive at once, and a regroupment that proceeds with whoever is actually willing, are the two options. The Fourth International took the second and spent decades paying for the narrowness. That is the reason to read its history, and it is a better reason than continuity of tradition.
What made a new International necessary
Two failures, not one. Social democracy had declined to confront the bourgeoisie on any fundamental question, integrating itself into the bourgeois state and administering capitalist austerity. Its support for the First World War in 1914 was the decisive event, the point at which a definitive break became unavoidable for revolutionaries.
The second failure came later and from the other direction. The rise of Stalinism in the USSR degenerated the Communist International, and the Moscow-aligned parties turned into defenders of the Stalinist bureaucracy, putting Moscow’s interests ahead of the international working class. The Fourth International’s specific origin is the Left Opposition formed inside the Communist Party of the USSR in 1923, fighting bureaucratisation and arguing for a return to socialist workers’ democracy and revolutionary internationalism. That fight went global as the International Left Opposition.
So the new International was founded in the worst conditions available: defeats for the labour movement across Europe, fascism advancing, the communist parties degenerating. It stayed small. Moreau’s claim is that it nonetheless kept developing because its programme tracked the real dynamic of the revolutionary process rather than the organisation’s own preferences.
What a small organisation did next
It went into other people’s parties. The French Turn sent Trotskyists into the socialist parties as an open revolutionary tendency, and the tactic was extended to Belgium and the United States. It produced growth in numbers and influence, and it produced splits. Moreau’s assessment is the interesting part: the turn converted Trotskyists from external fractions commenting on the workers’ movement into organisations addressing the whole of it as an independent political pole.
During the Second World War the International expected the conflict to generate social and political crises, and set two positions that look contradictory until you hold them together. Revolutionary defeatism in the imperialist countries. Defence of the USSR against imperialism, to preserve what remained of October, with no implication of support for Stalinism. Trotskyists were among the first to join the resistance to Nazi occupation in 1940. The International also backed colonial struggles, on the argument that oppressed peoples were entitled to exploit their imperialism’s difficulties to win liberation.
The prediction was half right, which is more instructive than being wrong. A new revolutionary wave did arrive after 1943, in Italy, France, Greece, Yugoslavia, China, Vietnam and Indonesia. In Europe the Stalinist parties helped suppress it, in line with the Yalta agreements.
The events that forced a revision
Revolutions then succeeded under Stalinist leadership in Yugoslavia, Vietnam and China, several of them in open conflict with Moscow. That broke the working assumption that these parties were monolithic instruments of the Kremlin. The Third World Congress in 1951 adopted the position that Stalinist communist parties could project a revolutionary orientation under mass pressure in a crisis.
This is the pattern worth studying. The International supported the Yugoslav party against Moscow because of the positions it was taking, and was disappointed. It supported the insurgents in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and built out of it a programme for political revolution in the Eastern countries. In 1985 the Twelfth World Congress concluded that a new workers’ state had formed in Nicaragua, a conclusion reached by revising its own earlier analysis. An organisation that revises its analysis when events contradict it leaves a usable record. One that does not leaves only a catechism.
The internal history is less edifying. The 1953 split turned on Michel Pablo’s views about the transition to socialism and on accusations levelled against him, with the American SWP leading the break in what Moreau calls national messianism. The 1950s leadership is credited with holding the line against both sectarian degeneration and liquidationism, and with resisting the temptation of national-Trotskyism. It refused the concept of the party-fraction, operating instead as an international organisation built on a programme and a flexible democratic centralism. Reunification came in 1963, driven by a shared wish to get out of sectarianism and by the example of the Healyites and the Lambertistes. The Seventh World Congress that year assessed class struggle across the three sectors of the world revolution, abandoning an older picture of uniform trends.
Then the opening. Between 1968 and 1975 the International expanded and a new revolutionary generation arrived. The Cuban Revolution mattered because it was led by a new movement rather than a party tied to Moscow. Solidarity with Vietnam became the central campaign. From 1975 to 1990 came realignment, a bourgeois counter-offensive and the crisis of the Stalinist regimes, during which the SWP’s weight inside the International fell away sharply.
What you actually get from this
Not inspiration. Four specific things.
A tactical vocabulary that has been tested and costed: entrism, the distinction between the united front and the popular front, the approach to colonial struggle. These were not thought up in seminars. Each has a record of what it achieved and what it broke.
A record of an organisation revising its position under the pressure of events, in Yugoslavia, in Hungary, in Nicaragua, and of what it cost each time.
A common language. The International’s survival preserved a shared framework for analysing events and deciding tasks across borders. Anyone who has watched two left groups fail to understand each other’s terms knows what that is worth, and rebuilding it now would be slow work.
And a counterfactual, which is Moreau’s strongest argument. Other anti-Stalinist currents of the 1930s either died or hardened into sects. This one persisted. Had it never been founded, or had it disappeared, the job of building an international rooted in revolutionary continuity would be starting from nothing today, in the ideological confusion that decades of Stalinism left behind.
The use of it
The founding question has not gone away. Every regroupment since has faced the same choice the Declaration of the Four faced: hold out for the broad formation, or start with whoever will actually sign. Britain is having that argument again, in Your Party, in the Socialist Federation, in the debates about what a new left party is for.
The Fourth International’s answer in 1938 was to proceed narrow rather than not at all, and the record of what followed, the entries, the splits, the revisions, is the closest thing available to evidence about whether that was right. Read it for the evidence.
This piece draws on François Moreau’s multi-part work, “Combats et Débats de la IVe Internationale”.