The Fourth International is the World Party of Socialist Revolution. It was founded by Leon Trotsky in 1938 to carry forward the fight for Marxism in opposition to the Stalinist degeneration of the Soviet Union and the Communist (Third) International.
Trotsky had founded the Left Opposition in 1923 to oppose the usurpation of power by a nationalist bureaucracy headed by Joseph Stalin and defend the program of socialist internationalism that had animated the Russian Revolution in 1917. In 1933, with the coming to power of the Nazis, facilitated by the disastrous policies of Stalinism, Trotsky called for the formation of a new (Fourth) International.
In the decades after its founding, revisionist tendencies repeatedly emerged inside the Fourth International, advocating in one form or another the abandonment of its orientation to building a revolutionary party in the working class, and calling instead for an orientation to one or another petty-bourgeois, Stalinist, Social Democratic or bourgeois-nationalist tendency.
The International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) was established on November 23, 1953, following a split in the Fourth International between the orthodox Trotskyists, led by James P. Cannon, a founder of the Trotskyist movement in the United States, and an opportunist faction led by Michel Pablo and Ernest Mandel. The ICFI, which publishes the World Socialist Web Site, has upheld the principles of Marxism and is today the sole representative of revolutionary socialism in the world.
On this page, readers will find links to essays, books and topics on the history of the Fourth International. We also encourage our readers to explore the works available in our Library.
On October 7, David North, International Editorial Board chairman of the World Socialist Web Site, delivered the following lecture to a well-attended public meeting in Colombo, organised by the Socialist Equality Party (Sri Lanka).
An appraisal, on the occasion of the eightieth anniversary of Trotsky’s assassination, of the work of the great theoretician and strategist of World Socialist Revolution during the final year of his life.
Today marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov in the Russian city of Simbirsk on April 22, 1870. Known in history under the name of Lenin, he was the founder of the Bolshevik Party, leader of the 1917 October Revolution and, undoubtedly, a towering figure in the political and intellectual history of the twentieth century.
The Heritage was published in book form in 1988. Its origins lie in the political struggle waged by the ICFI and the Workers League, the predecessor of the Socialist Equality Party (US), from 1982-1986, to defend Trotskyism against the nationalist opportunism of the ICFI’s former British section. It establishes the continuity of orthodox Trotskyism in the 20th century.
This document was adopted at the founding congress of the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) held in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on August 3-9, 2008. Tracing essential historical events and political experiences spanning more than a century, the work establishes the theoretical and political basis of the struggle for socialism.
This statement of the ICFI was written in August, 1986, in the immediate aftermath of the ICFI split with the Workers Revolutionary Party from 1985-1986. It provides a detailed analysis of the causes and consequences of the political degeneration of the WRP over more than a decade and its betrayal of Trotskyist principles.
In October 1917, in the midst of the slaughter of World War I, the Russian working class, led by the Bolshevik Party under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, overthrew the capitalist provisional government headed by Alexander Kerensky and established the first workers’ state in world history. Less than nine months earlier, Russia had been ruled by a monarchical dynasty headed by Tsar Nicholas II. The revolution was the beginning of the end of the imperialist war.
The Russian Revolution marked a new stage in world history. The overthrow of the capitalist Provisional Government proved that an alternative to capitalism was not a utopian dream, but a real possibility that could be achieved through the conscious political struggle of the working class.
Trotsky and his supporters formed the Left Opposition in October 1923. Its aim was to reform the Communist Party and Comintern along the line of socialist internationalism, against the rising conservative, nationalist bureaucracy headed by Joseph Stalin.
The conflict that emerged between Stalin and Trotsky was between irreconcilable political programs. The consolidation of power by Stalin, and the bureaucratic dictatorship that he personified, was not inevitable. It developed out of the conditions of an economically backward and isolated workers' state due to the delay of the international and European revolution.
In his critique of Stalinism, Trotsky developed a theory of world socialist revolution that proved immeasurably more far-sighted than the pragmatic nationalist maneuvers of the Stalinist bureaucrats.
The principled strategy of bringing about the reform of the Russian Communist Party and Comintern had guided the International Left Opposition since its founding in 1923. But the coming to power of the Nazis in Germany in 1933, facilitated by Stalin’s disastrous policies, demanded a reconsideration of this policy.
In the months that followed Hitler’s victory, Trotsky waited to see if any criticism of the policies pursued by Stalin would emerge from any of the parties of the Comintern. On April 7, 1933, the Communist International unequivocally endorsed the policies of the German Communist Party. Trotsky concluded that a new course was necessary. In a statement dated July 15, 1933, he called for a break with the Comintern and the building of a new International. The entire remainder of his life was devoted to this struggle.
This is the founding document of the Fourth International, published in September 1938. Assessing the historical lessons of the betrayal of the working class by both the Second and Third Internationals, Trotsky outlines the principles upon which to build a new proletarian leadership for the struggles against world imperialism and Stalinism.
In this 1938 recorded speech, Trotsky addresses the founding of the Socialist Workers Party, the American section of the Fourth International, and speaks on the 10th anniversary of the founding of the Trotskyist movement in the United States, from the founding of the Communist League of America in 1928.
In the course of the 1930s, the counterrevolutionary bureaucracy in the Soviet Union headed by Joseph Stalin murdered virtually the entire leadership of the October Revolution. Show trials of Bolshevik leaders were organized between 1936 and 1938, including Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin and Rakovsky. Hundreds of thousands of socialists, the finest representatives of several political generations of Marxist intellectuals and workers, were physically exterminated. Nearly 1 million people were killed in a wave of counter-revolutionary violence from 1936 to 1939.
This liquidation—which confirmed, in the most direct sense, Trotsky’s assessment of Stalin as the “gravedigger of the revolution”—dealt a blow to the revolutionary consciousness of the Soviet working class from which the Soviet Union never recovered. The history and record of these unparalleled crimes constitute the unanswerable refutation of the claim of countless bourgeois propagandists that Stalinism based itself on the theoretical and political heritage of Marxism, let alone the claim that Stalinism and Trotskyism were merely variants of one and the same Marxism. The real relationship between Stalinism and Trotskyism was described best by Trotsky: they were separated, he wrote, by “a river of blood.”
Trotsky delivered this speech denouncing the Stalinist Moscow Trials and publicizing the calling of the independent Dewey Commission to investigate the charges, from Mexico in January 1937.
“Stalin’s trial against me is built upon false confessions, extorted by modern Inquisitorial methods, in the interests of the ruling clique,” he said. “These trials develop not from communism, not from socialism, but from Stalinism, that is, from the unaccountable despotism of the bureaucracy over the people!”
With the outbreak of World War II in September 1939, following the signing of the Stalin-Hitler pact, a section of the US Socialist Workers Party led by Max Shachtman and New York University Professor James Burnham capitulated to the pressure of democratic public opinion, rejecting the defense of the Soviet Union on the grounds that it could no longer be considered a degenerated workers state.
Burnham declared that the Soviet Union must now be characterized as “bureaucratic collectivist”—a historically new form of exploitative society, in which the Stalinist bureaucracy had been transformed into a new form of ruling class. The Fourth International, Shachtman and Burnham stated, should not call for the defense of the USSR in the event of war.
Trotsky replied that the characterization of the Stalinist regime as “bureaucratic collectivist”—an unprecedented form of exploitative society unforeseen by Marxism—had far-reaching political and historical implications. At issue, in the final analysis, was the historical viability of the Marxist project itself.
In the final months of his life, Trotsky contributed several documents to the struggle within the SWP that are among his most brilliant and far-sighted. It culminated in a split in April 1940.
This book documents Trotsky’s intervention in this political struggle, which was of fundamental importance for the Fourth International. Trotsky showed that the Burnham-Shachtman faction was being propelled to the right by the logic of its political perspective, its class outlook, and its philosophical method, which was rooted in a rejection of dialectical materialism.
In this work Cannon takes up the organizational conceptions advanced by the petty-bourgeois minority, demonstrating that they had nothing in common with the Leninist conception of the Marxist party. Cannon answers the claim that the party majority was an example of “bureaucratic conservatism.”
The Heritage was published in book form in 1988. Its origins lie in the political struggle waged by the ICFI and the Workers League, the predecessor of the Socialist Equality Party (US), from 1982-1986, to defend Trotskyism against the nationalist opportunism of the ICFI’s former British section. It establishes the continuity of orthodox Trotskyism in the 20th century.
Gerry Healy (1913-1989) was a longtime leader of the Fourth International, whose struggle in the British and international Trotskyist movement spanned five decades, until his break with the International Committee in 1985. This book contains a critical Marxist assessment of the life of Healy and its relationship to the historical development of the Fourth International.
This document, written by James P. Cannon, the leader of the Socialist Workers Party in the United States and published in 1953, reaffirmed the principles of Trotskyism and summoned Trotskyists internationally to oppose the revisionist tendency headed by Michel Pablo that was threatening to destroy the Fourth International.
The Pabloites presented—and some of them still present—Castroism as a new road to socialism, as confirmation that the socialist revolution could be carried out, and a workers' state established, without the conscious participation of the working class.
There was a significant difference between these states and the Soviet Union, relating to their origins. The Soviet State had been established by a victorious proletarian revolution, which was later betrayed. The Eastern European states emerged, not only without the active involvement of the working class, but under conditions where the working class was being violently suppressed.
Fifty years ago, in May-June 1968, a general strike brought France to the brink of proletarian revolution. This eight-part series describes the events and draws the political lessons for today.
This series of articles published by the Socialist Equality Party in Sri Lanka marks the fiftieth anniversary of its foundation in June 1968.
On August 20-21, 1968, tens of thousands of troops of the Warsaw Pact states invaded Czechoslovakia to crush the “Prague Spring” and stifle a nascent movement of the working class. This is the first part of a four-part series.
We are publishing here the first part of a three-part series on the political career of Livio Maitan, who died in Rome in September. We will post the second and third parts in the course of this week.
On December 31, 2018, Halil Celik, founder and leader of the group Sosyalist Eşitlik, which supports the International Committee of the Fourth International in Turkey, died of cancer at the age of 57. This obituary presents an overview of his life.
Trotsky’s assassination ranks among the most politically consequential crimes of the 20th century, with far-reaching implications for the international working class and the world socialist movement. And yet, for decades, the circumstances surrounding the assassination remained shrouded in secrecy. The massive scale of the Stalinist conspiracy against Trotsky was the subject of a carefully orchestrated cover-up.
In 1975, the International Committee of the Fourth International launched the first systematic investigation by the Trotskyist movement into the assassination. This investigation, known as Security and the Fourth International, led to the exposure of the network of GPU agents within the Fourth International that ensured the success of Stalin’s conspiracy against Trotsky’s life.
On October 3, 2015, the World Socialist Web Site held the first in a two-part interview series with David North, the chairman of the WSWS International Editorial Board, on the subject, “Why and How the GPU Murdered Leon Trotsky.”
In 1985, after a protracted process of political degeneration, the Workers Revolutionary Party, the British section of the ICFI, broke decisively from Trotskyism. In documents written contemporaneously in the course of its struggle of with the WRP, the ICFI demonstrated that the political collapse of the WRP was the outcome of its retreat and betrayal of principles of genuine Trotskyism that it had previously defended, and its adaptation to Pabloite opportunism.
The struggle waged by the ICFI against the WRP from 1982-1986 ensured the continuity of orthodox Trotskyism and the ICFI. In this page, readers can find the major documents of this struggle.
This statement of the ICFI was written in August, 1986, in the immediate aftermath of the split with the Workers Revolutionary Party. It provides a detailed analysis of the causes and consequences of the political degeneration of the WRP over more than a decade and its betrayal of Trotskyist principles.
This volume of Fourth International, then the quarterly theoretical journal of the ICFI, contains the original documents of the struggle waged by the ICFI against the WRP.
These lectures address the history of the ICFI from 1982-1995: from the initial formulation of a detailed critique of the Workers Revolutionary Party’s revisions of the theory and program of Trotskyism, to the decision to transform the leagues of the ICFI into parties.
On December 26, 1991, the Soviet Union (also known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics)—which emerged out of the socialist revolution of October 1917—was formally dissolved by the Stalinist regime led by Mikhail Gorbachev. The destruction of the Soviet Union was the outcome of the anti-socialist and nationalist policies of the ruling bureaucracy, which confirmed the warnings of the Trotskyist movement of the counterrevolutionary nature of Stalinism.
In the immediate aftermath of its split with the national-opportunists of the Workers Revolutionary Party in 1985-1986, the International Committee of the Fourth International had developed an extraordinarily prescient analysis of the pro-capitalist orientation of the Stalinist bureaucracy, reflected in Gorbachev’s policies of glasnost and perestroika. It warned the Soviet and international working class of the danger of capitalist restoration.
