Max Shachtman
Articles from The New International
The 4th International Is Launched
Source: The New International: A Monthly Organ of Revolutionary Marxism Vol 4,
No. 11, November, 1938. Pg. 325-327.
The dramatic and tragic political events of the last month in Europe were
characteristic of the situation which dictated to the thirty delegates who came
from eleven countries to attend the world conference of the revolutionary
Marxists in Switzerland on September 3 the decision to found and organize the
Fourth International -- World Party of the Socialist Revolution.
These events served to underscore heavily the fact that the working class, the
toiling masses in general, have at their head a leadership in the form of the
two old Internationals which is not only incapable of organizing their
resistance to the most monstrous of all the products of capitalism --
totalitarian war -- but is actually the most vigorous force at work in the ranks
of labor itself mobilizing the masses for enthusiastic support of the war.
The period in which we live is preeminently the period of world economy and
world politics, in which any form of self-enclosed existence -- be it autarchy,
isolationism, or socialism-in-one-country -- is either an illusion or dupery.
The last quarter of a century has strikingly emphasized the indispensability of
international organization, leadership and strategy for the proletarian
movement. The working class can no more do without them than individual army
corps can dispense with a directing general staff. When the old general staffs
of the working class, the traditional Internationals, have proved themselves to
be not merely bankrupt but a direct obstacle to the further progress of the
labor movement, it is imperative that no time be lost in restoring the world
revolutionary organization.
How blind one would have to be not to see the reactionary role played by the
Second and Third Internationals during the critical September month when Europe
see-sawed over the brink of war, a role neither unexpected nor accidental, but
analyzed and forecast by us years in advance!
What a contrast they presented even to the Second International on the eve of
the war of 1914-1918. As is known, all the important parties of the
International turned patriotic and chauvinistic, and formed a "civil peace" with
their respective capitalist class once the war actually broke out. But in the
terror-filled weeks before the beginning of August 1914, they at least made an
effort to appear before the masses as opponents of the imminent holocaust. The
International Socialist Bureau met in Brussels to discuss -- very despondently
and without much conviction, it is true -- what could be done to mobilize the
workers against the war-mongers. The rafters of Brussels' largest hall rang with
the voices of thousands of workers echoing Jaures' eloquent denunciation of the
rulings class of all Europe. Similar scenes were repeated in most of the other
European capitals and important population centers.
Even these impressive, if ineffectual, gestures were, however, everywhere absent
in the crisis moments of 1938, when, a bare twenty years after the end of the
last War to End All Wars, the world seemed to be catapulting to a new and
infinitely more horrible disaster.
What passes for the leadership of the Second International -- its world Bureau
-- did not even consider it necessary to hold a meeting for the purpose of
appraising the situation and issuing a declaration that would guide the workers
of all the countries who are affiliated to it. How could it meet? What could it
say? Its policy is determined in each country not by proletarian
internationalist considerations, but by the policy of its respective national
bourgeosie, or, as in the case of the exiled German social democracy, the
bourgeoise of another nation which has given it asylum, and which it considers
at least for the time being as its very own -- the French. With what felicity
the social democracy followed the methods of its national ruling classes down to
the minnutest detail! Just as Chamberlain consulted with Daladier, without
bothering to ask for the opinions of the Czech bourgeoisie, so did a delegation
of the British Labour Party, headed by Sir Walter Citrine, consult in September
with the leaders of the French Socialist Party without bothering to ask for the
opinions of their "comrades-of-the-International" of the German and Czech social
democracies. When Chamberlain, just before leaving for Munich, finally
condescended to inform the great and democratic British Parliament of his policy
and decisions, the leader of the British Labour Party, Major Atlee, could say no
more than his colleagues on the other benches: he too wished the Prime Minister
Godspeed! It was too solemn a moment for His majesty's Loyal Opposition to put
forward its own independent position on the war question, which is symbolized by
its attacks on the Tory government for failure to speed up the production of
military airplanes. That the parties of the Second International have been
voting with religious monotony for the war budget in every country where they
are still allowed to vote, is too well known to need comment.
The parties of the Third International differed from the Second only in their
more rabid patriotic zeal, in their unrestrained agitation for an immediate holy
war of the Democracies against the Dictatorships. Daladier, in his statement to
the Chamber's military commission defending the abrogation of the 40-hour week
in the interests of "national defense", was able to refer good-humoredly to the
antics of his Stalinists friends who demanded of him that he play the part of
Don Quixote riding to the defense of imperilled civilization. Throughout the
period of the Chamberlain-Hitler negotiations, the Stalinist press in England,
France, Belgium and Czechoslovakia carried on an unbridled campaign of
chauvinism which put even the outright reactionaries to shame. Shifting away
from Daladier in France, the Kremlin hirelings frantically applauded the
saber-rattling speeches of Henri de Kerillis, spokesman for the fascists in the
Chamber. In England, the only demonstrations organized by the Stalinists were
those that condemned Chamberlain for not immediately launching a war against
Hitler; "British honor" and "England's interests" -- these were the
mouth-filling shibboleths of the Stalinist manifestations. Unbelievable as it
sounds -- yet, what is unbelievable about Stalinism nowadays? -- the
"communists" in Dublin, where the writer happened to be on the eve of the Munich
agreement, ran up and down the city calling upon all good Irishmen and true to
rally to the defense of that institution so deeply beloved by Erin -- British
Democracy.
It is this complete absence of a revolutionary international leadership that
compelled the conference of the Bolshevik-Leninists not only to reaffirm their
view that the two existing Internationals had become counter-revolutionary, but
to found the new International. Properly speaking, the struggle for the new
International dates back to the seizure of power by Hitler in 1933 and the
lamentable capitulation of the communist and social-democratic parties, which
retired from the field of battle without even firing a shot. It was then that
the world movement that had developed around the struggle of the so-called
"Trotskyist Opposition" in the Communist International, announced the
abandonment of its ten-year-old position of concentration upon reforming this
International. It issued the call for a new communist International and new
communist parties to replace those that had collapsed so ingloriously.
In the period of intense discussion and ferment that followed in the radical
movement after the German events, the movement for the Fourth International
gained strength in one country after another. In 1934, the famous Pact of Four
in favor of the new International was signed by the International Communist
League, the Independent Socialist Party of Holland and the Revolutionary
Socialist Party of Holland (the two last-named organizations were soon to fuse
into one), and the Socialist Workers Party of Germany. If the new International
was not actually founded until four years later, it was only in order to allow
for the elapse of a necessary period in which the fundamental discussions and
the clarification and taking up of positions could occur. This was necessary,
even if to a much smaller measure, for the International Communist League as
well as for the numerous groups which were breaking or had already broken away
from the old Internationals.
In this respect, the last four-five years have been among the most instructive
and fruitful in our century. To the superficial observer, they appear to have
constituted a period of chaos, of endless unifications and an even greater
number of splits, of pointless academic disputes and meretricious personal
recrimination -- all largely incomprehensible and leading to nothing more
positive than the constant churning up of stagnant water. The more careful
observer, however, could discern both meaning and purpose in the developments of
this period. Out of chaos comes the star, said the philosopher; and what appears
to many to have been the chaos of these last five years was in ...
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