SPECIAL DOSSIER International Leninist Trotskyist Fraction Collective for the Refoundation of the Fourth International /e-mail: [email protected] • www.flti-ci.org

August 20 Tribute to 1940-2020 Leon Trotsky 80 years since his assassination by the hand of a KGB Stalinist agent

Leon Trotsky together with Leon Sedov

Days of Tribute to Leon Trotsky August and the founders of 22 and 23 the Fourth International 80 years of the murder of Leon *in Zoom Organizes: Trotsky by the International Leninist Trotskyist Fraction (FLTI) hand of Stalinism

International Leninist Trotskyist Fraction Collective for the Refoundation of the Fourth International Editorial Board of the paper “The International Workers Organizer” /e-mail: [email protected] • www.flti-ci.org Sign up to participate In the 80th anniversary of the murder of Leon Trotsky, we reproduce excerpts of the Manifesto of the Collective for the Re-foundation of the Fourth International / FLTI published in 2010, in the 70th anniversary

In spite of Stalinism having slaughtered the Bolshevik and the 3rd International’s General Staff… In spite of KGB, fascism and imperialism having murdered and chased ceaselessly the Bolsheviks of the resistance in the ‘30s: Leon Trotsky, Leon Sedov, Rudoph Klement, Abraham Leon among other martyred champions of the world proletariat … In spite of Pabloites and all kinds of revisionists which razed Bolshevism and the Fourth international to the ground …

On the 70th Anniversary of Leon Trotsky’s murder From the Fracción Leninista Trotskista Internacional (International Leninist Trotskyist Fraction) we assert,

The Fourth International is not dead! Long live the struggle for the Re-foundation of the Fourth International!

eventy years after the murder of Leon Trotsky, from the Inter- national Leninist Trotskyist Fraction we pay tribute to his most grandiose work: the foundation of the Fourth International, Swhich was the continuity of Bolshevism and the Third Internation- al, that is, of the internationalist, revolutionary fraction of the world proletariat. The foundation of the Fourth International in 1938 synthesized in itself both scientific socialism and its continuity within the imperialist epoch and the historical experience of two generations: the first com- prising those Russian -already from 1902- and German -from 1906 on- Marxists who stood up fighting against the reformists’ betrayal to the proletariat, namely, the reformists’ submission to their respective bourgeoisies in the First World War; and the second consisting in the Leon Trotsky, founder of the Fourth International youth that closed their ranks around the survivors of the former and and the Red Army of the USSR shared their struggle; both confronting the “second-batch Menshe- viks”, that is, the stranglers of the October and World Revolutions: the ing this revolutionary movement that was alive and well in the eve of Stalinist executioners of Bolshevism. the Second World War what guided, for the sake of the imperialists’ The foundation of the Fourth International and its program as a benefits, the counterrevolutionary blows of the Stalinist hit-men, who historical synthesis of the program for the international socialist rev- murdered Trotsky as well as dozens of his comrades of struggle. olution was the greatest elaboration by comrade Leon Trotsky, who With that same objective, and wanting to teach a lesson to the devoted to it his greatest effort. Certainly it was the goal of destroy- ever rebellious masses in the aftermath of the 1WW both the national

SUMMARY * Excerpts of the Manifesto of the FLTI published in 2010, - For the liquidators of the Fourth International, the Fourth in the 70th anniversary of Leon Trotsky’s murder International does not exist ...... 11 - The Fourth International is not dead! Long live the struggle - Under the banner of the Fourth International ...... 12 for the Re-foundation of the Fourth International!...... 2 - The Fourth International -when Leon Trotsky was at its head- - Trotsky’s vile murder achieved its goal only because the prepared the vanguard of the international proletariat ...... 13 leaders of the fourth international dissolved Coyoacan’s * Tribute of the Collective for the Re-foundation international centre...... 6 of the Fourth International, in the 78th anniversary ...... 16 - Trotskyism and the Fourth International were the only and * Edition of the paper Socialist Appeal, genuine continuity of Bolshevism ...... 8 organ of the US SWP, in tribute to Trotsky (1940)...... 19 - Leon Trotsky and his legacy: a thousand and one times * Statement of the members of slandered, a thousand and one times falsified ...... 10 the Fourth International in Argentina (1940)...... 20

2 International Workers Organizer bourgeoisie and the imperialists together with the treasonous leader- ships of the proletariat, had exterminated physically the fraction of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxembourg (murdered by Noske’s Social Democratic soldiery). Both revolutionaries had accompanied Lenin, the Bolsheviks and comrade Trotsky in their revolt against the open treason of a Social Democracy which having been co-opted in Germa- ny and elsewhere by the monopolies and the finance capital, was call- ing the proletarians to kill each other in the battlefield to the service of the imperialist gangs in the 1WW. Stalinism as the outcome of the decomposition and isolation of the first worker state from the middle and late ‘20s was in charge of carrying to its end, with a cynicism a thousand times worse than that of Social Democracy the counterrevolutionary job that the latter had inaugurated in early 20th century when liquidating the revolutionary internationalist fraction of the world proletariat. The internationalist revolutionaries who founded the Third International and seized the Lenin and leaders of the Third International in 1919 power in Russia showed the world working class that it was possible to “take heaven in their hands”. nounced in his work “State and Revolution” about those anti-Marxists To the horror pf imperialist bourgeoisie, the proletariat threatened and falsifiers aiming to turn Marx into a toothless old lion as they had with seizing power all across Europe. Due to the immaturity of the not been able to defeat his ideas. young and new Communist Parties that mushroomed after the 1WW, Thus, as Lenin said: “What is now happening to Marx’s theory has, the proletariat couldn’t seize power in Germany, which led to the iso- in the course of history, happened repeatedly to the theories of revolu- lation of the USSR that was left to terrible pressures between the back- tionary thinkers and leaders of oppressed classes fighting for emancipa- wardness of its productive forces and the world economy dominated tion. During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes by imperialism. constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage Comrade Trotsky as well as the Bolsheviks’ old guard suffered the malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns same fate that the German and European masses and proletariat, who of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them were not able to seize power. They endured the same conditions of into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their resistance and sufferings as the USSR masses whose energies got de- names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes pleted after 4 years of civil war and tough battles against 14 imperial- and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing ist armies. The revolutionaries suffered the reaction emerging from the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge those conditions; to the interior of the worker states that produced the and vulgarizing it. Today, the bourgeoisie and the opportunists within advent of a cynical and careerist counterrevolutionary bureaucracy the labor movement concur in this doctoring of Marxism. They omit, which eventually carried to its complete degeneration. obscure, or distort the revolutionary side of this theory, its revolutionary From that moment, Trotsky and Trotskyism, both from the USSR soul. They push to the foreground and extol what is or seems acceptable and combating to recover the Third international in the West started to the bourgeoisie. All the social-chauvinists are now “Marxists” (don’t to fight for the continuity of Bolshevism, this time resisting against laugh!). And more and more frequently German bourgeois scholars, Stalinism; this commitment reaches an enormous historic leap when only yesterday specialists in the annihilation of Marxism, are speaking the Fourth International was founded in 1938 as continuation to Bol- of the “national-German” Marx, who, they claim, educated the labour shevism and the third International in its revolutionary period. It unions which are so splendidly organized for the purpose of waging a emerged as a new Zimmerwald-Kienthal that prepared itself for the predatory war! (V.I. Lenin, Collected Works, Volume 25, The State and struggle to seizing power during the 2WW and its aftermath. Revolution, Chapter 1. “The State: A Product of the Irreconcilability of Today when Trotsky’s most aggressive detractors have turned sus- Class Antagonisms”, September, 1917) piciously to praising him as “one of the many outstanding characters What a remarkable historical truth! His is a great lesson on how within the socialist movement”; when a bourgeois nationalist soldier to expose those who flatter Leninism-Trotskyism in order to notch as President Chavez (who supplies the whole imperialist war machine its revolutionary edge, to make a tooth-gap in its legacy and the with Venezuelan oil) invites people to read Trotsky’s books (deliv- history of its struggles, surrounding it with a certain “sacred halo” ered to him by renegades as Alan Woods); when even the Trotskyite as a means of “consolation” and deception to the oppressed classes. renegades give some Castroite bureaucrats disguised as “democratic The Stalinists did the same to Lenin after his death. Nothing differ- leaders” a choice of Trotsky’s books to be “displayed” in some Hava- ent have attempted by the Trotskyite renegades against Trotsky and na’s Book Fairs; when during the last 70 years in the name of Trotsky his legacy, the Fourth International. and Trotskyism and after his death, the Fourth International and its From the FLTI, 70 years after Trotsky’s murder, we denounce tire- program was put by the opportunists and revisionists grown in the lessly the shameless falsification that the Trotskyite renegades make of same belly of that Fourth International at the feet of Stalinism, the his revolutionary positions and of the relentless combat that Trotsky executioner of the world working class and the revolutionary world and the Bolshevik-Leninists waged against the bourgeoisie and all movement,: when today in the name of the Fourth International the kind of exploiters and oppressors. same old and rotten pseudo-theories and fake programs of Stalinism Trotskyism fought against any kind of class collaborationism, and and Mensheviks are again held up and camouflaged with the aim os not only against the popular front in France or Spain in the ‘30s, but strangling the world proletariat –we Trotskyist declare what Lenin de- already in 1927 in China, when Stalin carried the Chinese Communist International Workers Organizer 3 Party to enter as a left wing in the bourgeois nationalist Kuomintang and dishonoured the Congresses of the Stalinist Third International by inviting Kuomintang leader Chiang Kai-shek -the same bourgeois warlord that afterwards massacred a million Chinese communists when smashing the Canton proletarian insurrection in 1927- as hon- orary chairman to the Komintern congresses. Watching today the Trotskyite renegades support Chavez and beg him to “advance towards socialism”… plead Morales “to expropriate the imperialists”, while all of them together wallow in the mud of the World Social Forums, in the way all the Trotskyite renegades of Latin America have done… It’s all Stalin the servant of the native bourgeoi- sies supporting Chiang Kai-shek again, an old and disgusting movie revisited! Watching today the Trotskyite renegades to the Fourth Interna- tional support “democratic Obama” against “fascist Bush” in the US, defend vigorously the unity of imperialist Europe to Maastricht’s letter and go on seconding -as they merrily do the Castroite bureaucracy, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht even to the very doorways of the capitalist restoration in Cuba, is like watching again the old Stalinist policy of supporting the “democratic and its program has passed time and again the test of History. The imperialists” –speaking of murderous Churchill and Roosevelt- who “Trotskyites” haven’t… Those renegades got the lowest grades or none nothing had to envy to fascist Hitler in terms of massacring and pilfer- at all. Hanging on to Trotsky’s legacy and in the struggle for recovering ing oppressed peoples! Only this time the stomped banners are those the banners of revolutionary Marxism, the Fourth International of the Fourth instead of the Third International… is alive. Trotskyism is not dead; the forces that will found again Those who “commemorate” in this date Trotsky’s “political per- the Fourth International are already re-grouping. This is our best sonality” as “one more socialist of the lot” are the same that have de- homage to our comrade Leon Trotsky, who fell dead while struggling stroyed his legacy, his historical struggle; they have in fact reneged ferociously against the class enemies and traitors. him, plus Bolshevism and the Fourth International, the party of the As was stated in the leaflet issued in 1940 in Argentina by the world socialist revolution, which they have liquidated one and a thou- Trotskyist groups and as we say today, 70 years after Trotsky’s death, sand times. in the face of the Trotskyite renegades, who try to turn Trotsky into an These people claim to be “Trotskyists” and convene meetings to inane icon and castrate his revolutionary doctrines; together with the glorify Trotsky as an inoffensive icon when it is imperative for the rul- founders of the Fourth International we from the FLTI declare: “Leon ing classes to control and suffocate the working-class left wing. Once Trotsky has been murdered, comrades! He has fallen to the ground as they have succeeded in their purpose, they say “good bye, Trotsky (i.e. the fighters, as the heroes of the proletariat do: he has given his life for we piss off on your legacy)”… up to next year, when they dust the icon a better future for mankind. He has fallen in a gloomy period for the up for the next “homage”. world, when his guide and his presence of unchallenged leader of the That is why they never mention –in fact, they make every- revolutionary proletarians of all countries in the world were most neces- thing to hidden the fact that Trotsky’s greatest deed, his ultimate sary. Leon Trotsky is dead, comrades! Let the manly grief that makes a work, thanks to which today they are obliged to speak in the name lump on our throats and fills our fists with ire and impotence carry us to of Trotskyism for better destroying it, was the foundation of the commit ourselves to take example of his exceptional virtue; let our grief Fourth International in the late 30’s with a program and a perspec- and our ire make us take revenge for his death by picking and keeping tive for leading the international proletariat to victory. Trotsky’s what Trotsky had of indestructible, that virtues which those who killed program and legacy were so strong in History that even today, after him in an ignominious way could never and would never destroy: his having been one and a thousand times falsified, revised, hybridised, ideas as a faithful follower and continuity of Marx, Engels and Lenin’s. the Fourth International’s program is the only one from which the His and their ideas together are the guide that will lead the oncoming militants can speak and look frankly into the world proletariat’s eyes to world proletarian revolution. Leon Trotsky is not now within us! Let’s fight for the proletarian liberation. That’s why Morenoites, Mandelites, collect the last words attributed to him and hold them tightly and very Healyites, Pabloites of the first and second hours and a varied array of high up as a banner beside his immortal features of a man, a leader and liquidators of the Fourth International are obliged to devote comrade a revolutionary: “I AM THOROUGHLY CONVINCED THAT VICTO- Trotsky obituaries and memorials. RY WILL CROWN THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL! FORWARDS!” To those that claim to speak in the name of Trotsky we say that (Translated from the leaflet of the Grupo Obrero Revolucionario –Rev- they will fail in their purpose, as they are mounting a farce that will be olutionary Worker Group- Fourth International, Buenos Aires, August, exposed; what they will attain is the same as was attained by their pre- 1940). decessors: that revolutionary youth and perspicacious workers, when From the FLTI we pay homage to Bolshevism, to the reading Trotsky’s works and understanding his struggle, will begin Third International, to the militants of the Zimmerwald-Kien- to discover that their “Trotskyite teachers” of today have nothing in thal left and to those that continued their fight during the common with Trotskyism, as thousands of conscious workers in the gloomy years of Stalinism, Popular Front and Fascism, when world are already affirming. in the ‘30s the latter three strangled the proletarian revolu- For that reason, 70 years after Trotsky’s murder, we re-affirm tion and opened way to the Second Imperialist World Slaughter. once more Trotskyism as continuity to Bolshevism, with its theory We pay homage to Bolshevism in the resistance, which began 4 International Workers Organizer to struggle as early as in late ‘20s and the beginning of the ‘30s, immediately after Lenin’s death, and they took in their hands the task of combating against the Stalinist bureaucracy that usurped the worker state, annihilated the best Bolshevik elements and destroyed Lenin’s Party and the Third International. Bolshevism in the resistance against the counterrevolutionary of- fensive of Stalinism was headed by Leon Trotsky and his Left Oppo- sition to the interior of the Third International and the Communist Party of the USSR when after 1924, the last revolutionary offensive of the German proletariat had been defeated and the forces that created the October Revolution in Russia had been left decimated and isolated subsequently to four years of civil war against 14 imperialist armies, Second Congress of the Communist International (1920) which gave way to the materialization, as an excrescence within the USSR, of the Thermidorian bureaucracy. We pay homage to comrade Leon Trotsky and the Fourth Inter- To depict Trotsky as a “sectarian” is an infamous lie. As Trotsky national that in their struggle against Stalinism gave us revolutionary said, when the reformists accuse us Bolshevik-Leninists of being “sec- lessons, bringing to its completeness the theory of Permanent tarian”, they are actually attacking the soundness of our principles and Revolution in the Chinese Revolution of 1927 and in the struggle for our uncompromising intransigence in the fight for the proletarian the political revolution to the interior of the USSR to restore the power revolution. Opportunists never attack our weak points (which un- for the Soviets by throwing down the bureaucracy and turning again doubtedly we have) but our strong ones… the worker state into a bulwark of the world revolution. We pay homage to the Russian Section of the Fourth Inter- In the tough battles against the popular front in the ‘30s; against national founded by Leon Trotsky as the Leninist fraction of the centrism that aimed at each step to abort the left turn of wide layers of Bolshevik Party which combated the ignominious misdeeds by the working class; against the “united fronts from the top” of Stalinism Stalinism and the soviet bureaucracy against the world proletariat. and Social Democracy -which blocked the way towards the general In the USSR, Trotsky’s followers were locked up in the Stalinist concen- strike in England in late ‘20s and against fascism in Germany -where tration camps, the isolators or “gulags”, as in Vorkuta. From those terrible Stalinism and its “third period” politics divided and defeated the Ger- Stalinist holes the revolutionaries fought for the Fourth International. man proletariat, handing it out to fascism, Trotskyism formed revo- The Russian section was centralized from the West by the internation- lutionary cadres under the hard conditions of counterrevolution and al secretariat of the Fourth International, headed by Trotsky together revolution. The Fourth International was built as continuity of Bolshe- with Cannon, Van Heijenoort, Rudolph Klement, among others. Be- vism confronting the “hell-black night” of Stalinism and fascism and side them a new generation of internationalist cadres was emerging, the dog-like servility of the treacherous leaderships to the “democratic having at their head comrade Leon Sedov, who was chased by the imperialists” that led to the tragic defeats of the Spanish and French German Gestapo and treacherously stricken by the Stalinist KGB as- Revolutions and submitted the US and UK working classes to the im- sassins. Both the old guard and the younger one constituted an inter- perialist butchers, Roosevelt and Churchill. Along with these first de- nationalist General Staff that gave continuity to the legacy of the Third feats, by the way, were the bases for the Stalinist filth to settle firmly International. Long Live the heroic Russian Section of the fourth In- not only in the USSR but in the Third International as well. ternational, massacred by Stalinism in the concentration camps and We stand up to pay homage to the brave Bolsheviks-Lenin- one thousand times betrayed by the liquidators of the Fourth Inter- ists that in 1933, after the Stalinist treason to the German proletariat, national who in the West submitted their program and their struggle started their struggle to put in place a new international, the Fourth to Stalinism and its counterrevolutionary politics of peaceful co-exis- International; this new international was conquered along hard battles tence with imperialism in the second post-war! They were servants to in the battleground of the Spanish civil War against the Stalinist and Mao Zedong, Tito, Castro and Ho Chi Minh. They are responsible of Popular-Frontist betrayals to the proletariat and the centrists’ impo- leaving the Russian section of the Fourth International resisting iso- tence mixed with tailism to the reformists –as shown by the case of the lated in the USSR, as they left dislocated the socialist revolution in the Spanish POUM- that carried them to support the reformists from the West from the political revolution in the East that in Czechoslovakia, left; the POUM was born from an unprincipled wedding between An- Hungary, Poland, etc., was confronting the Stalinist bureaucracy. dres Nin and the followers of Bukharin in Spain, and it was a tragedy We pay homage to the theory and the program conquered in the for the socialist revolution in that country. foundation of the Fourth International; we re-affirm their full validity The Fourth International did not stay indifferent before the emer- and current importance. When that doing, at the same time we de- gence of whole layers of the proletariat that were breaking with Social nounce the falsifiers, revisionists and Trotskyite renegades that have Democracy and turning to the left in front of the progress of fascism, blamed those theoretical and programmatic bases for all their own seeking for a revolutionary breakthrough that Stalinism was not of- errors and for the crisis of our world party. fering. Working over the centrists, in order to facilitate the quick evo- We pay homage to comrade Trotsky as the symbol of a genera- lution of thousand hundreds of workers towards the revolutionary tion of revolutionary internationalist Marxists who from the first program, was concentrated in a crystal-clear politics of strategic in- decade of the twentieth century, when Capitalism developed and flexibility combined with tactical flexibility. survived as Imperialism –that is, as parasitic Capitalism- , adjusted the Trotsky always held that centrism is a major factor in our epoch. Marxist theory and program with the method of scientific socialism, The task of revolutionaries is not to supply the centrists with political preparing the conditions to lead the proletariat to victory. As we have fodder, but to oblige them to opt between reform and revolution. just said, that generation started being as a bunch of internationalists

International Workers Organizer 5 who concentrated the first revolutionary experiences in the new im- in the chain of counterrevolutionary shots, as was the previous one perialist epoch that opened in the early years of the twentieth century, -Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Liebknecht’s cowardly murders in the in Russia with the Bolsheviks as in Germany as well with Rosa Lux- hands of social democrat Noske’s soldiery, aimed to defeat the glorious embourg and Karl Liebknecht. These internationalist revolutionaries revolution by the soldier and worker councils in 1918-19 in Germany merged their forces definitively in 1914, by breaking with the Marxist and Moscow Trials when Stalinist bureaucracy liquidated the entire renegades and traitors as Bebel, Kautsky and the rest of Social Demo- Bolshevik generation of the third International. crats as the Mensheviks that handed out the proletariat to the different Let’s transform then this 70th anniversary of Trotsky’s mur- gangs of the imperialist powers that disputed among themselves the der in a tribute to Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxembourg and also all world in that slaughterhouse called the 1WW. those that were murdered in the Moscow trials as the old Bolshevik From the FLTI, we at the same time denounce and reaffirm in guard! Let’s pay homage to comrades Leon Sedov, Rudolph Kle- front of the world proletariat, that Trotsky’s murder was a deci- ment, Abraham Leon and also all the Trotskyists and revolution- sive milestone in the way to liquidate definitively an entire generation aries backstabbed by the Stalinist fifth column in the Spanish civil of internationalist, socialist revolutionaries that couldn’t be reduced war…! Let’s pay homage then to comrade Leon Trotsky and the en- to kneel before the bourgeoisie, that said well aloud, as Liebknecht tire generation of internationalist socialist revolutionaries that to- did, “water and fire don’t do good bed-fellows!”, that confronted gether with Lenin showed that it was possible to lead the world pro- recklessly the traitors in the unions and other worker organizations, letariat to victory and to conquer the conditions for that victory! be them social democrats, bureaucrats, etc.; that in Tsarist Russia un- From the FLTI we know that the annihilation of a whole genera- der the leadership and centralization of a revolutionary general staff tion of internationalist intransigent revolutionaries was what allowed emerged from the merging of the internationalist cadres in Zimmer- ultimately Capitalism to outlive itself, while the proletariat had to wald-Kienthal, were able to show to the world working class that it was endure a tremendous blow to the international centralization of its possible to seize power and change the course of History, ending with struggle, its organization and its internationalist consciousness, three the regime of Capitalist exploitation. indispensable conditions for the working class to liberate itself from Trotsky’s murder in the hands of Stalinism was an accurate shot, exploitation in Capitalist society. centralized and monitored by the world imperialist gangs, one more

Trotsky’s vile murder achieved its goal only because the leaders of the Fourth International dissolved Coyoacan’s international centre

rom the FLTI we affirm that that blow affecting the Fourth International with Trotsky’s murder was an accurate Fshot, but it only could be decisive due to the Fourth International’s International Secre- tariat’s capitulating before the Stalinist ter- ror and the siren songs of the “democratic imperialists” and thus dissolving the Inter- national Centre; the responsibility of such a capitulation fell in a great measure upon the leadership of the US SWP which returned to its country of origin. The Centre built in Coyoacan “was left vacant”. So the national sections of the Fourth International became isolated one from the other, having to en- dure without any counterbalance thousands of pressures in the total isolation under the terrible conditions of war in Europe and the Speech at Copenhagen university in 1932 counterrevolutionary blows by fascism and Stalinism. centralized more than ever the ranks of the world party of socialist The greatest achievement of Bolshevism’s, the Fourth Interna- revolution, when the war was already a fact, the proletarians con- tional headed by Trotsky in the’30s, was not destroyed by the mur- fronting each other in the battlefields and the USSR being invaded derous Stalinist picket but because of the leaders of the Internation- by German fascist troops. al Centre, who after Trotsky’s death deserted their task of keeping As denounced by Trotsky, Stalinism enjoyed some advantages over

6 International Workers Organizer social democracy in its counterrevolutionary job, not only for its degree of cynicism and thirst of vengeance, but overall for its centralization and the worldwide extension of its counterrevolu- tionary forces.

It was necessary not only to murder the chiefs of the in- ternationalist fraction of the world working class, the only one that had shown that the heaven could be taken by storm and jeopardized the imperialist dominance over the planet, but fundamentally, what was sought after by liquidating this revolutionary fraction was to annihilate the militant interna- tionalism of the world proletariat. That militant internation- alism had led to the foundation of the First International, to the worldwide general strikes for the 8 hour workday, showing that the world proletariat was able to unite in a single fist to hit the exploiters; the Third International had shown that it was possible to seize power in a country and that this power could only attain victory or maintain itself as an episode of the Trotsky at Petrograd’s revolutionary soviet in 1919 international revolution and to the extent that it could expand itself to the rest of the world. could achieve its victories, the only true victories in its story. Thanks to those internationalist revolutionary leaderships it also could draw Trotsky’s murder was then a counterrevolutionary white terror ex- and keep, even when it was defeated, revolutionary lessons that pre- erted by the Stalinist bureaucracy for the sake of the world bourgeoisie pared and forged new generations even more revolutionary and con- and imperialism. It was the last of the executions of the series of coun- scious than the precedent ones, and so a continuity was attained for terrevolutionary Moscow Trials that liquidated the whole revolution- scientific socialism. ary generation of the Third International and the worthiest cadres of the Fourth International. In 1940 the only member of the Bolshevik The proletariat achieved its victories with the Paris Commune in Central Committee that had seized power in the October Revolu- the nineteenth century declaring all the workers in the World “citizens tion in the URSS still alive was…Stalin the assassin. of the worker commune”. It also achieved its victories en the gener- The physical blow given to Trotsky and most part of his inter- al revolutionary strikes for the 8 hour workday in the late nineteenth national team by the KGB pursued the historic objective of liqui- century, which threatened the foundations of world Capitalism. It dating the last of the leaders that in 1914 and 1915 “sat in the arm- achieved them conquering bread and land, liquidating autocracy and chair” of Zimmerwald and Kienthal. breaking the chain of the confrontation between workers of different From the FLTI we affirm and vindicate what was denounced by nations in the 1WW with the seizing of power in Russia. And just be- Nadezda Krupskaja, Lenin’s spouse who, based on this thesis of the cause the Russian revolution couldn’t expand to Germany and to the internationalists, affirmed that if Lenin hadn’t died in 1924, Stalin –as rest of the imperialist countries, for the immaturity of the young com- the expression of the forces of the bureaucratic counterrevolution and munist parties, what came were not victories but defeats and calami- the expropriation of the October revolution- would have murdered ties for the proletariat. him. How certain she was! And when the internationalist fraction was getting ready under By murdering comrade Trotsky those forces tried that at the the leadership of Trotsky and his general staff for organizing the sec- beginning of the 2WW and moreover in its aftermath, the Fourth ond act of the world revolution for the aftermath of the second inter International could not play the role of preparing the revolution- imperialist war, Stalinism gave its sure shot by murdering Trotsky. ary parties for the task of leading the proletariat to seizing the The dissolution of the international centre of the Fourth Internation- power as the internationalists of Zimmerwald-Kienthal and al is what turned Trotsky’s murder into a historically decisive action. The the Third International had done in the last days of the 1WW. revolutionary movement is paying today the price of the capitulation Today the Trotskyite renegades, together with the impostors, falsifi- of those that dissolved the general staff of the world proletarian revolu- ers and various kinds of charlatans want to deny these revolutionary tion, with a 70-year crisis in our world party. The revolutionary lessons lessons before the eyes of the new generation of proletarians, so that of the international proletariat as “a class-for-itself” were interrupted they do not continue to exist and allow centralized international frac- in History. Every proletarian generation has had to begin anew its ex- tions of the proletariat to stand up again. Those renegades and traitors perience and learning passing through very heavy crises. Revisionism blame “Trotsky’s murder” for the crisis in the Fourth International, and opportunism liquidated any continuity of the Marxist program. and do not recognize the responsibility of their own capitulations and The liquidators of the Fourth International don’t have, will never have adaptations to every reformist leadership they met and to which they a justification for their misdeeds. They receive and will always receive tied the fate of the world proletariat, containing and hand-tying it for a condemnation from all who struggle for re-founding the Fourth In- the last 70 years. ternational and standing up again on its feet the general staff of the Due to the crisis of this last 70 years in the Fourth International world socialist revolution. The time for national programs has long and international socialism within the ranks of the world proletariat ago passed out! Only the foundation anew of the Fourth International it was definitely established, albeit in a negative way that only with could give continuity to the program of socialist revolution! international revolutionary leaderships at its head the proletariat

International Workers Organizer 7 Trotskyism and the Fourth International were the only and genuine continuity of Bolshevism

Trotskyism in the ‘30s put before the World proletariat the same war cry and the same motion that had been put by Lenin and the Bolsheviks in their fight against Menshevism. Against the counterrevolu- tionary Second and Third Internationals, against the centrist (called 2 and a half) Amsterdam International, the Trotskyists in the ‘30s held: “Let Mensheviks and re- formists build their party; we Leninist-Bol- sheviks will build ours to prepare the victo- ry of the socialist revolution”. The Fourth International, heir to Bol- shevism, was conscious about the im- perialism as “the splitting of socialism” Trotskyists militants of the Fourth International in Johannesburg, South Africa (1934) and they know that only by defeating the interests of the worker aristocracy and bureaucracies, bought by finance Capi- from time to time in congresses where they whitewash their tal and the bourgeoisie to submit the working class and its “blunders” as was the case with the Fourth International in struggles, the proletariat will be able to seize the power. the last 70 years. These people want to hide and blur the fact that the Far from that, during Trotsky’s life, the Fourth Interna- struggle in Zimmerwald and Kienthal, continued by the tional as continuity of Bolshevism confronted ruthlessly the revolutionary Third and Fourth Internationals was the re- popular front and the policy of strangling the revolution in sponse by revolutionary Marxism in the twentieth century the West on the part of Stalinism and Social Democracy. It to confront the betrayal of Social Democracy and Stalinism was backstabbed from the own “republican” camp during that had changed sides going to defend the interests of Cap- the Spanish civil war against Franco by the fifth column set italism in its parasitic, last phase of death agony. by the KGB, the same fifth column that murdered Trotsky in Mexico in cold blood. That’s why, against the imposture of the Trotskyite ren- Be it during a tide or an ebb of the working class activ- egades, we affirm that since the foundation of the Fourth ity, from the top of power or in the resistance, from Zim- International in ’38, what the internationalist revolutionary merwald-Kienthal to the Coyoacan centre of Trotsky’s in movement has done after 70 years is “sowing dragons to Mexico in the ‘40s, the revolutionary proletariat could harvest fleas”, as Trotsky said talking about Stalinism in the keep an international centre, a general staff that took on ‘30s in France. the task of centralizing the proletarian struggles world- wide against the counterrevolutionary general staff of the imperialist bourgeoisies and the treacherous lead- We Trotskyists from the FLTI pay homage to Trotsky and ership. As soon as Social Democracy led by social-impe- with him to the Soviet section of the Fourth International, rialist Kautsky and Bernstein changes sides, going over to to the French section that was prepared to struggle against the trench of imperialist counterrevolution, an internation- the “democratic” imperialisms, as well as to the rest of the al wing emerges that re-groups the ranks of revolution- European sections that were formed by our world party to ary Marxism during the war, wages battle to the defectors intervene in the second inter-imperialist war with the war- and prepares in Zimmerwald-Kienthal the fight for power cry: “about-face with your guns! Kill the exploiters, not your during and in the aftermath of war. class brothers!” and the program of the revolutionary de- featism.

The Fourth International after Trotsky’s death failed to play that role. Centrists and opportunists liquidated any The Fourth International we make ours is that Interna- possibility of being a continuity of the Marxist program, as tional which in Latin America led the struggle against fas- this is international and cannot develop in a party that is cism in Brazil in ’36 and took he revolutionary lessons drawn not a world party, much less in national groups federated from that struggle to Bolivia, where in 1946 the Minework-

8 International Workers Organizer ers Federation voted the Pulacayo The- ses, i.e., the Trotskyist Program for the 1952 Revolution adopted by the COB (Bolivian Central Labour Union) that same year. We want to pay homage and vindi- cate Trotsky and young Cannon’s SWP in the US that in the ‘30s confronted ruthlessly the Rooseveltians and Stalin- ists in the American labour movement; that SWP which parted its banners with those of Bukharinist opportunism and far from placing the US working class to Roosevelt’s feet, as the entire American left does today with Obama, it confronted openly both fascism and “democratic” imperialism alike, and said “presently the Second and Third Internationals and the International of Amsterdam are counterrevolutionary organizations whose objective is check- ing and paralyzing the world proletari- ans’ revolutionary struggle against the “democratic” imperialists” (Conversa- tions with Argentinean Bolshevik-Le- ninist Mateo Fossa, September 29, 1938, our translation).

Trotsky together with Jean Van Heijenoort From the FLTI we make ours every battle waged by factions of the Fourth International which in a honest way tried to keep unabridged that bloody river existing from long We denounce that for the Trotskyite renegades and for ago between Bolshevism and Menshevism, between Trotsky- those that destroyed the Fourth International, speaking ism and Stalinism, between revolution and reformism. about the Fourth International today amounts to a politi- We pay homage to the fighters of the Russian section that cal suicide and nobody kills itself in politics, because these were abandoned in the frontline of the war against the people have abandoned the battlefield and the fight for Stalinist filth, betrayed in the West by the liquidationist ras- the Fourth International long ago. How dare these people cals of the Fourth International that usurped its name and speak and vindicate the Fourth International, its theory and banner after Trotsky’s death. We pay homage to those mar- program, which have passed the test of History, when they tyred comrades that fell fusilladed in the Stalinist concen- have been doing nothing more than revising them during tration camps, crying “Long live the October Revolution! decades and preparing their overt leave to the ranks of the Long Live Bolshevism! Long Live Trotskyism! Long Live the Fifth International? There they hold up together with the re- Fourth International!” mains of Stalinism and Social Democracy the old and long ago perished theories, which revolutionary Marxism has buried successfully as the “two-stage revolutions”, “socialism We make ours the thousand and one attempts with which in a single country”, “supporting and backing popular fronts different proletarian generations in the last 70 years gave in order to confront fascism”, or “national front to confront their life to put in place an internationalist fraction of the imperialism and after that –donkey’s years ahead- let’s do the world proletariat, that longed for fighting under the program socialist revolution”. and the banners of the Fourth International, but were end- lessly taken by opportunist, centrist and liquidationist lead- erships to political and physical defeats and demoralized. We want to affirm that the hard blows against Trotsky- Those heroic efforts by the precedent generations oblige us ism have not only come from Stalinism but from the vicious to put our best and utmost forces in order to give continuity actions of Pabloism and revisionism, which from within the to the Marxist program of combative internationalism, so very same belly of the Fourth International liquidated its that the new proletarian generations are never more led by theory, legacy and program, in the same way that the 2nd the “Marxian” impostors to new frustrations and demoral- and Third International were lost. izations in the class struggle. International Workers Organizer 9 Leon Trotsky and his legacy: a thousand and one times slandered, a thousand and one times falsified

hy was a character as Trotsky so slandered in Histo- ry? For the German imperialism and the 14 impe- rialist armies, defeated by the Soviet and European Wproletariats in the ‘20s, Trotsky was “a vile and bloodthirsty assassin”, who “massacred defenceless children”. For Stalinism, that usurped the power in the Soviets, Trotsky had turned a counterrevolutionary agent working for the Japanese Mikado and the German Nazi Gestapo. For the Gestapo “there was not a more dangerous red agent” than him. Thus Trotsky ended as a refugee in Mexico, without a visa, calumniated as being an agent of Franco and then of Cardenas. tionary Marxist program before the new developments with When Stalinism signed the “non-aggression” pact with Ger- the method of historical-dialectical materialism, under the many in 1938 (the so called Molotov-Ribbentrop Agreement) banners of the theory of Permanent Revolution and the pro- the Soviet bureaucracy accused Trotsky of being an agent of US gram for the seizing of power. They want that not even one President Roosevelt. Under those terrible conditions, however, Trotskyist dare to put again in place an international centre Trotsky had brought into being the international centre of the for grouping the world proletariat under the banners of in- Fourth International, a net of steady revolutionaries who from ternationalism. Portugal to Moscow organized the Soviet section and put in It is for them a question of life and death that a fulcrum isn’t place a revolutionary party in the own heart of the US, the SWP created for the levers to be applied by any revolutionary worker of young Cannon. in the world who wants to fight for the international proletarian Why so much slandering against this revolutionary “per- revolution and unite with his/her class brothers and sisters in sonality”? we may ask ourselves. UK Prime Minister Churchill the world –as the only possibility for victory in each country- and US President Roosevelt, the representatives of the British under the stainless banners of the program of the founders of and American imperialists, respectively, discussed about who the Fourth International of 1938, of Zimmerwald-Kienthal and would win if the US took part in the war. Both of them agreed the Third International of Lenin and Trotsky in the ‘20s. in that no doubt “the winner would be Trotsky”, in spite of the The reformists, servants to the bourgeoisie and those who latter not having but a few thousand followers in the world. pay them, the finance capital and the capitalists, all of them For the class enemy and its general staffs, in this case the know that if the internationalist fraction of the world proletar- chiefs of the “democratic” imperialist gangs, Trotskyism, as in iat returns to the heart of the exploited, the revolution will re- 1948 had been the League of the Communists of Marx and En- turn as that of the worker councils in Germany, the soviets with gels, meant the looming ghost of revolution. They knew that revolutionary leaderships will return in order to take the power, war engenders revolutions and that Trotskyism could well be revolutionary parties will emerge in the imperialist powers that the midwife of revolution in the same way that the internation- will tie their destiny to that of the proletariat of the colonial alists that met in the conferences of Zimmerwald and Kienthal and semi colonial world oppressed and massacred by their own –who scarcely filled a sofa in 1914 when the 1WW was at its imperialist bourgeoisies. In the semi colonial world the rev- beginning- had been. olutionary parties will emerge again that will not cede a step But Trotsky, as well as Lenin, not only was calumniated and or give the most minimum support to the cowardly national falsified. He was also revised, tried to be softened, put to the bourgeoisies and their governments, but will tie the fate of the feet of the Castroes, the Titos, the Maos, or any “left” or “pro- proletariat of the colonies and semi colonies to the victory of gressive” social democrat appeared in the world. His legacy was the proletariat in the imperialist powers. submitted to the cheapest trade-unionism and not less cheap They know that there are accounts to be settled and that the parliamentarism. militant internationalism of the revolutionary fraction of the What explanation has the terrible fury with which they act world proletariat will certainly settle them. The time will come in this 70th Anniversary of Trotsky’s murder? What explana- in a moment when the Chinese workers have already begun to tion can be given to such an amount of falsifications and im- struggle in mutinies, revolts and revolutionary actions. postures from those that have long ago broken with Trotskyism From Kyrgyzstan, from the periphery to the centre, the pro- and its legacy? We have to be clear: so much ignominy exist so letariat of the former USSR threatens to return to the stage with that not even one Trotskyist dares to commit himself to the revolutionary manoeuvres. The heroic combat of the Afghan task of reviving and applying the theoretical and program- masses poses a Vietnam-like scenario. The ghost of Trotskyism matic legacy of the Fourth International, which keeps all its is frightening all the class enemies. vigour and validity; they don’t want that even one Trotskyist dare to occupy the empty chair in the congress of the found- Long Live Trotskyism! Long Live the Fourth International! ers of the Fourth in order to give continuity to the revolu-

10 International Workers Organizer For the liquidators of the Fourth International, the Fourth International does not exist

long a certain number of years period, to build “their” internationals, an historian who devoted his ef- with their “mother parties” and “satellite forts to follow closely the life of groups” which only served to give a cov- ALeon Trotsky wondered why the founder er to the misdeeds that each one of them of the Red Army and leader of the Third performed in its country. They have used International and the victory of Russian the Fourth International as a cover for October preferred to “waste” his pre- federations of national groups, for their cious time organizing little groups and pompous international diplomacy of discussing endlessly with them, to spend helping each other to put into practise so many hours gathering and forming and conceal the worst social-patriotism cadres in the “hell-black night” of fas- in order to better submit the working cism and Stalinism in the ‘30s, for the classes of their respective countries to sake of forming the Fourth International. their own bourgeoisies. From the viewpoint of this historian, Trotsky affirms –and we with him- called Isaac Deutscher –author of works that the hour of national programs has as “The Prophet Unarmed” and “The long passed away; that the revolution in Prophet Outcast”, the worst mistake of each country is only the refraction of the Trotsky’s was that of wasting his time or- international conditions created by the ganizing the Fourth International when political, economic and military dom- the Left Opposition had to break com- inance of imperialism over the planet; pletely with the Third International after that the only national task for a revolu- the defeat in 1933 to the German prole- tionary party is winning over the major- tariat in the hands of fascism and Hitler ity of the proletarians and their fighting Rudolph Klement due to the Stalinist misleading. organizations in order to centralize them For all their heaps of scribbles about together with the rest of the world work- International and defending the power Trotsky, for all their fake ”tributes” to ing class for attaining victory, leading the of the soviets, where I played a very sig- him, no one of the Trotskyite renegades masses in each country towards a victo- nificant role, I could have equally been can deny that they are adepts to that pet- rious insurrection. absent; however, Bolshevism would have ty bourgeois viewpoint by Deutscher and The liquidators of the Fourth Interna- achieved those goals all the same. only pay a shallow homage to Trotsky’s tional, with their international diplomat- Against the impostors that pay “hom- masterpiece, the founding of the Fourth ic federations, with their mother parties age” falsifying Trotskyism, it’s necessary International. They have dedicated, with and satellites, have only achieved the dis- to tell the truth: comrade Trotsky an- their different “national-internation- continuity of a centralized party of the swered his guests (as today he would al chiefs” originated in the post-Yalta world proletariat. tell his detractors): “but I am positively When Trotsky received in Mexico the important, and must play in it a cen- visit of hundreds of passionate revolu- tral role, for the task of founding the tionary cadres, eager to know his expe- Fourth International, the world party rience at the head of the Red Army, he of socialist revolution. Without that, refused to answer their questions about the next generation of the proletariat this topic. His guests insisted, asking him will be lost. The next war will be only a again and again about his views on the catastrophe in a chain of catastrophes experience of the Red Army and his ex- if the world socialist revolution does traordinary contributions to the military not succeed in attaining victory. The program of the proletariat, as in the case perspective of socialist revolution will of the war of manoeuvres. Trotsky’s only be far away for years and barbarism answer was: “The Third International will devastate the planet”. and the Russian Bolsheviks have already The founding of the Fourth Interna- written a lot about that. Please read and tional was the greatest work by Trotsky study those lessons and you will be able and his internationalist team for con- to instruct yourselves”. tinuing with the job of Bolshevism and The founder of the Fourth Inter- the third (Leninist) International. national affirmed: for conducting the seizing of power, for founding the Third Abraham Leon

International Workers Organizer 11 Under the banner of the Fourth International

In this 70th anniversary of Leon Trotsky’s murder, we want to pay tribute to him; and this homage is also an homage to his decisive historical legacy, the foundation of the Fourth Interna- tional and its theory, the theory of Permanent Revolution and its program, the Transitional Program of 1938. We want to pay homage to the monumental work, the most extraordinary one among all the works that Trotsky contributed to conquer, and which its destructors, detractors and falsifiers have not been yet able to defeat and liquidate at an historic level. Because we are sure the program of the Fourth International and its lessons remember us that the laws of History are stronger than any ap- paratus. Reformism supports and defends a decaying system that discards its agents at each step, treating them as squeezed lem- ons. The reformists cannot solve any of the problems of the masses. Capitalism cannot even give some charities for the re- formists to put them as “gains” or reforms. That is why they pay their homage to Trotsky 70 years after his murder, painting their faces as if they were still real Trotskyists so to better deni- grate Trotskyism and falsify its legacy. From the huge contradictions of a system that has long ago ceased to deserve living, in front of the worst unheard suffer- ings the masses are enduring, the conditions are created and re-created again for the Bolshevism to re-emerge. Small revolu- tionary groups of today will be able to form and have thousands of opportunities along a period of cresis, wars and revolutions, a period that not only continues open but will deepen openly 1938: the magazine Quatrieme Internationale announces and become hotter in the twenty first century. the Fourth International foundational Congress If the proletarian revolution does not succeed in one or vari- ous imperialist powers and in the semi-colonial World, fascism downfall of Bolshevism. There are those who put responsibility and new imperialist –either local or worldwide- wars will come upon revolutionary doctrine for the mistakes and crimes of those inexorably. There and under those conditions, reformists will who betrayed it (…)The majority of these apostles have succeed- gasp as fish taken out of the water. ed in becoming themselves moral invalids before arriving on the The Fourth International is not dead! Marxism lives in thou- field of battle” (Transitional Program, “Against Opportunism sand hundreds of disputes between fractions and tendencies in- and Unprincipled Revisionism”) ternationally! The fight to re-.found the Fourth international In this tribute we pay to comrade Trotsky in the 70th year and put it again on its feet matches the necessities of the young after his murder, we from the FLTI affirm, paraphrasing our generation of the proletariat that wants to receive a program Transitional Program, that at the early years of the twenty first and a stainless banner to fight and succeed! century false phrophets disguised in fake Trotskyist costumes Only a Fourth International founded again with its method and through flashing revelations are today treating the world and theory, with the revolutionary lessons of the last 70 years proletariat to old recipes long ago buried in the archives of and those drawn from the hottest acid tests in the world class pre-Marxist socialism. From the FLTI we declare ruthless war struggle will be able to educate the new proletarian generation in the way of the Fourth International’s program, to the restora- and lead it decidedly to victory. tionist Castroite bureaucracy, to the Stalinist filth that became From the FLTI we affirm: in that fight for the foundation in bourgeois and handed over the worker states to capitalist anew of the Fourth International there will be neither room for restoration. We declare ruthless war to the gangs of imperialist opportunists, nor for those that tolerate and support the treach- parasites that dispute among themselves the bounty over the erous leaderships, submit the masses to the popular fronts, the starvation, the misery and the slavery of million of workers Bolivarian bourgeoisies or the Islamic bourgeoisies, seek a worldwide. We declare as our intransigent commitment that of solution near the “democratic” imperialists, so murderous and confronting them with the method of proletarian revolution. bloodthirsty as the Hitlers and Mussolinis of yesterday. We declare war to the Fifth International and to the Trotsky- We affirm with Trotsky and our Transitional Program ite renegades that support it from the left, orbiting around it as that: “The tragic defeats suffered by the world proletariat over satellites. That is, as the Transitional program reads: we declare a long period of years doomed the official organizations to yet a ruthless battle to reformism without reforms, to the paci- greater conservatism and simultaneously sent disillusioned pet- fist without peace and to the revolutionaries that are mortal- ty bourgeois “revolutionists” in pursuit of “new ways.” As always ly frightened of revolution. during epochs of reaction and decay, quacks and charlatans ap- We pay homage to comrade Trotsky and with him to the pear on all sides, desirous of revising the whole course of revolu- founders of the Fourth International, to all those that were tionary thought. Instead of learning from the past, they “reject” it. brave enough to put in place an international centre under the Some discover the inconsistency of Marxism; others announce the worst conditions of fascism, Stalinist counterrevolution and 12 International Workers Organizer war in order to keep alive the legacy of the revolutionary Third the FLTI considers itself only a fulcrum to set a lever on in or- International and the most important lessons of revolutionary der to conquer an International Committee for the re-founda- Marxism in the twentieth century. tion of the 1938 Fourth International. We call to continue along that way and to establish the in- Against revisionism and unprincipled opportunism, while ternational fraction of the world proletariat so that all the rev- paying this homage to Trotsky we say: “The Fourth Internation- olutionaries in the world are able to group in a new Zimmer- al does not search after and does not invent panaceas. It takes its wald-Kienthal. We call for the new revolutionary generations stand completely on Marxism as the only revolutionary doctrine to make good of criticism, to think with their own heads and that enables one to understand reality, unearth the cause behind to seek the truth. So many deceptions, lies and falsifications the defeats and consciously prepare for victory. The Fourth Inter- against Trotskyism, overall those which are made in its own national continues the tradition of Bolshevism which first showed name, cannot remain unpunished in History. And in the same the proletariat how to conquer power. The Fourth International way we call the world working class, more than ever, to refuse sweeps away the quacks, charlatans and unsolicited teachers of to be hand-tied, to trust only in their own strength, to believe morals. In a society based upon exploitation, the highest moral is firmly that nothing can be accomplished in alliance with the that of the social revolution. All methods are good which raise the class enemies, the exploiters and their servants. class consciousness of the workers, their trust in their own forces, We call the international proletariat to self-organ- their readiness for self-sacrifice in the struggle. The impermissible ize, to recover the worker democracy and expel with methods are those which implant fear and submissiveness in the determination the traitors from within our ranks. oppressed before their oppressors, which crush the spirit of protest We affirm that the spontaneity and courage which the mass and indignation or substitute for the will of the masses – the will movement has displayed in the class battles have been a million of the leaders; for conviction – compulsion; for an analysis of re- times superior to the cowardice and dog-like servility of the ality – demagogy and frame-up. That is why Social Democracy, reformist leaderships calling for these masses to submit to the prostituting Marxism, and Stalinism – the antithesis of Bolshe- exploiters. vism – are both mortal enemies of the proletarian revolution and We call the new proletarian generations, especially the most its morals. exploited sectors, as the working youth and women, to fight for To face reality squarely; not to seek the line of least resistance; the Marxist apothegm to come again to the fore: THE LIBERA- to call things by their right names; to speak the truth to the mass- TION OF THE WORKERS WILL BE THE JOB OF THE OWN es, no matter how bitter it may be; not to fear obstacles; to be true WORKERS. in little things as in big ones; to base one’s program on the logic Sooner than later the young generation of the prole- of the class struggle; to be bold when the hour for action arrives tariat will understand that those who speak in the name – these are the rules of the Fourth International. It has shown of socialism and Trotskyism on “holidays”, actually nei- that it could swim against the stream. The approaching histori- ther struggle for them every day nor fight for their pro- cal wave will raise it on its crest. (Transitional Program, “Against gram trying to lead the proletariat to victory. In this 70th Opportunism and Unprincipled Revisionism”) anniversary they make the proletariat promises of victory, but everyday they present it with a chain of bitter defeats. Long Live the Fourth International! The tour has come to strengthen an international centre, of put- Long Live proletarian internationalism! ting in place a general staff for the world revolution, of which For the victory of the international socialist revolution!

The Fourth International -when Leon Trotsky was at its head- prepared the vanguard of the international proletariat for intervening with a revolutionary program in the 2WW proper and in the immediate post-war revolutionary period

With the defeats of the Spanish and rope, and of course within it, France, as agreement between Stalin and Hitler French revolutions, with the German he actually did. And the Wehrmacht had amounted to ask politely the fox not to proletariat smashed under Hitler’s jack- just touched Paris gates when Nazi Ger- send the hen down its gullet. The 2WW boot, the way to war was cleared. In many launched a terrible attack over the demonstrated to have a dual character, 1938, with the excuse of “preventing Hit- USSR leaving a toll of 500,000 workers as the fourth International had correctly ler from invading the USSR”, rogue Stalin and peasants dead in the first week alone, foreseen. On one hand, it was inter-im- signed a non-aggression pact to German while cowardly Stalin kept crying and perialist to the extent that Germany was fascism. trembling under his bed in a dacha and obliged to break the siege of the Ver- As it was correctly denounced by the the entire Soviet bureaucracy was trying sailles Treaty, which had been imposed Fourth International, Hitler needed the to find him out to ask him desperately to on her by the 1WW victors, and also to wheat from Ukraine to supply his armies “please” come again and safeguard their the extent that USA was on the verge of and be able to march over Western Eu- interests as he had used to up to then. inundating the world with her gigante- rope in order to grab the whole of Eu- As Trotsky said, the non-aggression an finance capital to dominate it. But on

International Workers Organizer 13 the other hand, the objective of both murderous imperialists: “No support imperialist powers (the fascist as the to the “democratic” imperialists; nei- “democratic” one) was simply to take ther Roosevelt nor Churchill, much hold of the USSR, by restoring capital- less the imperialist French cliques, ism all over her. some of them allied to Hitler and oth- Through its analysis, prognosis and ers to Churchill! If the latter win the program the Trotskyists were prepar- war with their Anglo-American allies ing to centralize the forces of the in- they will massacre the masses of the ternationalists in front of the second war in the same way or worse than worldwide slaughterhouse into which the masses were finally contained by the fascism!” the entire human civilization was being rogue Stalinist-Maoist bureaucrats in the How correct and just were the pro- thrown. 38 parallel. In the same way, the Stalinist gram and the legacy of the Fourth Inter- While Hitler was invading the URRS, clique contained the march of the USSR national! We have seen in the post-war Stalin sat at the same table with Chur- and East European masses in the Ber- period the assassins of the French “dem- chill and Roosevelt to conform the new liner gates, just for the German imperi- ocratic” imperialist gangs massacring a “democratic” Command of world coun- alists not to be expropriated and so the million workers and peasants in Algeria terrevolution. Those were the interna- revolution did not win in that country. during the revolution that shook that tional conditions within which the GPU/ The Yalta-Potsdam pact left the Stalinist country in the ‘50s, and giving courses KGB interwove and prepared the coun- bureaucracy –from Berlin to Moscow- to all the counterrevolutionary armies in terrevolutionary blows on the Trotskyist in the role of controlling the proletarian the world, with lessons on how to torture militants and particularly on comrade revolution in the East, while the Stalinist worker and peoples’ fighters. Trotsky. The Fourth International had to parties were in charge of disarming the And that not to mention the massacres confront the cowardly policies of Stalin- Italian, French, Greek, etc., proletariats, and genocides made by the Anglo-Amer- ism, now in the war proper. preventing the socialist revolution from ican imperialists in the last 70 years, the Trotsky’s murder had that objective: attaining victory in imperialist Western “democratic” victors of the 2WW. to disperse the ranks of the Fourth Inter- Europe. The Fourth International fought for national, and to set up that “democratic So, paying homage to Trotsky 70 the defence of the USSR invaded by Hit- front” between the Soviet bureaucracy years after his murder, and to the found- ler; but it affirmed that that defence con- and the “democratic” imperialists, Chur- ers of the Fourth International, amounts sisted in organizing revolutionary cells chill and Roosevelt, a front that as the to settling accounts with decades of revi- in the rank and file of the German army war ended with the German defeat grant- sionism and liquidationism in the inte- so that the workers could make an about ed imperialism and world capitalism as a rior of our world party in the 2nd Post- face with their guns in occupied France whole their property. And above all, the war, with all those that blamed Trotsky and in the forefront in Stalingrad, and so objective was that this bloc, predecessor and the Fourth International for their point them against Hitler and his impe- and founder of the present UNO, could own flaws and failures, degradation and rialist clique. grant the restoration of capitalism in the capitulations, and who transformed our The Fourth International affirmed USSR in the aftermath of the 2WW that world party in an appendix to Stalinism that while fascism was being confront- they had motorized. and social Democracy during the Yalta ed as it was by millions red workers and But not everything went as they had period. peasants the best conditions were being planned. The war was again the midwife Nothing was more exact and accurate conquered, namely that while fascism of new revolutions and in spite of all than the prognosis and the program by was being smashed the way was opened their efforts they couldn’t prevent the ex- the Fourth International with which the to defeat Stalin, who was the great ob- propriation of the bourgeoisie in a third world proletariat was prepared in front stacle for the proletariat to win the war of the planet. of war in mid twentieth century. Trotsky instead of the imperialist cliques, and If the Stalinist bureaucracy was not himself in a conference of the Fourth In- that that was the best way to defend the able to give Moscow’s keys to “demo- ternational intervened in a decisive way, USSR. Their war cry was: “To defend the cratic” imperialism –as Yeltsin and Gor- fixing in its final shape the declaration of USSR it is necessary to defeat the coun- bachov were to do in the ‘80s- and if that conference, namely, the Manifesto of terrevolutionary gang of Stalin’s that is Churchill and Roosevelt could not reach the War of the Fourth International. ready to hand the worker state to the the URRS at the head of the same Ger- Those are the lessons and the pro- “democratic” imperialism of Churchill man general that had given in to them gram that today are reneged by all the and Roosevelt!” when Hitler was downthrown in Germa- Trotskyite renegades, who refuse thus to Every class conscious worker will ny, that is, if the “democratic” imperial- prepare the new proletarian generations be able to see that beyond the timing, ist command with McArthur as its chief for the oncoming wars, revolutions and this process of handing out the USSR could not take hold of the USSR, it was counterrevolutions that the twenty first to Roosevelt or Reagan – Churchill or due to the heroic resistance of the masses. century has boiling in its cauldrons in Thatcher was completed only 30 years The USSR and East European proletari- still more acute conditions. later. The delay was due to the heroic ats plus that of the West put more than The program of the Fourth Interna- struggles of the world proletariat and its 25 million dead in order to smash fas- tional affirmed in the ‘40s something that revolutionary processes in the West that cism, and some millions more to defeat even today retains its validity, something prevented that sell-out and not because the murderous Japanese and Chiang Kai- that confronts openly all the servile lead- of the alleged “defence of the USSR” as shek’s troops in China, and afterwards erships who bend their knees in front claimed by the Stalinist gangs who an- to make McArthur and his troops flee of the “democratic complexions” of the nihilated and or aborted the world so- after the war in Korea in 1952, though cialist revolution. 14 International Workers Organizer For Trotskyism and the Fourth Inter- without encountering any resistance, but national the victory of the political rev- we should not let the Germans defeat her olution against the Stalinist bureaucracy beyond that point: they must not win the was the only guarantee for setting the war”. The reason is that if the Germans USSR as a bulwark of the European revo- took hold of URRS, winning the war, lution during the war and in its aftermath. they could get a whole new market and “But that was not what happened!” the that would have obliged the US to enter revisionists cry. Yes, that didn’t happen, into a new open dispute for the world. So, however it was not due to any inexistent “democratic” imperialism was preparing Stalinist bravery but in spite of the to take hold of the worker state and in its heroic struggle of the masses those strategy, Hitler and fascism were a deci- people misled and because the political sive, key part, together with the submis- revolution did not attain victory during sion of Stalinism to the “Allied” front of and after the war. Let’s not forget that all Churchill and Roosevelt. the Trotyskyite renegades under Pablo’s How right were as a synthesis of Bol- orders had entered “for an indefinite shevism the strategy and the fight of the vented by the Pentagon’s strategists in 2010. time” the Communist (Stalinist) Parties, Fourth International facing the 2WW! Neither is sending Iraq back to the Mid- so putting the Fourth International And this is not music of the years past: dle Ages in the name of “democracy” and under the spell of Stalinism. When the now again we see the world left kneel in “freedom” and sending fresh “democratic” processes of political revolution finally front of Obama, supporting the “demo- troops to massacre Afghan people a nov- came, how could the fake Trotskyites put cratic” “Bolivarian” governments, as the elty or “democratic” Obama backed by all themselves at their head, identified as popular fronts in Bolivia. How valid are the social imperialist worker organizations. they were as servants to Stalinism? Due even today the revolutionary lessons by Revisionism in the Fourth Interna- to the political revolutions that shook the Fourth International! There you have tional, continuation of Menshevism and the workers states along the entire post- the story of the “democratic” popular Stalinism, has not left any legacy to the war having not succeeded for the open front of French imperialism, which after world proletariat, save for the trap submit- betrayal of the liquidators of the Fourth strangling the ’36 revolution in France, ting the working class to the bourgeoisie. International, the tactic victories of went with Leon Blum at its head in ’38 Paying homage to Trotsky today is the world proletariat became strategic –and the rattling of Nazi sabres nearing drawing the revolutionary lessons from rev- defeats in 1989. Paris in its ears- to rescue General Pe- olution and wars in the twentieth century. Pabloites, Mandelites, Morenoites, tain from oblivion, made him be named Without those lessons it would be Healyites, Lambertites et all have revised by the French parliament as “Saviour of impossible to conquer the conditions the program, the theory and the strate- France” and put the 1WW “hero” to de- for the proletarian victory in the twenty gies with which the Fourth International fend her from Hitler. That same “saviour” first century, much less prepare the rev- had prepared the world proletariat for Petain, a general blessed by the popular olutionary parties for new wars that the playing a central and decisive role in the front was who handed the Paris keys to rotten world imperialist system has in historical period opened during the war Hitler, making a partnership with the oc- the works and no doubt will begin in the and for the entire post-war period. cupiers to make juicy business, showing same level of destruction that the 2WW In the same way that had the national that capitalists recognize no borders (save ended, if the proletarian revolution does sections left to their fate during the war for jailing undesired foreign workers) but not succeed. That is, the new wars will in Europe, Morenoites and Pabloites af- common business… or wars to decide start –as continuity to the A bombs over firmed that, the 2WW had been a “war who gets the booty when it is necessary. Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Woe unto the between regimes”, namely, between “de- Any similitude with “socialist” Allen- world proletariat, said the Manifesto of mocracy and fascism”. de naming “democratic soldier” Pino- the War of the Fourth International in “Trotskyite” opportunists in Yalta pe- chet as commander in chief to the Chil- 1940, if they believe that the preceding riod believed in the fable of Roosevelt’s ean Armed Forces in Chile in 1973… so war was the “last” one! “democratic” imperialism and his suc- that the same Pinochet could smash the The present debacle and bankruptcy cessors. They believed in the trueness of “cordones industriales” (Chilean work- of the finance capital will deepen the dis- the D-day in Normandy, with the “dem- ers’ soviets) with a counterrevolutionary putes among the major imperialist pow- ocratic” imperialist troops dying to “lib- coup… is not a mere coincidence. Any ers for the market. Those among them erate Europe from fascism”. “Liberation” alikeness with the pact between Evo Mo- that emerge as losers in the present world that those troops were faced to as late as rales and the fascist Media Luna in Bo- crisis will become aggressive to recover 1945, because the “democratic” imperial- livia in order to keep alive the power of their spheres of influence. Like vultures, ists were waiting for the German troops the Rosca and contain and strangle the the winners will try to share a world to first demoralize, ravage and massacre revolution of 2003/2005 in that country market that is becoming ever smaller the USSR. As all the declassified US Pen- neither is a pure accident. and sooner than later, if the proletariat tagon Papers expose today, the US policy The Clintons and Obama, support- cannot prevent them from, the vultures was to wait by the sides that Germany ing with one hand the “coupers” in Hon- will also squabble among each other. smashed the worker state, however with- duras and with the other making Zelaya out leaving the Nazis to win the war. That go round Central America backed by the was cynically expressed by US President entire left of the Americas…and eventu- SECRETARIAT of INTERNATIONAL Harry Truman as follows: “The German ally legitimizing the regime of the coup in COORDINATION of the FLTI army must destroy sufficiently Russia in Honduras through elections… that was such a way that allows us take hold of her not an innovative bourgeois strategy in- International Workers Organizer 15 In the 80th anniversary of the murder of Leon Trotsky, we reproduce the tribute of the Collective for the Re-foundation of the Fourth International / FLTI published in 2018, in the 78th anniversary After decades of opportunism and revisionism of revolutionary Marxism...... The ex-Trotskyists led the Fourth International and its legacy at the feet of the bourgeoisie and the swamp of Stalinism and social-imperialism We must recover the Fourth International and regroup the revolutionary and internationalist forces to refound it!

his new anniversary of the assas- every thread of continuity sination of Comrade Leon Trotsky with the revolutionary pro- Tfinds revisionism and the liquida- gram of the Fourth Interna- tors of the Fourth International, seeking tional and its lessons had to liquidate all continuity and leaving no been cut. With an open trace of the theory, the program and the rupture with Trotskyism, combat of the most important work of those who continued to Comrade Trotsky, which was the Foun- speak in his name already dation of the IV International. only falsified it. Thus, with a true crisis and outbreak, The events of 1989 found the and without historical con- renegades of Trotskyism at the feet tinuity of its combats, the “IV International” entered of Stalinism, which sold out the the 21st century. former workers’ states to imperialism The so-called “anti-cap- While Stalinism sold out the former italists”, like the French workers’ states, the USSR, China, Viet- LCR, openly reneged on Before the fall of Stalinism, nam (as now Cuba) to imperialism, the the dictatorship of the proletariat. Others the Fourth International was renegades of Trotskyism were - just like lamented the fall of the Stalinist bureau- today - at their feet. They had followed cracy and from that moment on they open- the only place from where Stalinism as the soul to the body. Their ly support it. They were and are the ones one could speak to the world parties burst into pieces in the late ‘80s who tie the fate of the working class to the working movement. In the name and’ 90s. The laws of history proved to leaderships that betray it at every step. of Trotskyism, opportunism be stronger than any apparatus. The ren- Others, like today’s LIT, insisted and con- legitimizes Stalinism and the egades of Trotskyism who had usurped tinue insisting on the enormous “victory” the Fourth International had turned their that the “fall of the bureaucracy” meant traitors of the WSF backs, throughout the post-war period, as a “victorious democratic revolution” to the enormous battles of the working and not as it was: the defeat of a histor- After ‘89, the renegades of Trotsky- class of Eastern Europe and the former ic conquest and the collapse of worker ism, which had burst into a thousand USSR against the Stalinist bureaucracy. states. Even today they have to explain pieces, and after having become the Those who had long ago broken with how can the fall of the bureaucracy of a greatest destroyers of the revolution- the program of the Fourth Internation- worker state be a victory when they were ary program, give Stalinism a survival al blamed the masses, their supposed dissolved. so that it continues betraying the world “backward consciousness and Bolshe- Others, like the PTS of Argentina, proletariat. When the first wave of rev- vism for such a catastrophe of the col- saw a decomposing worker state un- olutionary struggle comes after the fall lapse of the former worker states. They til well into the first decade of the 21st of the worker states, at the end of the accused, in a true crusade and holy al- century, giving suprahistorical powers to 20th century and the beginning of the liance, Trotskyism of being “sectarian” the Stalinist bureaucracy when it was al- 21st century, with an enormous process throughout the postwar period. Thus, ready in private hands and the imperial- of struggle in the colonies and semi-col- they ended up washing the dirty clothes ism had appropriated of all the property onies took place. Stalinism was totally back to Stalinism, which had already of the planned economy. Not to mention delegitimized by the surrender of the for- become a direct agent of imperialism China, when the new party of the Chi- mer worker states and Trotskyism was and become a new possessing class. nese mandarins put the most numerous from the only place where one could With the fall of the workers’ states, working class to produce for the world speak in the name of socialism and the a great subversion against Marxism economy under conditions of slavery. left. This time, in his name, opportunism emerged. In the late 1980s and 1990s, usurping the flags of the Fourth Interna-

16 International Workers Organizer tional, legitimized the battered Stalinism to support their governments in cri- they have quickly formed their broad that the bourgeoisie accommodated by sis and harassed by the masses, fronts and “New Left” parties, which are making them lead the unions in a coun- the so-called “New Left” emerges. no more than Popular Fronts imitations terrevolutionary way and supporting the The change of command to its followers and class collaboration with the bour- native bourgeoisies in the semi colonial of the “New Left” was organized in the geoisie. There we saw the LIT voting world. Thus arose a new counterrevolu- last meetings of the World Social Fo- for Petro in Colombia, a petty-bourgeois tionary direction regrouped by big capi- rum in 2013 and 2015 in Tunisia along democrat supported by the big bourgeoi- tal, the World Social Forum (WSF). with Podemos and Syriza. There they sie of Antioquia. Or, heading as does the imposed their program of “the enemy is ITU, the list of the Broad Front of Peru, The former Trotskyists were the left the ISIS” that imperialism and its agents supported by Stalinism and fractions of flank of the new counterrevolutionary used to massacre and crush the revo- bourgeois gangs that quickly flee from international regroupment that was the lutionary processes initiated in 2011 in traditional parties to better deceive the WSF, giving life to Stalinism and its de- the Maghreb and the Middle East. A masses posing as “leftists”. bris so that it continues betraying the social-chauvinist “New Left” that enters revolutions on an international level history with blood-stained hands of the The particularity of the tragedy we are as it did from the WSF together with most advanced of the world revolution. living in this historical period with our world the native bourgeoisies. In the name party, the Fourth International, is that af- of Trotskyism, the entire Bolivarian These parties, supported by the old ter denying it a thousand times, its theory bourgeoisie that expropriated the Latin European Communist parties, by the old and its program, after using it -as we have American revolution was legitimized. renegades of Trotskyism today turned seen- to support and resuscitate Stalinism Chavez and Morales were called to be into “anti-capitalists” and the leftovers as a new “Lazarus”, they ended dissolving voted for “critically” ... to demand that of the social democracy, are a Menshe- it in this “New Left”. The clean banners of they “make socialism”, while defend- vism new wave. Already in ‘89 all con- the Fourth International with the parties of ing the Castroite bureaucracy that had tinuity with the program of Bolshevism the Stalinist counterrevolution, which the already begun a open course to capi- had been cut off. The crash of the world bourgeoisie preserved to control the work- talist restoration. Remember that Alan capitalist system led those who had ers’ movement at the international level Woods was the one who gave Chavez long since reneged Marxism, to a new from the trade unions, have been and are the Transitional Program and a long etc. reactionary offensive and falsification of still dirty there. it. They proclaimed the party of “Lenin The “anticapitalists” of course, have Before the el crack of 2008, and Jean Jaures”, the convergences been dissolved in Podemos and Syriza between Trotsky and Gramsci. They re- imperialism centralizes all its for some time, they are inside the Labor peated cries that “socialism did not work Party, they are the left wing of Sanders agents. The Fourth International anymore, even in Cuba” as Fidel Castro in the US to subordinate the working in the hands of the renegades said. Hung from the coattails of Stalinism class to the Democratic Party, while of Trotskyism, is led at the feet and its old policy of class collaboration they preach “antifascist fronts” against of the bourgeoisie and the and revolution in stages, they proclaimed Trump. to support Clinton and Obama. and proclaim the expansion of bourgeois counterrevolutionary leaderships We are facing a new reissue of the democracy so that the working class, old theory of revolution by stages and through it, could achieve new conquests popular fronts of Stalinism, openly de- The response of imperialism to its and raise their standard of living. fended by ex-Trotskyists who crossed bankruptcy with the crack of 2008 was to the Rubicon long ago. Today, 78 years recruit all its agents into the labor move- They have the audacity to raise, as after his assassination, they pay “hom- ment to contain the masses’ offensive does Varoufakis and the left of Syriza, age” to Comrade Trotsky, when they are that threatened to sweep away imperi- that the imperialist Europe of Maastricht with their assassins in common parties alist domination and open a new 68/74. can be democratized with a European betraying to the world working class. The WSF played all its role. Today it is constituent assembly. Like the PTS of Ar- For the Trotskyists, in the Fourth In- clear how it retires from the historical gentina and the FIT, they fall over them- ternational there is no place for those arena with the Maduros, the Ortegas, selves presenting bills in the bourgeois who are hanging on the coattails of the the Morales, the Kirchner, the Lulas, the parliament together with the parties of bourgeoisie with the popular front. There Iranian ayatollahs, starving and shooting the bourgeois opposition for the working they are wallowing with Stalinists, not the people, after having aborted the an- class to recover or achieve new con- only reviewing Marxism but acting direct- ti-imperialist struggle of the working class quests. ly as a counterrevolutionary force, where of the semicolonial world. With the Cas- In England, with the English SWP, imperialism is testing them, as in Syria. troes it imposed a pact with Obama that they support the Labor party, the greatest That’s because this “New Left” en- allowed Yankee imperialism to cushion agent of the City of London, partner of tered the class struggle with hands inside the hard blows meant by the bat- the Tories in the looting and exploitation stained with blood. In the Middle East tles of the masses in Iraq and Afghani- of the colonial and semi-colonial world by they supported al-Assad, who along with stan that forced it to withdraw from Iraq. British imperialism. They are defenders Zionism, the US and other imperialist of the Crown parties in their colonies, just powers, is the largest genocidal of the Imperialism has not managed to like the ISO in Zimbabwe calling to vote, working class in the 21st century. None get out of its bankruptcy up to now. nonchalantly, to the MDC. of these leftists passed the test of the Here and there it treats its agents like Syrian revolution. squeezed lemons. Faced with the In Latin America, in the face of the crash of the imperialist powers, and bankruptcy of Stalinism and the WSF,

International Workers Organizer 17 Some directly treated the dog Bashar, supported by the assassin Putin, as an “ally of the oppressed peoples”, when he was the one who did the “dirty work” of imperialism to massacre the Syrian revolution. On the other hand, there are those who cover it up by stating that in Syria there is a “war of two reactionary camps”. An “abstentionism” that only served al-As- sad and his government to have their hands free to crush a revolution, which was delivered from within by the gener- als of the FSA. Other currents of the “New Left” end- ed at the feet of the “democratic” bour- geois generals of the FSA. Such is the case of the English SWP, the French NPA and the LIT-CI. They asked the US to stop the war decreeing the prohibition of flights in the airspace of Syria or, by sending weapons and equipment to the resistance...While it was USA itself who supported the dog Bashar and gave the order so the bourgeois generals of FSA sold out all rebel cities one by one. This “New Left” is conformed with the Stalinist Third International, togeth- Vorkuta Stalinist concentration camps er with the ex-Trotskyists who appro- priated the Fourth International and its flags, petit-bourgeois politicians and Written 80 years ago, the objective al. Reformism is exposed day by day. It with the shadow of the bourgeoisie. premises of the Transitional Program can no longer pass alms as conquests. Thus the substitutes of the World Social remain fully valid. Reformism and revi- In its struggle, the working class here Forum have arisen: a “New Left” de- sionism settled down destroying these and there poses “milestones of social- fender of the different imperialist gangs premises to end up supporting the ism.” The fight is to regroup the rev- that today are fighting for the world mar- capitalist system in bankruptcy. The olutionary and internationalist forces. ket spoils. destroyers of the Fourth Interna- The theory and program of the Fourth tional prepared their passage to International for socialist revolution re- Stalinism, with a brutal revisionism mains intact. It is about recovering the The actuality and validity of of Marxism and the legacy of the Fourth International from the mud to the theory and program of Trotskyist theory and program. In which opportunism and revisionism led Trotskyism and the Fourth recent years, such as the English SWP it to regroup the forces to re-found it. International. We have to and the PTS of Argentina, for example, On this new anniversary of Trotsky’s recover the Fourth International they have been trumpeting the con- assassination, we call the forces that vergences of Trotsky and Gramsci, a claim themselves as Trotskyism and from the mud to which confessed theoretician and militant of resist the passage of ex Trotskyists to opportunism and revisionism led Stalinism. the field of Stalinism, to turn next Sep- it, to regroup the forces to re- The crisis of leadership has wors- tember, which marks the 80th anniver- found it. ened to an extreme degree because sary of the founding Congress of the IV of this betrayal of the Fourth Interna- International, into a month of struggle tional. The productive forces are totally and combat to recover it. As the Transitional Program of the IV decomposed, the delay in solving the The program that Trotskyism raised International proposes: “The objective crisis of leadership can lead to the path today becomes a powerful weapon prerequisites for the proletarian revolu- of war if the proletariat does not give against those who betrayed it and sold tion have not only” ripen”; they have be- an answer. The political and econom- it out. We reproduce here excerpts gun to get somewhat rotten. Without a ic clashes in the current trade war, to- from a FLTI’s manifesto of the year socialist revolution, in the next historical morrow will be interimperialist military 2010 on the 70th anniversary of the period at that, a catastrophe threatens conflagrations, or between any agents murder of Leon Trotsky, as a contribu- the whole culture of mankind. The turn tion in the fight to regroup the revolu- is now to the proletariat, i.e., chiefly to acting on their behalf. tionary forces and to recover the flags its revolutionary vanguard. The histor- of the Fourth International.∙ ical crisis of mankind is reduced to the crisis of the revolutionary leadership”. After 78 years of the murder of Comrade Trotsky, the combat is under the banners of the Fourth Internation- 18 International Workers Organizer 80 years of the murder of Leon Trotsky by the hand of a GPU agent… Edition of the paper Socialist Appeal, organ of the US SWP, in tribute to Trotsky

On the front page of the paper, the main headline is: “Jackson’s ‘confession’ shows GPU hand in Trotsky murder”. Jackson’s “confession” was published in this paper. In the center, under the headline, it says: “In honor of Leon Trotsky” and the column on the right side of the last photograph explains: “great throngs did honor to the remains of Leon Trotsky in Mexico City last week. Representatives from the Mexican government joined with those of Mexican workers’ organizations in the final tributes”. Top photo shows Albert Goldman, Trotsky’s attorney, delivering the funeral oration. With him is Adolfo Zamora, editor of Marxist review Clave. Middle photo: Mexican workers mount guard at the bier. Lower left: Part of the crowd that demonstratively came out for the funeral service.”

A distinguished column below the previous explanation reports a fact: “Chilean workers denounce Stalin as the murderer.” It is clarified under the heading that “The following cable appeared in the New York Times on August 23.” The news: “SANTIAGO. Chile, August 22- Leon Trotsky’s death caused a stir here today in a section of the masses where he had many supporters. Members of the Revolutionary Workers Party and the International Workers Party paraded the streets last night visiting newspaper offices and voicing Download the 1940 paper Socialist Appeal protests. A committee composed of leaders repudiated Joseph who have now awakened to a new life. They mourned the Stalin’s methods throughout the world, asserting his agents martyr, the fighter, the idealist.” (page 3) It is stated that the were responsible for the crime.” press estimated between 60,000 and 100,000 people who attended the funeral of Leon Trotsky. The paper includes diverse notes about the funeral and the different events that took place about the event in This paper also reproduces the greetings and tributes Mexico and the US. Among them, there’s an excerpt from that from all the corners of the world were pronounced the Mexican newspaper El día that reports on the funeral. by organizations and workers’ parties in honor of the The journalist who attended the funeral of the leader of the revolutionary leader. From the Socialist Labor Party, the Fourth International states that flowers had arrived from all International Workers Front, the Independent Labour over the world: from unions, students, writers, intellectuals League, the Socialist Union Party, from Chile (International and thinkers. He then says: “When I saw the giant mass Workers’ Party), from Great Britain (Militant Labour go by the casket, I felt that the Mexican masses came, not League), from Canada (Socialist Workers League), from to mourn after a great Russian revolutionary politician, China (Communist League of China), from the USA but have felt that there lies a man who fought for all the (Minneapolis and St Paul, Cleveland, Portland, Oregon). oppressed and downtrodden- also for them, the Mexicans,

International Workers Organizer 19 We reproduce the statement of the members of the Fourth International in Argentina (1940) August 1940 Under the merciless hand of a mercenary, Leon Trotsky has fallen in his fighting outpost for socialism

Stalin, allied to Hitler, has finally murdered him. But for all his sinister apparatus of repression in the service of imperialism, Stalin cannot destroy the revolution he embodied, or the cry of condemnation of the workers of the world that will accompany in history Stalin’s dark figure of traitor and executioner

Comrade workers, service of imperialism, cannot destroy the revolution that Trotsky embodied, can never silence the cry of condemna- Once again Stalin’s treacherous hand tion of the workers of the world that will has risen, this time with success, to si- accompany in history Stalin’s dark figure lence the inflexible revolutionary voice of traitor and executioner. of Leon Trotsky. In order to finish his work, the strangler of the October Re- Leon Trotsky has died, comrades! He volution needed to eliminate the last one fell as all those who fight have fallen, as that represented it. That is why, at the the heroes of the proletariat fall, surren- same time that he shakes hands with the dering their lives for a better humanity. bloody Nazi dictator, he has armed the He has fallen in ill-fated hours of the mercenary arm that has just unloaded world, when his guiding word and his the blow that will remain in history as a presence as the undisputed leader of the classic example of nauseating cowardice. revolutionary proletariat of all countries Stalin, executing orders from his allies, were most necessary. Leon Trotsky has Mussolini and Hitler, wanted to crush died, comrades! May the manly anguish the socialist revolution in the person of that knots our throat and closes our fists Leon Trotsky. It was not enough for him will lead us to take the firm decision to to have destroyed, to the extent possible identify with even more of its exceptio- without threatening his own stability, all nal virtues and to avenge him by picking the conquests achieved in the USSR du- up what was in Trotsky that those who so ring the glorious days of Lenin; to have ignominiously murdered him will never subjected the Russian proletariat to a be able to destroy: his ideas as a faithful brutal totalitarian regime where there is follower of Marx, Engels and Lenin who, only freedom to praise his figure; shot in Lealeft of Workers Revolutionary Group (GOR) of Argentina together with theirs, will lead the futu- grotesque trials, or even without them, re world proletarian revolution. Leon all the great revolutionary leaders who Trotsky is no longer with us! Let’s pick completed that cast of fighters that laid up the last words that are attributed to obtuse being. Leon Trotsky has been vilely the foundations of the first triumphant wor- him and raise them as a flag along with killed in his combat position, when he was ker state established on earth; destroyed the his imperishable figure of man, leader and pursuing with unparalleled determination Chinese revolution and betrayed the German revolutionary: his struggle for the emancipation of the wor- one; entered into spurious alliances with the king class, for socialism. imperialist countries; crushed the Spanish “I am convinced of the triumph of the IV The paid arm of an agent unloaded on his revolution and assassinated its leaders; ha- International! Forwards!” ving, in short, marked the historical route of brain the treacherous blow that is in itself a the proletariat with the most terrifying suc- symbol of what Stalin sought to destroy in cession of tremendous defeats. his gigantic revolutionary personality. Sta- lin has killed him after the longest campaign Now, to close on a high note his nefarious Buenos Aires, August 1940 of persecution, defamation and slander that trajectory of crime and felony, José Stalin has Revolutionary Worker Group has been undertaken against any man. Sta- just executed the crime for so long cherished (4th International) lin, finally, has killed him. But Stalin’s entire in his deformed bestiality of inferior and sinister apparatus of repression, put at the