Emergency Conference of the Fourth International, May 1940
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1. The recent split within the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), the official section of the Fourth International in the United States, was the culmination of an attempt by a petty-bourgeois minority to revise the fundamental programme of the Fourth International on the unconditional defence of the Soviet Union, and of this minority's refusal to respect the decisions of the majority at the congress convened to settle this dispute.
2. In attempting to call into question our programme on the issue of the unconditional defence of the USSR, without however linking its project of revision to the question of the class nature of the Soviet Union — a degenerated workers' state, of which the Fourth International has produced an exhaustive analysis — the petty-bourgeois opposition rendered itself guilty of a fundamental revision of Marxist methodology. As far as James Burnham, the ideological leader of this group, is concerned, this revisionist attempt was carried through to the total rejection of the basic principles of scientific socialism, as they were set out by Marx and Engels and subsequently developed by Lenin and Trotsky.
3. This attempt to revise our fundamental principles was begun by the petty-bourgeois opposition immediately after the signing of the Hitler-Stalin pact and accelerated after the outbreak of the Second World War, thereby demonstrating clearly that the force which drove the petty-bourgeois elements of the party into opposition to the Fourth International was none other than the war pressure of bourgeois democracy.
4. Not only did the petty-bourgeois opposition attempt to call into question the fundamental principles and orientation of the Fourth International, but it also attempted to go back on Bolshevik organisational methods. The opposition took part in the SWP's April congress, thereby recognising the authority and validity of the congress. Nevertheless, it rejected the decisions of the majority and, in flagrant violation of democratic centralism, launched its own press organ which publicly attacked the Fourth International.
Considering the debate that had preceded this, conducted in the fullest democracy in accordance with the best traditions of Bolshevism, and considering the guarantees granted to the minority to allow it to continue its existence — with the possibility of developing its positions in the Internal Bulletin after the close of the congress and of holding responsibilities in all the leading bodies, without regard to the positions upheld by the members of the opposition and without sanctioning them for their prior breaches of party discipline — this repudiation of the congress decisions by the members of the opposition, and their departure from the party, can only be interpreted as further proof of the petty-bourgeois nature of this opposition.
The Emergency Conference of the Fourth International supports the suspension measures taken by the American section of the Fourth International against all those who violated the decisions of the April congress.
The conference suggests that the National Committee of the SWP set a precise deadline of one month after the publication of the conference's decisions, within which the suspended militants must express their acceptance of the congress decisions, on pain of unconditional expulsion from the party.
5. The Emergency Conference of the Fourth International regards the struggle of the proletarian majority of the SWP as a struggle for the defence of the programme of the Fourth International, of its Marxist theoretical foundations, and of its Bolshevik organisational principles. The conference calls on all sections of the Fourth International to stand in solidarity with the SWP in this struggle.