Issuing body: Editorial board of Quatrième Internationale
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Always Forward!
The Fourth International has held its first international conference since the end of the imperialist war.
Delegates from several sections, come from every continent, met in the wake of the greatest upheaval history has known, to discuss the problems of the revolutionary movement and to work out a political line answering to the demands of the present period. This conference was the fourth since the founding of the International in September 1938.
During the second imperialist war, the Fourth International, alone among all the organisations that lay claim to the working class, held two international conferences, one in 1940, the other in February 1944, in Europe, in the midst of the Nazi occupation. The Conference noted the progress made by all the sections of the International during the war and particularly since its end. The older sections have everywhere been strengthened, and new sections have been created during the war, as in Italy, India, Egypt and elsewhere.
The Conference saw in this progress, and in the manner in which all the sections defended, during the decisive trial of the imperialist conflict, the programme of revolutionary Marxism, the best proof of the historical justification of the Fourth International, as well as the surest pledges of its final triumph.
The stubborn struggle waged in every corner of the world, in Europe, in America, in the colonies, by the Fourth International in defence of the world socialist revolution, and the death of several of its leading cadres and of hundreds of its best militants, who fell between 1939 and 1945 in their fight against the imperialist war, have forged indestructible bonds with the vanguard of the world proletariat, which increasingly recognises in our movement the true and sole continuator of the revolutionary Marxist traditions of Marx, of Liebknecht, of R. Luxemburg, of Lenin, of Trotsky.
The Second International, even before the war, had ceased to exist as an international organisation of the proletariat, eaten away by the opportunism and chauvinism of the bureaucracies of its various national leaderships. The Third International, for its part, which since its Stalinisation from 1923 onward had been nothing but a docile instrument in the hands of the Soviet bureaucracy, serving the interests of its foreign policy, was even formally dissolved during the war. The embryonic international of the centrists, such as the British Independent Labour Party and the Spanish POUM, which the London Bureau represented, has given no sign of life, decomposed and undermined by the absence of a revolutionary Marxist programme and of ideological coherence.
Today, various attempts are being made to set a workers' international back on its feet, such as the initiative of certain Italian socialist leaders like Silone. But their ambition (and their possibilities) does not go beyond the aim of refloating the wreck of the socialist Second International.
To build a genuine workers' international presupposes a complete break with the bourgeoisie, a resolute orientation toward the proletarian revolution, and the adoption of a genuine revolutionary Marxist programme. These conditions are at present met only within the movement of the Fourth International.
The April Conference chiefly worked out a political resolution on "the new imperialist 'peace' and the building of the parties of the Fourth International," together with a long programmatic manifesto addressed to the workers, the exploited, and the colonial peoples of the whole world. It also renewed the leading bodies of the International, which will direct it until the next world congress. All the political documents drawn up by the Conference are gathered together in this issue of Quatrième Internationale. They will constitute a valuable basis for the ideological rearmament and for the general orientation, in the months to come, of all the sections of the International.
A new great step forward has thus been marked by the holding of this conference. The Fourth International demonstrates, amid the ideological decomposition of the Stalinist and reformist movement, that it is the only international proletarian organisation possessing a growing vitality, a clear awareness of the vital problems of the workers' movement, and the capacity to discuss and resolve them in the spirit of revolutionary Marxism.
The Fourth International daily demolishes — by its acts, by its progress, its struggles, its presence from India to the United States, from Greece to Norway, by its ideological life — the doubts, the unhealthy scepticism, the hesitations of all the centrists as to the possibility of fighting on an independent basis, hewn from the rock of revolutionary Marxism, against the stream, and of building a genuine workers' international. The Fourth International has come through successfully, amid the greatest difficulties and the greatest sacrifices, the trial of the second imperialist war. It has emerged from this trial strengthened numerically and ideologically. It is now making, everywhere, very serious progress, and the confidence of its militants in its future is greater than ever.
Our road will be longer and harder than we had envisaged when, thirteen years ago now, we laid the foundations of our International, but it remains none the less the only road that revolutionary Marxists have to choose and that the world proletariat must follow in order to fight and to win.
Editorial of Quatrième Internationale, April–May 1946