Issuing body: International Secretariat of the Fourth International
Communiqué of the International Secretariat
The proceedings of the Second World Congress of the Fourth International, which began in early April 1948, extended over a period of three weeks.
Some fifty delegates, representing twenty-two organisations of the Fourth International and nineteen different countries, attended the congress, which was the most representative international gathering yet held by the world Trotskyist movement.
Among the delegates were representatives from most of the countries of Europe, including countries under American or Soviet occupation, from North America, South America, Africa, and the Middle and Far East. The number of representatives from colonial and semi-colonial countries was particularly high.
In the course of the congress's extremely laborious proceedings, important political resolutions were adopted, all of which are reproduced in the present issue of Quatrième Internationale.
In addition, the congress adopted a long programmatic manifesto addressed to the exploited of the whole world, summarising the main political ideas worked out by the congress, which is being published separately as a pamphlet.
A new International Executive Committee of nineteen full members was elected. This IEC, meeting immediately thereafter, elected a new International Secretariat.
The congress sent its greetings and the expression of its complete solidarity to comrade Natalia Trotsky, to the imprisoned Trotskyist militants of Greece, China, Vietnam and India, and of Bolivia, to the Trotskyist militants of the USSR, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Germany and Austria, and to the workers of the whole world and the colonial peoples now fighting for their social and national liberation.