- I - The Fourth International is not dead!
Long Live the Struggle for the re-foundation of the Fourth International!

Seventy years after the murder of Leon Trotsky, from the International Leninist Trotskyist Fraction we pay tribute to his most grandiose work: the foundation of the Fourth International, which was the continuity of Bolshevism and the Third International, 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 comprising 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 youth that closed their ranks around the survivors of the former and shared their struggle; both confronting the “second-batch Mensheviks”, that is, the stranglers of the October and World Revolutions: the Stalinist executioners of Bolshevism.
The foundation of the Fourth International and its program as a historical synthesis of the program for the international socialist revolution was the greatest elaboration by comrade Leon Trotsky, who devoted to it his greatest effort. Certainly it was the goal of destroying this revolutionary movement that was alive and well in the eve of the Second World War what guided, for the sake of the imperialists’ benefits, the counterrevolutionary blows of the Stalinist hit-men, who murdered Trotsky as well as dozens of his comrades of struggle.

With that same objective, and wanting to teach a lesson to the ever rebellious masses in the aftermath of the 1WW both the national bourgeoisie and the imperialists together with the treasonous leaderships 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 Germany and elsewhere by the monopolies and the finance capital, was calling 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 power in Russia showed the world working class that it was possible to “take heaven in their hands”. To the horror pf imperialist bourgeoisie, the proletariat threatened with seizing power all across Europe. Due to the immaturity of the young and new Communist Parties that mushroomed after the 1WW, the proletariat couldn’t seize power in Germany, which led to the isolation of the USSR that was left to terrible pressures between the backwardness of its productive forces and the world economy dominated by imperialism. Comrade Trotsky as well as the Bolsheviks’ old guard suffered the same fate that the German and European masses and proletariat, who were not able to seize power. They endured the same conditions of resistance and sufferings as the USSR masses whose energies got depleted after 4 years of civil war and tough battles against 14 imperialist armies. The revolutionaries suffered the reaction emerging from those conditions; to the interior of the worker states that produced the advent of a cynical and careerist counterrevolutionary bureaucracy which eventually carried to its complete degeneration. From that moment, Trotsky and Trotskyism, both from the USSR and combating to recover the Third international in the West started to fight for the continuity of Bolshevism, this time resisting against Stalinism; this commitment reaches an enormous historic leap when the Fourth International was founded in 1938 as continuation to Bolshevism and the third International in its revolutionary period. It emerged as a new Zimmerwald-Kienthal that prepared itself for the struggle to seizing power during the 2WW and its aftermath. Today when Trotsky’s most aggressive detractors have turned suspiciously to praising him as “one of the many outstanding characters within the socialist movement”; when a bourgeois nationalist soldier as President Chavez (who supplies the whole imperialist war machine with Venezuelan oil) invites people to read Trotsky’s books (delivered to him by renegades as Alan Woods); when even the Trotskyite renegades give some Castroite bureaucrats disguised as “democratic leaders” a choice of Trotsky’s books to be “displayed” in some Havana’s Book Fairs; when during the last 70 years in the name of Trotsky and Trotskyism and after his death, the Fourth International and its program was put by the opportunists and revisionists grown in the same belly of that Fourth International at the feet of Stalinism, the executioner of the world working class and the revolutionary world movement,: when today in the name of the fourth International the same old and rotten pseudo-theories and fake programs of Stalinism and Mensheviks are again held up and camouflaged with the aim os strangling the world proletariat –we Trotskyist declare what Lenin denounced in his work “State and Revolution” about those anti-Marxists and falsifiers aiming to turn Marx into a toothless old lion as they had not been able to defeat his ideas.

Thus, as Lenin said: “What is now happening to Marx's theory has, in the course of history, happened repeatedly to the theories of revolutionary thinkers and leaders of oppressed classes fighting for emancipation. During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the "consolation" of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it. Today, the bourgeoisie and the opportunists within the labor movement concur in this doctoring of Marxism. They omit, obscure, or distort the revolutionary side of this theory, its revolutionary soul. They push to the foreground and extol what is or seems acceptable to the bourgeoisie. All the social-chauvinists are now "Marxists" (don't laugh!). And more and more frequently German bourgeois scholars, only yesterday specialists in the annihilation of Marxism, are speaking of the "national-German" Marx, who, they claim, educated the labour unions which are so splendidly organized for the purpose of waging a predatory war! (V.I. Lenin, Collected Works, Volume 25, The State and Revolution, Chapter 1. “The State: A Product of the Irreconcilability of Class Antagonisms”, September, 1917)
What a remarkable historical truth! His is a great lesson on how to expose those who flatter Leninism-Trotskyism in order to notch its revolutionary edge, to make a tooth-gap in its legacy and the history of its struggles, surrounding it with a certain “sacred halo” as a means of “consolation” and deception to the oppressed classes. The Stalinists did the same to Lenin after his death. Nothing different have attempted by the Trotskyite renegades against Trotsky and his legacy, the Fourth International.
From the FLTI, 70 years after Trotsky’s murder, we denounce tirelessly the shameless falsification that the Trotskyite renegades make of his revolutionary positions and of the relentless combat that Trotsky and the Bolshevik-Leninists waged against the bourgeoisie and all kind of exploiters and oppressors.
Trotskyism fought against any kind of class collaborationism, and not only against the popular front in France or Spain in the ‘30s, but already in 1927 in china, when Stalin carried the Chinese Communist 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 honorary chairman to the Komintern congresses.
Watching today the Trotskyites 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 tha way all the Trotskyite renegades of Latin America have done… It’s all Stalin the servant of the native bourgeoisies supporting Chiang Kai-shek again, an old and disgusting movie revisited!
Watching today the Trotskyite renegades to the Fourth International 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, even to the very doorways of the capitalist restoration in Cuba, is like watching again the old Stalinist policy of supporting the “democratic imperialists” –that of murderous Churchill and Roosevelt- who nothing had to envy to fascist Hitler in terms of massacring and pilfering oppressed peoples! Only this time the stomped banners are those of the Fourth instead of the Third International…
Those who “commemorate” in this date Trotsky’s “political personality” as “one more socialist of the lot” are the same that have destroyed his legacy, his historical struggle; they have in fact reneged him, plus Bolshevism and the Fourth International, the party of the world socialist revolution, which they have liquidated one and a thousand times.
These people claim to be “Trotskyists” and convene meetings to glorify Trotsky as an inoffensive icon when it is imperative for the ruling classes to control and suffocate the working-class left wing. Once they have succeeded in their purpose, they say “good bye, Trotsky (i.e. we piss off on your legacy)”… up to next year, when they dust the icon up for the next “homage”.
That is why they never mention –in fact, they make everything to hidden the fact that Trotsky’s greatest deed, his ultimate job, thanks to which today they are obliged to speak in the name of Trotskyism for better destroying it, was the foundation of the Fourth International in the late 30’s with a program and a perspective for leading the international proletariat to victory. Trotsky’s program and legacy were so strong in History that even today, after having been one and a thousand times falsified, revised, hybridised, the Fourth International’s program is the only one from which the militants can speak and look frankly into the world proletariat’s eyes to fight for the proletarian liberation. That’s why Morenoites, Mandelites, Healyites, Pabloites of the first and second hours and a varied array of liquidators of the Fourth International are obliged to devote comrade Trotsky obituaries and memorials.
To those that claim to speak in the name of Trotsky we say that they will fail in their purpose, as they are mounting a farce that will be exposed; what they will attain is the same as was attained by their predecessors: that revolutionary youth and perspicacious workers, when reading Trotsky’s works and understanding his struggle, will begin to discover that their “Trotskyite teachers” of today have nothing in common with Trotskyism, as thousands of conscious workers in the world are already affirming.
For that reason, 70 years after Trotsky’s murder, we re-affirm once more Trotskyism as continuity to Bolshevism, with its theory and its program has passed time and again the test of History. The “Trotskyites” haven’t… Those renegades got the lowest grades or none at all. Hanging on to Trotsky’s legacy and in the struggle for recovering the banners of revolutionary Marxism, the Fourth International is alive. Trotskyism is not dead; the forces that will found again the Fourth International are already re-grouping. This is our best homage to our comrade Leon Trotsky, who fell dead while struggling ferociously against the class enemies and traitors.
As was stated in the leaflet issued in 1940 in Argentina by the Trotskyist groups and as we say today, 70 years after Trotsky’s death, in the face of the Trotskyite renegades, who try to turn Trotsky into an inane icon and castrate his revolutionary doctrines; together with the founders of the Fourth International we from the FLTI declare: “Leon Trotsky has been murdered, comrades! He has fallen to the ground as the fighters, as the heroes of the proletariat do: he has given his life for a better future for mankind. He has fallen in a gloomy period for the world, when his guide and his presence of unchallenged leader of the revolutionary proletarians of all countries in the world. Leon Trotsky is dead, comrades! Let the manly grief that makes a lump on our throats and fills our fists with ire and impotence carry us to commit ourselves to take example of his exceptional virtue; let our grief and our ire make us take revenge for his death by picking and keeping what Trotsky had of indestructible, that virtues which those who killed him in an ignominious way could never and would never destroy: his ideas as a faithful follower and continuity of Marx, Engels and Lenin’s. His and their ideas together are the guide that will lead the oncoming world proletarian revolution. Leon Trotsky is not now within us! Let’s collect the last words attributed to him and hold them tightly and very high up as a banner beside his immortal features of a man, a leader and a revolutionary: “I AM THOROUGHLY CONVINCED THAT VICTORY WILL CROWN THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL! FORWARDS!” (Translated from the leaflet of the Grupo Obrero Revolucionario –Revolutionary Worker Group- Fourth International, Buenos Aires, August, 1940).

From the FLTI we pay homage to Bolshevism, to the Third International, to the militants of the Zimmerwald-Kienthal left and to those that continued their fight during the gloomy years of Stalinism, Popular Front and Fascism, when in the ‘30s the latter three strangled the proletarian revolution and opened way to the Second Imperialist World Slaughter. We pay homage to Bolshevism in the resistance, which began 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 offensive of Stalinism was headed by Leon Trotsky and his Left Opposition 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 subsequent to four years of civil war against 14 imperialist armies, 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 International that in their struggle against Stalinism gave us revolutionary lessons, bringing to its completeness the theory of Permanent Revolution in the Chinese Revolution of 1927 and in the struggle for the political revolution to the interior of the USSR to restore the power for the Soviets by throwing down the bureaucracy and turning again the worker state into a bulwark of the world revolution.
In the tough battles against the popular front in the ‘30s; against centrism that aimed at each step to abort the left turn of wide layers of the working class; against the “united fronts from the top” of Stalinism and Social Democracy -which blocked the way towards the general strike in England in late ‘20s and against fascism in Germany -where Stalinism and its “third period” politics divided and defeated the German proletariat, handing it out to fascism, Trotskyism formed revolutionary cadres under the hard conditions of counterrevolution and revolution. The Fourth International was build as continuity of Bolshevism confronting the “hell-black night” of Stalinism and fascism and the dog-like servility of the treacherous leaderships to the “democratic imperialists” that led to the tragic defeats of the Spanish and French Revolutions and submitted the US and UK working classes to the imperialist butchers, Roosevelt and Churchill. Along with these first defeats, by the way, were the bases for the Stalinist filth to settle firmly not only in the USSR but in the Third International as well.
 We stand up to pay homage to the brave Bolsheviks-Leninists that in 1933, after the Stalinist treason to the German proletariat, started their struggle to put in place a new international, the Fourth International; this new international was conquered along hard battles in the battleground of the Spanish civil War against the Stalinist and Popular-Frontist betrayals to the proletariat and the centrists’ impotence mixed with tailism to the reformists –as shown by the case of the Spanish POUM- that carried them to support the reformists from the left; the POUM was born from an unprincipled wedding between Andres Nin and the followers of Bukharin in Spain, and it was a tragedy for the socialist revolution in that country.
The Fourth International did not stay indifferent before the emergence of whole layers of the proletariat that were breaking with Social Democracy and turning to the left in front of the progress of fascism, seeking for a revolutionary breakthrough that Stalinism was not offering. Working over the centrists, in order to facilitate the quick evolution of thousand hundreds of workers towards the revolutionary program, was concentrated in a crystal-clear politics of strategic inflexibility combined with tactical flexibility.
  Trotsky always held that centrism is a major factor in our epoch. The task of revolutionaries is not to supply the centrists with political fodder, but to oblige them to opt between reform and revolution.
 To depict Trotsky as a “sectarian” is an infamous lie. As Trotsky said, when the reformists accuse us Bolshevik-Leninists of being “sectarian”, they are actually attacking the soundness of our principles and our uncompromising intransigence in the fight for the proletarian revolution. Opportunists never attack our weak points (which undoubtedly we have) but our strong ones…
We pay homage to the Russian Section of the Fourth International founded by Leon Trotsky as the Leninist fraction of the Bolshevik  Party which combated the ignominious misdeeds by Stalinism and the soviet bureaucracy against the world proletariat.
In the USSR, Trotsky’s followers were locked up in the Stalinist concentration camps, the isolators or “gulags”, as in Vorkuta. From those terrible Stalinist holes the revolutionaries fought for the Fourth International.
The Russian section was centralized from the West by the international secretariat of the Fourth International, headed by Trotsky together with Cannon, Van Heijenoort, Rudolph Klement, among others. Beside them a new generation of internationalist cadres was emerging, having at their head comrade Leon Sedov, who was chased by the German Gestapo and was treacherously stricken by the Stalinist KGB assassins. Both the old guard and the younger one constituted an internationalist General Staff that gave continuity to the legacy of the Third International. Long Live the heroic Russian Section of the fourth International, massacred by Stalinism in the concentration cams and one thousand times betrayed by the liquidators of the Fourth International who in the West submitted their program and their struggle to Stalinism and its counterrevolutionary politics of peaceful co-existence with imperialism in the 2ND Post-war! They were servants to Mao Zedong, Tito, Castro and Ho Chi Minh. They are responsible of leaving the Fourth International Russian Section resisting isolated in the USSR, as they left dislocated the socialist revolution in the West from the political revolution in the East that in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, etc., was confronting the Stalinist bureaucracy.
We pay homage to the theory and the program conquered in the foundation of the Fourth International; we re-affirm their full validity and current importance. When that doing at the same time we denounce the falsifiers, revisionists and Trotskyite renegades that have blamed those theoretical and programmatic bases for all their own errors and for the crisis of our world party.
We pay homage to comrade Trotsky as the symbol of a generation of revolutionary internationalist Marxists who from the first decade of the twentieth century, when Capitalism developed and survived as Imperialism –that is, as parasitic Capitalism- , adjusted the Marxist theory and program with the method of scientific socialism, preparing the conditions to lead the proletariat to victory. As we have just said, that generation started being as a bunch of internationalists who concentrated the first revolutionary experiences in the new imperialist epoch that opened in the early years of the twentieth century , in Russia with the Bolsheviks as in Germany as well with Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Liebknecht. These internationalist revolutionaries merged their forces definitively in 1914, by breaking with the Marxist renegades and traitors as Bebel, Kautsky and the rest of Social Democrats as the Mensheviks that handed out the proletariat to the different gangs of the imperialist powers that disputed among themselves the world in that slaughterhouse called the 1WW.
From the FLTI we at the same time denounce and reaffirm in front of the world proletariat, that Trotsky’s murder was a decisive milestone in the way to liquidate definitively an entire generation of internationalist, socialist revolutionaries that couldn’t be reduced to kneel before the bourgeoisie, that said well aloud, as Liebknecht did, “water and fire don’t do good bed-fellows!”, that confronted recklessly the traitors in the unions and other worker organizations, be them social democrats, bureaucrats, etc.; that in Tsarist Russia under the leadership and centralization of a revolutionary general staff emerged from the merging of the internationalist cadres in Zimmerwald-Kienthal, were able to show to the world working class that it was possible to seize power and change the course of History, ending with the regime of Capitalist exploitation.
Trotsky’s murder in the hands of Stalinism was an accurate shot, centralized and monitored by the world imperialist gangs, one more in the chain of counterrevolutionary shots, as was the previous -Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Liebknecht’s cowardly murders in the hands of social Democrat Noske’s soldiery, aimed to defeat the glorious revolution by the soldier and worker councils in 1918-19 in Germany and Moscow Trials when Stalinist bureaucracy liquidated the entire Bolshevik generation of the third International.
Let’s transform then this 70th anniversary of Trotsky’s murder in a tribute to Karl Liebknecht, ¨Rosa Luxembourg and all those that were murdered in the Moscow trials as the old Bolshevik guard! Let’s pay homage to comrades Leon Sedov, Rudolph Klement, Abraham Leon and all the Trotskyists and revolutionaries backstabbed by the Stalinist fifth column in the Spanish civil war…! Let’s pay homage then to comrade Leon Trotsky and the entire generation of internationalist socialist revolutionaries that together with Lenin showed that it was possible to lead the world proletariat to victory and to conquer the conditions for that triumph!
From the FLTI we know that the annihilation of a whole generation of internationalist intransigent revolutionaries was what allowed ultimately Capitalism to outlive itself, while the proletariat had to endure a tremendous blow to the international centralization of its struggle, its organization and its internationalist consciousness, three indispensable conditions for the working class to liberate itself from exploitation in Capitalist society.