- VII - “The Fourth International will enter the next War as a tightly welded Unit”. the destruction of the international centre in Coyoacan after Trotsky’s murder: a backsabbing to the internationalist fraction of the world proletariat

In order to end with the misery of revisionism and the Trotskyite renegades, that hide their own capitulation in History; and to pay homage to comrade Trotsky as the last of the internationalist revolutionaries that was driven to the historical arena, as a product of the historic combats of the proletariat from the Paris Commune and the October Revolution and the chain of revolutions that gave origin to revolutionary Marxism, we affirm: it was not the program, the theory and the prognosis by the Fourth International what provoked the latter’s crisis, but the capitulations and adaptations of the fake “Trotskyists” who couldn’t even the first decisive test that History put before them after Trotsky’s murder.
That test, that challenge, as we have already declared, was no other than maintaining the International Centre of the Fourth International. They didn’t do that. They adapted and capitulated to Stalinist Terror in the ‘40s, and they also submitted themselves to that terror in the ‘50s and along the entire Yalta period, with the excuse that “the masses were there” (within the Stalinist parties) as they used to repeat.
The international centre built by Trotsky in Coyoacan, Mexico, was dissolved.
 Under these adverse conditions, where it was necessary from the start to row against the current, and not to be terrorized by the Stalinist and fascist blows or cede to demagoguery and the “democratic fronts’ siren songs”, the majority of the international secretariat that was organizing the Forth International together with Trotsky, capitulated a short time after the murder of their best members. They went back to their respective countries and liquidated the international centre, that new Zimmerwald-Kienthal, the general staff of the Fourth International, leaving their national sections adrift. So Stalinism, fascism and the “democratic” imperialists, in a centralized way, could decimate the ranks of the Fourth International and submit  them to terrible pressures and adaptations.
This tremendous crisis of the Fourth International was caused by the nationalist desertion of its former leaders, overall by the leadership of the American SWP that deserted Coyoacan and ran to cluster as recluses in the US opting for a national isolation. They put as an excuse that they were to struggle for the proletarian military policy in front of the war in and from the US. The national exclusiveness was the revisionist lame justification to open the door to the liquidation of the international centre of the Fourth International. Van Heijenoort on his turn, ran to seek refuge in the French section and from here he capitulated, as was logical in his national isolation, to the “struggle for the autonomy of France against the German aggressor”, the slogan of the French POI-CI.
So the real cause of the degeneration of the Fourth International is the fact that after Trotsky’s death, a sector of the International Secretariat goes back to the US and the rest go to Europe, leaving the character of international leadership, and the Fourth International had to do without a leadership. Cannon, Hansen, Van Heijenoort, who were the leading team in Coyoacan, refused to continue exerting their role of centralized leadership by maintaining the international centre. After that there was not any international leadership that took on the task of correcting the deviations of the European sections, defending Marxism against the capitulationist positions in France and Europe occupied by the Nazis. We do not know a single document by the SWP about the position of the French POI-CI. There does not appear even a dime of anxiety for the fate of the Soviet section, those heroic Trotskyist militants that were murdered in the Stalinist concentration camps in the USSR, who had been left isolated from the Fourth International since the murder of Leon Sedov in early 1938. The European cadres tried to give a response, as they could under the conditions of fascism and occupation. It was logical that under conditions of isolation they ceded before the enormous pressure of the Nazi occupation and the war. But there was not any international centre that through political struggles could serve as a counterbalance and help them to correct and stay the course. From 1940 to 1945 the Fourth International had to do without a revolutionary international leadership!
To justify such a capitulation, they could allege the “terrible and hard conditions” prevailing in those times. But it is a lie. Trotsky and the Fourth International had already declared that the latter had enormous advantages at the beginning of the 2WW with respect to the small bunch of revolutionaries that had regrouped their ranks and were sufficient to occupy a sofa in the conferences of Zimmerwald-Kienthal in 1914.
Thus Trotsky was preparing the Fourth International to pass the test of History. In his article “A recent lesson”, he wrote: “At present, sections of the Fourth International exist in thirty countries. True, they are only the vanguard of the vanguard. But if today, prior to the war, we had mass revolutionary organizations, then revolution and not war would be on the order of the day. We lack this, of course, and we hold no illusions on this score. But the position of the revolutionary vanguard is far more favorable today than it was twenty-five years ago. The main conquest is that before the war there already exist in all the most important countries of the world tested cadres, numbering hundreds and thousands of revolutionists in growing numbers, welded together by the unity of a doctrine, and tested in the school of cruelest persecutions by the imperialist bourgeoisie, the Social Democracy, and, in particular, the Stalinist Mafia. The Second, the Third, and the Amsterdam Internationals cannot at present convene their congresses, because they are paralyzed by their dependence on imperialism and because they are torn asunder by “national” contradictions. On the contrary, the sections of the Fourth International, despite their extremely meager resources, the difficulties of obtaining visas, the murder of their secretary (namely Rudolph Klement, TN) and the hall of repressions, were able in the most critical moment to convene their international congress and adopt unanimous decisions in which the tasks of the present titanic struggle are formulated precisely and concretely, on the basis of all historic experience.” The revolutionaries that met in Zimmerwald and Kienthal had found in the same war that the Second International had betrayed the proletariat and gone over to the enemy, the bourgeois imperialist trench, and in a ferocious struggle of tendencies and fractions they had to forge the principles, the strategies and the program under the crossed fire of the imperialist cannons. That didn’t prevent the Zimmerwald-Kienthal left –an internationalist centre- from guiding the proletariat to the seizing of the power in Russia two year later, when the Russian revolution was born by the war, and from having the same opportunity in Germany at the end of the war.
Following that logic, Trotsky goes on saying: “These precious cadres will not be swerved from their road by any wave of chauvinism, nor intimidated by Stalinist Mausers and knives. The Fourth International will enter the next war as a tightly welded unit, whose sections will be able to follow one and the same policy, irrespective of the boundaries and trenches dividing them. It is quite possible that at the beginning of the war, when the blind instinct of self-preservation combined with chauvinist propaganda will push the popular masses towards their governments, the sections of the Fourth International will find themselves isolated. They will know how to withstand national hypnosis and the epidemic of patriotism. In the principles of internationalism they will find a bulwark against the herd panic below, and the terror from above. They will view with contempt the oscillations and vacillations of philistine “democracy.” On the other hand, they will listen closely to the most oppressed sections of the population and to the army pouring out its blood. Each new day of war will work in our favor. Mankind has become poorer than it was twenty-five years ago, while the means of destruction have become infinitely more powerful. In the very first months of the war, therefore, a stormy reaction against the fumes of chauvinism will set in among the working masses. The first victims of this reaction, along with fascism, will be the parties of the Second and Third Internationals. Their collapse will be the indispensable condition for an avowed revolutionary movement, which will find for its crystallization no axis other than the Fourth International. Its tempered cadres will lead the toilers to the great offensive.”
But in the same Manifesto, Trotsky warned about a disadvantage that the Fourth International showed in comparison to Zimmerwald-Kienthal: “The work of exterminating the internationalists has already commenced on a world scale prior to the outbreak of the war. Imperialism no longer has to depend on a “happy accident.” In the Stalinist Mafia it has a ready-made international agency for the systematic extermination of revolutionists.”
The liquidation of the international centre, due to the capitulation and adaptation of its cadres that deserted Coyoacan, prevented the Fourth International from playing that role though it had one and a thousand opportunities, inclusive for founding the soviet section of the Fourth International, with the thousand and one attempts from the proletariat of Eastern Europe and the own China of confronting the Stalinist bureaucracy.
Actually, from the’40s to 1989 the world proletariat gave the Fourth one and a thousand opportunities to place itself at the crest of the wave. The liquidation of the militant internationalism and its international centre prevented the Fourth from being the continuity of the battles of Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Liebknecht, of Zimmerwald and Kienthal, of the combats of the Third international in Lenin’s times and of the October Revolution, of the lessons drawn form the revolutions in the hell-black decade of Stalinism and fascism. So it became useless and impotent for taking advantage of each one of the opportunities that History offered it.
This is what explains in the last instance the chain of tragedies that the Fourth International lived, its adaptations and capitulations during the 2WW en in its aftermath, along the entire post-war period. The centrism that emerged in the Fourth’s belly was part of the problem and not the solution to the crisis of the proletarian leadership.
In the aftermath of the 2WW, in the conference of ’46 and the congress of ’48, not one of these revolutionary lessons about the destruction of the international centre of the Fourth International was drawn by the attendants. Both encounters were a negotiation by a federation of groups and parties, under Pablo’s leadership in Europe, who had headed the resistance of the Fourth during the war, capitulating continuously before the “democratic front” and Stalinism. It was a logic outcome as, beyond this or that heroic action, the anti-defensist policy and the struggle for the political revolution in the USSR had completely disappeared from their horizon during the war.
 Pablo did not turn suddenly into “the devil” in 1953 when he called openly to enter the Communist Parties worldwide. During the war the French, German (in the exile), etc. sections, had capitulated to those parties during the war. It was a new generation that entered to the battlefield without a revolutionary international centre.
In these congresses and conferences, the American SWP with its whole leadership, had already lost any authority it could have gained in the past and was taking a true centrist course of national exclusiveness.
All of them were put to the test, notwithstanding the pompous conferences and congress in ’48 and ’51, in the Bolivian revolution of 1952. All of them ended supporting the “progressive” measures of the “provisional” government of Paz Estenssoro in Bolivia.
Zimmerwald and Kienthal, under the leadership of Liebknecht, Rosa Luxembourg, Lenin and Trotsky reached on time the revolutionary Russia of February, 1917 to prevent the Bolshevik Party from ceding to the peasant tide that imbibed the proletariat in the soviets, and so they could put it on the rail again in the struggle against the government that defended the imperialist war, preparing it for the struggle for power.
The federative centre of the Fourth International in ’46, ’48 and ’51 only could put the Bolivian proletariat on their knees in front of their executioners, the bourgeois government and expropriator of the Bolivian Revolution. The proletariat sought for the Fourth International in 1952, they had already voted its program in the COB: THE Pulacayo Thesis. The proletariat had also demolished the bourgeois army and put in its place the worker militias of the COB.
Meanwhile, what were the “Trotskyists” doing? Some of them supported straightforwardly the bourgeois government of Paz Estenssoro; others did that indirectly, though strengthening it much more. That was what the Morenoists did, going so far as to raising “Worker ministers in the (BOURGEOIS!) government, accountable before the COB”. They said that criticising the government of Paz Estenssoro or attacking it openly was equal to “preparing the conditions for the defeat and parting from the proletariat”. Theirs was the same position as Stalin-Molotov that supported “critically” the provisional government in 1917 up to the moment that Lenin arrived in St. Petersburg in April.
In Bolivia a new opportunity was lost in History; however the tragedies are not the opportunities that the Trotskyists lose but the defeats and penuries that the masses have to endure.
 Drawing these revolutionary lessons is part of the homage we pay to and also our duty before the revolutionaries that founded the Fourth International.
Thus the Fourth became a true federation that only hit the mark groping here and there, giving partial responses to the problems, though always not too far from -albeit to the left of- Stalinism: they supported Tito in Yugoslavia, Mao in China, every time waiting for the “left wings” that would split from Stalinism for them to be able to build their parties.
The big-bang of ’53 was not an accident. The Fourth became thoroughly centrist, forming a new “Two and a Half International”; then through zigzags, unifications and splits, it went on, not being able to pass the exam, the great opportunity that the world proletariat gave it again with the generalized uprising of ’68 to ’74. But they had never drawn any lesson. A mistake led to other mistake, the mistake to a capitulation and the capitulation to the degeneration of the movement.
This is the truth. We pay homage to comrade Trotsky and the founders of the Fourth International by affirming that the liquidation of the international centre in Coyoacan as a result of capitulations was what paved the way to precipice of the masterpiece built by a whole generation of revolutionaries who had given their lives to grant the continuity of Bolshevism.
We affirm that Trotsky’s murder was a direct attack to the international general staff of the fourth International. That place, which had been occupied by murdered Rudolph Klement, Leon Sedov, Abraham Leon, and Leon Trotsky in the international centre in Coyoacan, was abandoned by their followers. The national exclusiveness and the adaptations to the “democratic” imperialists that supposedly “were confronting fascism in the war” led the Fourth International to the swamp of centrism and opportunism, leaving it adrift. Then from there to capitulating and adapting themselves to Stalinism during the Yalta period, there was only a step.
Today the renegades intend to erase even the smallest trace of any continuity of the revolutionary lessons. From the FLTI we hold up this banner of continuity. It is necessary a decisive re-grouping of the revolutionary cadres who want to put on their shoulders the historic responsibility of recomposing within the world proletariat a powerful movement of revolutionary socialist internationalists, against the destructive actions of the treacherous and servile opportunists.
In the twenty first century recently opened, the crisis of the fourth International and its degeneration has turned into the most backward factor among the conditions for the victory of the world working class. And this is the responsibility of the deserters from the international centre in 1940, as well as the result of each one of the capitulations, adaptations and open degeneration to which the Fourth International was led in the hands of opportunism and revisionism.
But shedding tears over the milk that has been spilt is a vain exercise. There’s no time to lose. Again History will give the revolutionary movement a thousand and one new opportunities to stand up, on condition that they undertake courageously their historic tasks. As the Fourth International said in ’34: “In the present epoch, proletarian policy cannot but place before itself international tasks. International tasks cannot but demand the welding together of international cadres. This work cannot be deferred even for one day without capitulation to imperialism.” “…the imperialist war (…) neither will it spare all those indecisive centrist groupings that evade the problem of the International, seek purely national roots, do not carry any one question to its conclusion, are devoid of perspective and temporarily feed on the ferment and confusion of the working class.”  “Leon Trotsky, War and the Fourth International, “The Fourth International and War”, June 10, 1934)