- VIII - The Fourth International “was not a mass party in the aftermath of the 2WW” due to the adaptations and capitulations of those that fought during that war and in the post-war under its banners

The Trotskyite renegades, the new generation of Yalta, headed by the Pabloites, blamed Trotsky’s prognosis for “the Fourth International not being a mass party”. They said that as if the Fourth would have foretold that the revolutionary parties with massive influence could be built, for example, dissolving –as they did- the Fourth International within the Communist (Stalinist) parties under the excuse that “the USSR was going to be attacked by the imperialists and so the Stalinists would be obliged to seize the power all over the world”. They acted as if the Fourth International had taught that it was necessary to enter the popular front as in Sri Lanka. They thought that mass revolutionary parties were possible through supporting the bourgeois government of Paz Estenssoro in Bolivia and collaborating with the strangling of the Bolivian revolution in 1952, as we have said. And a special chapter was that of putting themselves under the discipline of Fidel Castro and Stalinism in Cuba in ’60s, or when they joined Stalinism and social Democracy in the strangling of the revolutionary process of ‘68-’74, refusing to head the combat of the Eastern European working classes that confronted openly in Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary the murderous army of the Stalinist bureaucracy.
They blamed again and again Trotsky and Trotskyism for the crisis and impotence of centrism and opportunism. Among so many falsifications and cynicism of those that began with an adaptation, continued with capitulations and ended betraying and degenerating openly, it is necessary today, after so any decades of lies, in this 70th anniversary of Trotsky’s murder, to tell the world proletariat what was the true prognosis of the Fourth International and how was that the latter prepared the young generations of internationalist revolutionaries for not betraying, as a condition to be led to the crest of the wave of the world proletariat for a long period of crisis, wars and revolutions.
The true prognosis of the Fourth International, how it prepared the young revolutionary parties in the late ‘30s, was of a millimetric precision.
The following tells how was it that Trotskyism prepared itself for a whole epoch marked by crisis, wars and revolutions: “The capitalist world has no way out, unless a prolonged death agony is so considered. It is necessary to prepare for long years, if not decades, of war, uprisings, brief interludes of truce, new wars, and new uprisings. A young revolutionary party must base itself on this perspective. History will provide it with enough opportunities and possibilities to test itself, to accumulate experience, and to mature. The swifter the ranks of the vanguard are fused the more the epoch of bloody convulsions will be shortened, the less destruction will our planet suffer. But the great historical problem will not be solved in any case until a revolutionary party stands at the head of the proletariat”.(Manifesto of the Fourth International on Imperialist War and the Imperialist War, “The problem of leadership”, FI, Emergency Conference, May 19-26, 1940)
And that period of enormous opportunities DID COME in the ‘40s, in the ‘50s, in the ‘60s, in the ‘70s, up to our days, as the Fourth International had foretold. These conditions appeared once and again after Trotsky’s death, even during the 2WW, and in its aftermath in the fantastic revolutionary upsurge in Asia in the ‘50s, in the revolution in Indochina as in the Bolivian revolution, in the ’68-’74, or in the last gasps of the political revolution in  early and middle ‘80s. No doubt the masses gave the Trotskyist movement many opportunities, and the ’89 was the last and possibly the biggest one. But so many years of adaptations, of revolutionary lessons that were not drawn from the capitulations, revisions and struggles lost, could not educate the cadres or the general staff able to pass that test; they ended as impotent parties, no matter if they were big or small, they were all equally sterile in their national-Trotskyism in the ‘80s.
Our world party had a thousand and one opportunities in the last 70 years for demonstrating that it was able to conquer the continuity with Zimmerwald and Kienthal, the Third and the Fourth Internationals, building revolutionary parties all over the world and even seizing the power.
The Fourth International had the opportunity for advancing to “be a mass party” in Bolivia on condition that it did not betray when the Bolivian proletariat took its program, but all the currents in the Fourth International, without an exception and claiming to be “Pabloites of the first hour”, supported the government of Paz Estenssoro and collaborated in strangling the Bolivian revolution in 1952.
They had that opportunity in Asia where the Japanese Communist Party was split in big proletarian fractions that looked at Trotskyism for an answer after the revolution of the worker councils in Hungary in 1956, which was smashed by the Stalinists; that opportunity would also have permitted the Trotskyists to reach within the powerful Chinese proletariat submitted under the jackboot of the Stalinist-Maoist cliques.
We insist, as we will not get tired of repeating once and again: when the German working class revolted in ’53 in the start of a political revolution, as in Poland in 1971, in Czechoslovakia in ’68, in Ukraine in ’68-’69…Where were the Western Trotskyists? They were beside Fidel Castro, beside the Sandinista “comandantes” in Nicaragua and entangled in an electoral careerism in Argentina within the “People’s Front” together with the CP of Codovilla, the organizer of Trotsky’s murder in Mexico.
The USec of Mandel and Co. were working as assistants to the Castroites and refusing to raise the slogan “Out with the Red Army from the Eastern Block!”. And after being so much servants to Stalinism in the West, to the degree of having dissolved its ranks within it in the aftermath of the 2WW up to the revolutionary upsurge of the ’68-’74, they began to cry for the “backwardness of the masses in the East and in the USSR”, blaming the working class –and not heir own capitulations and adaptations- for the inexistence of the Russian, Czechoslovak, Chinese and Hungarian sections of the fourth International. How could those sections have existed if all the currents of the fourth International in the ’60-’70, from Pabloites to Morenoites, said that their Cuban section was “that new revolutionary Jacobinism” headed by Stalinist Fidel Castro?
As we have already said, the whole “Trotskyism of Yalta” devoted to falsify the prognosis of the War manifesto, saying that “the Fourth International was to be a mass party in the aftermath of the 2WW”. But the prognosis of the fourth International was not a magic spell, as the opportunists had expected. The key, Messrs, was not to betray. It was about not betraying the proletariat. If you betrayed during an entire historical period, as was that of the post-war, which lasted to 1989 (and this post-war period was defined in favour of imperialism with the restoration of capitalism in the former worker states) the road to the masses would be, as it definitely was, absolutely closed.
During decades the Trotskyists were no more than a group dedicated to pressure Stalinism and the social democracy, but then, after 1989 they “crossed the Rubicon” and turned to be a fourth of fervid militants of the Fifth International of the Bolivarian bourgeoisies, the spoils of Stalinism and social democracy. Any attempt of marching towards the militant i9nternationalism and return to the program of the Fourth International was ephemeral. No one went to the end because they always tried to justify the adaptations and the capitulations.
The War Manifesto of the Fourth International warned that if the regime of the war lasted (the Churchill-Roosevelt-Stalin Pact) the revolutionary parties were condemned to degeneration… if they were happily adaptating themselves to Stalinism that was usurping the victories of the asses in the aftermath of the 2WW. And as they had previously dissolved the international centre, it was no longer possible to fight against the pressure to adapt. The Fourth International as a centralized general staff for the world combat of the proletariat existed no more as such. In a federation of national groups, the national capitulations were the norm.
We are before a school of falsifications and falsifiers that have been 70 years attempting to raze the continuity of international revolutionary Marxism to the ground. Hands off the Fourth International and Trotsky the revisionists and liquidationists!
Those that always sought and continue to seek “a way to the masses” and “be massive” have already achieved their objective. They were utilized by Stalinism and social democracy and their “mass parties” during Yalta for strangling the proletarian revolution. They are now in the Fifth International, which is a “mass party”. Today they administer the unions for the sake of the bourgeoisie, even entering the bourgeois governments, supporting the Obamas, the British crown, with their Euro-deputies of the Labour Party. They are assiduous promoters of the World Social Forums, sending Trojan Horses en their “democratic” boats for “liberating the martyred Palestinian people and ending the blockade” as if it were possible to make the loads of bread reach the starving masses in Gaza without first depriving the murderous Zionist army of its guns, destroying it. The treacherous renegades have attained their desire of being “mass parties” in the company of Hu Jintao, the Castros, the Chavezes, the British labour Party, the left of Jesse Jackson’s of the Democrats in the US in their Fifth International! Be happy!
But they won’t be “mass parties” or stay with them when they revolt in new revolutions opening the foruth Chinese revolution, when the American proletariat rises again against Obama –who is as bloodthirsty and murderous as Bush; when the revolutions expand and develop en the former soviet republics; when the Russian proletariat turns again to put up Lenin’s statue beside Trotsky’s statue in their oncoming revolutionary assaults. They will not be who will flutter the flag of the fourth international in Havana, in Mazar-i-sharif or in the martyred Gaza.
Let them be sure that they won’t be “mass parties” when the revolutionary Bolivian workers rise again the program of the Fourth International, the program of the Pulacayo Theses and the war cry: “Guns and shrapnel, Bolivia doesn’t shut up!”.
In ’89 the revisionists had already razed to the ground the Fourth International. Their revisions will pass to History as one more in a series of aggressions to Marxism. They will be put beside those of renegade Kautsky, the pseudo-theories as “two-stagism” and “socialism in a single country”; now the Trotskyite renegades’ pseudo-theories have to be added, which collect the worst part of Stalinism and social democracy to sustain in the name of Trotskyism the cynical counterrevolutionaries of the fifth International, including the bourgeois portion of the popular fronts, murders of workers and expropriators of the proletarian revolution.
That is why in our tribute to Trotsky and the Fourth International we are going to affirm that it was neither the program nor the theory or strategy of Trotskyism what closed for the Fourth International the way to the masses, but it was the dog-like servility of the revisionists and opportunists born within the belly of our world party that in ’90 passed openly to the reformist camp.