Manifesto of the Fourth International on the Dissolution of the Comintern
June 12, 1943
Adopted: June 12, 1943.
First Published: July 1943
Source: Fourth International, New York, Volume IV, No. 7, July 1943, pages 195-99.
Transcribed/HTML Markup: Daniel Gaido and David Walters, December, 2005
Public Domain: Leon Trotsky Internet Archive 2005. You can freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit the Marxists Internet Archive as your source, include the address of this work, and note the transcribers & proofreaders above.
Upon the occasion of the burial of the Third International by its murderer Stalin, the Fourth International addresses the workers of the world, and particularly those who have adhered to the Comintern.
Members of the Communist parties! You thought the Comintern was yours, you devoted your lives to it, but you were permitted no voice in deciding its fate. That fact alone should make clear to you that the Comintern was not yours tit all, that you misplaced your devotion, that Stalin and his puppets have betrayed you. On May 22 the Presidium of &e Comintern made public its resolution for dissolution—made it public in order to confront you with the accomplished fact. Less than three weeks later, on June 10, the Presidium announced, in the language of a bankrupt shopkeeper, the appointment of a four-man committee “to wind up the affairs, dissolve the organs and dispose of the staff and property of the Communist International.” By what authority was the Comintern dissolved? Ostensibly, in the few days between May 22 and June 10 a long list of Communist parties had approved the resolution of dissolution. Who really approved it? The so-called Central Committees hand-picked by Stalin and his Presidium, but the membership was not even consulted. Among the parties listed as approving, are those of Germany and occupied Europe. But who could pretend to speak for them within three weeks, except a few degenerate bureaucrats living in Moscow? The bureaucratic method of dissolution showed what the Comintern has really been for nearly two decades— a totalitarian instrument in the hands of a clique alien to the interests of the world proletariat.
The last act of the Comintern, characteristically, was a vicious attack against proletarian internationalism. Every reason given in the resolution for dissolution is reactionary to the core.
Why the Comintern Was Founded
Attempting to conceal the abyss which separates the Comintern of Lenin and Trotsky from the Stalinized Comintern, the resolution is silent on why the International was originally founded. It merely says the International “was founded in 1919 as the result of the political collapse of the overwhelming majority of the old pre-war workers’ parties.” But it dares not recall by a single word what that political collapse actually consisted of: support of the war and of their “own” capitalist governments by the parties of the Second International. The Comintern parties have likewise become supporters of capitalist governments and their war, making necessary the founding of the Fourth International for exactly the same reasons for which the Third International was created. The last Comintern resolution falsifies the origins of the Third International in order to conceal the historical necessity for the Fourth International.
For the same reason the resolution falsifies the aims of the Comintern of Lenin and Trotsky, saying that its “historic role” consisted “in upholding the principles of the working class movement,” helping “vanguard” workers in a “number of” countries to work for “the defense of their economic and political interests and for the struggle against Fascism and war.” In the whole resolution there is not even a mention of socialism, capitalism, or class struggle. Contrast this with the Platform of the Communist International adopted at its Founding Congress in 1919, which stated its purpose as “the conquest of political power” by “the dictatorship of the proletariat” for “the expropriation of the bourgeoisie and die socialization of the means of production.” Likewise the first Article of the Statutes of the Communist International, adopted at its Second World Congress in 1920, read:
"The New International Association of Workers is founded for the purpose of organizing a joint action of the proletariat of different countries, aiming at a single and identical goal, viz, the overthrow of capitalism, the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat and of an international republic of soviets which will make it possible completely to abolish classes and bring about socialism, the first stage of communist society.”
All the documents of the first four Congresses of the Communist International—one each year, from 1919 to 1922—are similarly couched in ringing words, for the International under Lenin and Trotsky was in the direct tradition of the Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels, which proudly proclaimed that “The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims.” Stalin’s resolution of dissolution, like all the Stalinist documents, belongs to an entirely different tradition, alien in spirit and language to everything revolutionary.
In the light of the real origins and internationalist aims of the Comintern of Lenin and Trotsky, one can see clearly how false and reactionary is the claim of the Stalinist resolution that the workers no longer need an International. Already in 1848 Marx and Engels adduced the necessity of the International from the fact that bourgeois society was world-wide in scope and required an international proletarian revolution to overthrow it and replace it by a socialist society. Still more concretely, Lenin and Trotsky declared the necessity of an International which should not be a mere sum of national parties but a single World party with sections everywhere. The unevenness of development of economy and the workers’ movements in the various countries, far from being an argument against internationalism, was one of the main reasons insisted upon by Lenin and Trotsky for the establishment of the Third International. They never tired of stressing the mutual need which the proletariat of advanced capitalist countries and the peoples of the colonies have for each other—the workers of Britain and the masses of India, the U.S. proletariat and the toilers of Latin America, etc.—in their common struggle against the imperialist overlords.
It is against this century-old Marxist principle that the Stalinist resolution declares that “the deep differences in the historical roads of development of each country of the world,” and “the difference in level and rate of their social and political development,” create such “various problems” that their solution “through the medium of some international center would encounter insuperable obstacles.” If these arguments were true, and since the same essential conditions existed in 1919, then the International should never have been founded. But every world is false.
Piling one lie on top of another, the resolution asserts that the International was needed in “the first stages of the working class movement, but it has been outgrown by the growth of this movement” and the dissolution is “taking in-to account the growth and the political maturity of Communist parties and their leading cadres in separate countries.” What a horrible joke! Nobody except the class enemy dreamed of dissolving the International when it was really at its height in 1922, numbering many millions of members in the capitalist world, with great many mass parties in Germany, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Scandinavia, Poland, Yugoslavia, France, etc. Now, when these parties have been destroyed as a result of Stalin’s false policies, when the few parties which still exist have been reduced to marionette impotence with the strings held in the Kremlin, this is called “political maturity"! The cruelest satirist could not have invented a more grotesque formula.
Stalin orders his hireling professors to embellish his crimes with historical precedents from “Marxism.” Even they, however, could not conjure up a “quotation” from Lenin to justify the dissolution. Lenin stood for burying degenerate Internationals by building new ones immediately. Apparently hoping that fewer workers will know the facts about an earlier “precedent,” the resolution adduces “the example of the great Marx” who dissolved the First International “as a result of the matured situation creating mass national working class parties.” The only truthful item in this lie is that the First International was dissolved in 1876. Marx, Engels and its other revolutionary leaders were compelled to dissolve the First International because it had suffered mortal defeat: the objective situation resulting from the crushing of the Paris Commune had paralyzed it, and the internal struggle with anarchists and adventurist elements threatened it with degeneration. It was dissolved, moreover, not in an epoch like the present, when world revolution is on the order of the day, but in the 1870’s, at a time when still-expanding capitalism had before it the perspective of still further development and the socialist movement correspondingly had time for the regrouping of its forces. Nor did the leaders of the First International present its dissolution as a triumph, but honestly called it a defeat. It left the scene beaten but undegenerated, with its banner unsullied and its historical lessons an inspiration to the workers of the world. Far from denying internationalism as Stalin does, Marx and Engels promptly set about gathering the forces to build a new International—a task accomplished within thirteen years by their followers. There is no analogy whatsoever between the clean death of the First International and the tardy burial of the malodorous corpse of the Third International.
The real analogy with Stalin’s action is the shameful death is the Second International in August 1914. As the first imperialist world war was the decisive test of the Second International, so has this war been the acid test of the Comintern. Stalin’s model is not Marx or Lenin but the bankrupt leaders of the Second International, the Kautskys and Plekhanovs. The parallel is inescapable. The “political maturity” claimed for the Comintern is the same kind of political rottenness exhibited by the Second International leaders, whom Lenin called “social-chauvinists’’—socialists in words, chauvinists in deeds. Just as the social-chauvinists pretended to see a basic principled difference between the warring camps in 1914, so the Stalinist resolution of dissolution asserts “a deep dividing line” between the present warring imperialist camps and imposes on the workers in the Anglo-U.S. bloc “the sacred duty” of “national unity’’—that is, the abandonment of the class struggle.
That this treason to the interests of the working class is as black as that of the Second International is obscured, in the eyes of many revolutionary-minded workers, because Stalinism presents it as the way to defend the Soviet Union. These workers, startled into awareness by the dissolution of the Comintern, must now thoughtfully re-examine the basic questions involved.
How to Defend the Soviet Union
The Fourth International stands for the unconditional defense of the Soviet Union. Despite the degeneration wreaked upon it by the Kremlin bureaucracy, the Soviet Union retains as its foundation the nationalized property created by the October revolution. This remaining conquest of the first successful proletarian revolution must be defended by every worker. The real defense of the Soviet Union, however, requires entirely different methods than the false course pursued since 1924 by the Kremlin bureaucracy.
Every serious worker must learn to understand what has happened to the Soviet Union and the Comintern since Lenin’s death. Only then will he grasp completely the fundamental difference between Lenin’s method of defending the Soviet Union and Stalin’s false method which made it possible for Hitler to invade the USSR, lay waste its richest areas, murder the flower of its manhood and, though Hitler should fail, leaves the way open for the “democratic” imperialists to go still further, whether by “peaceful” or war means, toward re-introducing private property.
When the. Second International joined the war-mongers in August 1914, Lenin and his co-workers immediately proclaimed its death as a revolutionary body and the need for a new, Third International. The program of the new International was worked out during the war years, and it was on that program that the October revolution triumphed. This victory, the Bolsheviks understood, was but the first link in the world revolution; without other victorious proletarian revolutions the Soviet Union could not maintain itself indefinitely in capitalist encirclement. Hence the “Declaration of the Rights of the Toiling and Exploited People,” which was the charter of the Soviet Union (until it was replaced in 1936 by the Stalinist “Constitution") established as the “fundamental task” of the new regime “the establishment of a socialist organization of society and the victory of socialism in all countries.” That was Lenin’s method of defending the Soviet Union. The indispensable instrument for that world task was the Third International, officially founded in March 1919.
Irreconcilable struggle against all the capitalists and their reformist agents, their peace and their wars, against their “democracy” and their repressions, for the revolutionary overthrow of all capitalist regimes and their replacement by the dictatorship of the proletariat and the World Federation of Soviet Republics—that, succinctly, was the program of the Third International under Lenin and Trotsky. Its first four Congresses, from 1919 to 1922, gathered together the revolutionary general staff of the entire world. The revolutionary offensive which it led very nearly put an end to the capitalist system in all Europe—that is attested to by the memoirs of the capitalist leaders who have since confessed how nearly they were overwhelmed by the proletarian upsurge. That wave of revolution saved the young Soviet republic.
But by 1923 the revolutionary wave was temporarily thrown back by the capitalists with the aid of the reformists in the labor movement. And before the next wave began, the revolutionary weapon, the Third International, had been blunted beyond use.
The Role of the Stalinist Bureaucracy
It was blunted by a bureaucracy which arose in the Soviet Union. The Soviet bureaucracy was similar to the labor bureaucracies in the capitalist world in its higher standard of living and other special privileges as against the workers, its conservatism, fear and distrust of the workers. Its rise and seizure of power can be attributed in part to the economic and cultural backwardness and poverty of the predominantly agrarian country inherited from Czarism. Above all, however, the bureaucracy was enabled to have its way because of the failure of the European revolution. In the resultant isolation of the first workers’ state in capitalist encirclement, exhausted by years of bloody imperialist and civil war, the Russian workers let the power slip into the hands of a bureaucracy of which Stalin became the spokesman. The bureaucracy entrenched itself by destroying all the democratic instruments—the party, the soviets, the trade unions—leaving only totalitarian caricatures completely in the hands of Stalin and his clique.
The bureaucracy distorted and revised Lenin’s ideas, above all on the international character of the October revolution. In Lenin’s theory socialist construction in Russia and socialist revolution elsewhere formed parts of an organic whole. In its place Stalin advanced the theory of “socialism in one country,” asserting that an isolated socialist society could be built in Russia without the aid of socialist revolutions elsewhere—a theory which is a repudiation of proletarian internationalism.
Fortunately for the future of humanity, Bolshevism did not remain without its defenders. Lenin’s principal co-worker, Trotsky, led the Left Opposition in the Russian Bolshevik Party and the Comintern in struggle against the bureaucracy.
The Left Opposition warned that the Stalinist bureaucracy was transforming the Comintern from an organization of world revolution into a mere instrument of Kremlin foreign policy, a mere border guard of the Soviet Union. Nor would the process stop there. From the bureaucracy’s loss of faith in the ability of the international working class to make the world revolution it was but a step to loss of faith in the ability of the world workers to defend the Soviet Union.
In the light of the dissolution of the Comintern, the workers who have adhered to it should ponder the prophetic words written by Trotsky in 1928 in answer to Stalin’s theory cf “socialism in one country": “If our (Soviet) internal difficulties, obstacles and contradictions, which are fundamentally a reflection of world contradictions, can be settled merely by the ’inner forces of our revolution’ without entering the arena of the world-wide proletarian revolution, then the International is partly a subsidiary and partly a decorative institution, the Congress of which can be convoked once every four years, once every ten years or perhaps not at all.”
The history of the Stalinized Third International is one of uninterrupted catastrophes perpetrated upon the world working class. We can note here only the most terrible landmarks of Stalin’s false policy.
In 1925-1927 came the great Chinese revolution, marching forward to major triumphs over the imperialists and their native puppets. Its real strength came from the workers and peasants who were revolting against all exploiters, both native and imperialist. Stalin desired to weaken imperialism but, with characteristic lack of confidence in the masses, ordered the Chinese Communist Party to subordinate itself to the bourgeois Kuomintang under Chiang Kai-shek. Closer to imperialism than to the Chinese masses or the Soviet Union, Chiang in 1927 reached an agreement with the imperialists and was enabled to carry out a bloody extermination of the militant workers and peasants who had been disarmed By Stalin’s endorsement of Chiang.
In England, Stalin tried to lean on the trade union bureaucrats, with whom he formed the Anglo-Russian Committee of the trade union bureaucracies of the two countries. The British labor bureaucrats were thus enabled to cover themselves with the prestige of the Russian revolution at a time when the British proletariat was rising in a struggle which culminated in the British General Strike of 1926. Using the Anglo-Russian Committee as a shield against the wrath of the workers, the British trade union bureaucrats betrayed the general strike. Even then Stalin insisted upon continuance of the Anglo-Russian Committee. Shortly afterward, when the defeated British working class lapsed into passivity, the British trade union bureaucrats abandoned the Committee which had served their counter-revolutionary purposes.
In Germany, Stalin perpetrated the most terrible defeat of all. Here his lack of confidence in the workers took an “ultra-left” form, beginning in 1929. He launched the theory of “social fascism,” terming the Social Democratic Party and the trade unions it led as the “twin” of fascism, hence “social fascist.” This theory denied the possibility of a united front of the Social Democratic-led workers’ organizations and those of the Communist Party for a common struggle against the rising Nazis. The pseudo-radicalism of this theory, which insisted that all the workers must first submit to the leadership of the Communist Party, actually led to disunity and passivity. The task of the hour, Trotsky warned, was to demand a united anti-Nazi front between the Communist and Social-Democratic parties. Should the Social Democratic leaders refuse, they would be exposed before their own members, who would then turn to the Communist Party. For this advice Trotsky too was dubbed a “social fascist” and the Stalinist leadership persisted on its disastrous course. Only thanks to this false policy was Hitler enabled to take over the country in 1933. The Stalinist leadership capitulated to Hitler, making no attempt, despite six million followers, to strike even such a blow as the socialist workers of Vienna struck against Dolfuss a year later.
The German catastrophe showed that Stalinism bad corrupted the Third International beyond redemption. Until then the Left Opposition led by Trotsky had, though bureaucratically expelled from the Comintern, stood for return to it and reform of it. Now it became imperative to proclaim the need for a new, Fourth International. During the next five years the movement gathered its forces and in 1938 in Paris held the Founding Congress of the Fourth International.
The Comintern Sold to Imperialism
The correctness of the establishment of the Fourth International was demonstrated by the defeats perpetrated by the Stalinist Third International since 1933. Whereas previously Stalin had made opportunist pacts with the Chinese bourgeoisie, the British trade union bureaucracy, etc., now lie sought alliances with the imperialist powers, Stalinism evolved from lack of faith in the ability of the workers into deliberate betrayal of the workers.
One open betrayal after another began with the Stalin-Laval pact of May 1935. Seeking implementation of that pact by direct military collaboration, and similar pacts with Britain and other “democracies,” Stalin wooed them by demonstrating how useful the Comintern could be to the capitalists. In August 1935, after a lapse of seven years, he convened its Seventh (and last) Congress, which ordered the Communist parties to enter Popular Fronts—only the name was new, die policy of class-collaboration and government coalitions was one which revolutionists have always branded as a betrayal of the working class.
The fruits were soon to be seen. In France the Communist Party deputies voted for the capitalist government’s military budget—precisely the act of the German Social Democratic deputies on August 4, 1914 which Lenin had branded as the death-sentence of the Second International. The Stalinist leadership openly joined in breaking the famous sit-down strikes of June 1936—a revolutionary upheaval which should have opened the road to proletarian revolution—with Thorez uttering the classic formula of betrayal: “Comrades, we must know when to call off a strike.” The Stalinists declared the French bourgeois state was a true friend of the Soviet Union, enabling it to crush the workers’ movement precisely because the Stalinists had presented it to the workers as a friend.
In Spain, where the civil war had begun in July 1936, and the workers were fighting back not only on the field of battle but by beginning the social revolution, Stalinism openly showed its counter-revolutionary character. To demonstrate his uses to the “democracies” Stalin constituted himself the guardian of private property in Spain. In return for scanty arms for the Loyalists, Stalin extorted political concessions which enabled the Spanish Communist Party and the GPU to crush the workers’ factory committees, the peasant collectives of Aragon and Catalonia, to assassinate hundreds of Trotskyist, anarchist and socialist militants, and establish a government under Negrin sufficiently “respectable” to meet the approval of the “democracies.” But this process of repression of the Spanish revolution destroyed the morale of the workers and peasants and the Loyalist armies, while winning no arms from the “democracies.” Thus Stalin facilitated the victory of Franco.
Nor did these betrayals gain Stalin his goal. Despite all his groveling, Britain evaded concluding a military alliance. The Stalin-Laval pact was never implemented by military discussions and ended by becoming a dead letter. Thus Stalin’s 1935-1939 policy of wooing the “democracies” collapsed in failure. Now, outraging the anti-fascist sentiments of the workers of the world, Stalin wooed Hitler.
The period of the Stalin-Hitler pact brought the Comintern to new depths of degeneration. Along with grain and oil, its services were sold to Hitler. The Comintern branded its opponents as “imperialists” and “war mongers” while Stalin’s message to Ribbentrop in December 1939 hailed the Hitler-Stalin alliance as “cemented by blood,” presumably the blood shed in their joint partition of Poland. This period or the Comintern is sufficiently characterized by the slogan of the Communist Party of the U.S.A.—’’The Yanks are not coming” —a policy of defeatism without being revolutionary. Blind to the real course of events, the Kremlin bureaucracy flattered the Nazis, Molotov declaring that “A strong Germany is an indispensable condition for a durable peace in Europe.”
This vile policy, in turn, collapsed on June 22, 1941, when Hitler, having completed the conquest of the continent, was able to choose his own moment for invading the USSR. The day before, the Stalinist press was reviling the “war-mongers” who were spreading “rumors” of an impending Nazi invasion.
Overnight the Kremlin’s puppets became again supporters of the “democracies.”
Such is the indisputable record of Stalin and his Comintern. These false policies made possible the plight of the Soviet Union. Bled and impoverished by the Nazi invasion, the USSR, even though Hitler is vanquished, will still be left facing its capitalist “allies,” who are no less opponents of nationalized property than is Hitler.
In the course of its degeneration the Kremlin bureaucracy has hardened into an ossified caste alien to the interests of the Russian and world proletariat. For it there is no turning back to Lenin’s method. The bureaucracy would be one of the first victims of a successful revolution in Europe, for then, freed from the fear of invasion and backed by new workers’ states, the Soviet proletariat would no longer tolerate the totalitarian bureaucracy. The Kremlin will attempt to pursue to the end its policy of wooing and adapting itself to the imperialists.
That is the meaning of the dissolution of the Comintern. It is but the latest episode in the Kremlin’s concessions to the capitalist world. The Communist parties have become the most rabid strikebreakers in England, the United States, Australia, Canada, etc. In India the Stalinists have played openly the role of tool of British imperialism in repressing the revolt of the Indian masses. Stalinist propaganda against Germany, making no distinction between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, paves the way for a second and worse Versailles Treaty of imperialist vengeance; and the resolution dissolving the Comintern says not a word in solidarity with the German proletariat. The 20-year Anglo-Soviet pact is predicated on the reconstruction of a capitalist Europe with Stalin’s cooperation. The dissolution of the Comintern is simply another sign by Stalin that he is ready to adapt himself still further to the rule of capitalism.
Like all his previous policies, Stalin’s present “alliance” is a mortal danger to the Soviet Union and leaves the initiative to the irreconcilable imperialist foes of the workers’ state. It enables them to seize the most favorable times for ever-greater demands for economic inroads into the Soviet Union designed to undermine the nationalized property and for a renewed attempt to crush it altogether. Like Stalin’s previous false policies, this one too will collapse under conditions most disadvantageous for the Soviet Union.
What Will Save the Soviet Union?
But neither Stalin’s concessions nor his aid to the imperialist masters can stabilize society in the period which Lenin called the epoch of imperialist wars, colonial revolts and proletarian revolutions. The world is not only ripe but overripe for the transition to socialism. World economy has been ready for the proletarian revolution for thirty years. All the objective conditions indicated by Marx and Lenin exist for the socialist revolution; the only thing that has been lacking is precisely the International which Stalin asserts the workers do not need.
Capitalist society has been in permanent crisis since 1914, having exhausted its potentialities. In its decline capitalism has inflicted upon humanity two world-wide imperialist conflagrations, and in between them innumerable lesser wars and imperialist aggressions against the colonial and semi-colonial peoples. Capitalist degeneration has expressed itself in the scourge of fascism, the most brutal and desperate form of capitalist rule, for the twin purposes of crushing the workers’ organizations at home and launching imperialist adventures abroad.
The terrible fate of Europe, the most civilized of the continents, has shown the price that humanity is paying for the failure to extend the October revolution after the last war. There it is crystal-clear that the continuance of capitalism would inevitably mean a Third World War. Amid the tens of millions of victims, the workers must remember with bitterness the arguments of the Social Democracy and the Popular Front against “bloody” revolution. There is no hope for the physical survival of the peoples except through ending the Balkanization of the continent by establishing the Socialist United States of Europe.
The first wave of revolution in Europe in 1917-1923 aroused the huge populations of the colonial and semi-colonial world—the overwhelming majority of humanity—to enter the political arena and boldly challenge their imperialist enslavers. The coming wave will spread even more quickly to Asia and Africa—the great masses of India are already advancing to meet it.
The events on the other continents will give a decisive impetus to the revolutionary development of the proletai3at in the United States. During the last decade the U. S. proletariat has learned that it is not immune to the evils which afflicted its European brothers. It has witnessed the Europeanization of America—permanent unemployment and hunger in the midst of plenty. The millions of workers who got their first jobs only when war industry mushroomed, and those who survive of the millions who never had jobs before key were put into uniforms, can have no expectations of retuning to anything but a worsened version of the economic crisis since 1929. Stripped of illusions about their own future under capitalism, the American workers in uniform will prove to be no praetorian guard against the European revolution.
These are the revolutionary developments, sure to come, which will save the Soviet Union from capitalist encirclement. It will be saved in spite of Stalinism and against Stalinism.
The Fourth International
The revolutionary wave began in 1917 in spite of the fact that the war had begun with the collapse of the Second International. The war in 1914 only a handful of workers’ leaders had remained true to proletarian internationalism. Their task of digging the workers out from under the ruins of the International and creating a new International may well have seemed insuperable. But history was on the side of this handful.
The collapse of the International caught the workers’ vanguard unawares in 1914. Amid the war they had to begin the new International. This time, however, the revolutionary vanguard was forewarned. On all the continents and in all the principal countries there were established cadres of the Fourth International long before this war began. Everywhere they stood the decisive test of the war and remained firm in their revolutionary internationalism. While the Third International broke its silence during the war only to dissolve itself, and the Second International has given no sign of life, lacking even the energy to bury itself, the Fourth International has spoken out throughout the war, working and preparing for the revolutionary wave that is coming.
As Trotsky correctly predicted at a time when the tiny Fourth International was a subject for jest among the reformist leaders, the critical test of the war has destroyed every International and international grouping except the Fourth International. Nothing and nobody can dissolve this International, the heir of the Communist International of Lenin and Trotsky.
Workers of all lands! Rally to the proud and stainless banner of the Fourth International! We are approaching the fifth year of the second imperialist world war. It is a year certain to outstrip all the others in human slaughter and material devastation. Before it closes, however, the first great battles of the proletarian revolution may already begin. Once again, out of the vast sea of human suffering of war, will arise the unconquerable spirit of the international proletariat determined to complete this time the task begun with the October revolution. The aroused workers will drop like cast-off garments the habits of servitude and dare to make a new world. In struggle the great masses will find in themselves inexhaustible reservoirs of revolutionary fortitude and heroism. In those days, nearer at hand than many of you dream, the cadres of the Fourth International will speedily become transformed into great mass parties leading tens and hundreds of millions in the final conflict. Comrades and fellow workers! Above all else the toiling peoples now need the International to lead them. There is only one International now, the World Party of Socialist Revolution, the Fourth International! Enter its ranks and prepare with it to lead the successful struggle for the world revolution!
The Executive Committee of the World Party of Socialist Revolution (Fourth International)
June 12, 1943
Last updated on 12.03.2005