Chris Arthur's article in the B.™.S. No.1 on the need for the Fourth International is argued within an idealist problematic that has little to do with Marxist political theory or strategy. The ideal form of revolutionary organisation is deduced from the trivial statement that “we live in one world with one history" and from the thesis that the socialist revolution cannot be victorious in one single country, which is trivially true if we use the term ‘socialist revolution’ to refer to the ultimate aims of the revolution. Not for nothing is the article entitled 'The Idea of the Fourth International’.
With the idea of the Fourth International we have no quarrel. Any Marxist would agree that a single ‘world party of socialist revolution’ is the most effective organisation for world revolution. The question for us however igs not what in abstract is the most perfect form of revolutionary organisation, but what in the concrete and complex situation of the world today is our optimal strategy for social revolution. And this question involves taking account of the specific autonomy and therefore specific weight of organisational forms, which do not become real simply because they are rational. The weakness of Trotskyism from 1933 on is not its characteristic analysis of Soviet and world actualitybut its organisational voluntarism; a fourth international was desir-ible, therefore it should be built. But if the Fourth International was premature (ag Deutscher argued) in 1938, it . is today not a viable goal of that part of revolutionary strategy that involves Party-building, and therefore rather than a strategy, a mere utopia.
The following notes on the Bolshevik party, the Comintern and the Fourth International will help to establish this:
(1) The Bolshevik party, organisational model for the Comintern and the Fourth International that imitates it, was established not around a sociological group (the working class) but around a strategy. This is the essence of Leninism and the precondition for any Party that aims to make the revolution.
(2) The creation of such a party was premised on the acceptance of the authority of a single political leadership. In the Bolshevik Party Lenin invariably made it clear that he was only prepared to lead a Farty that accepted his authority. {This did not preclude free discussion within the Party which contributed to the formation of its strategy and tactics, but the role of the leadership was paramount, and its authority held the party together). (3) Authoritative revolutionary leaderships such as have directed all successful revolutions have only built their parties with extreme difficulty. : A series of splits has inevitably occurred in the process, and unity of the greater part of the conscious revolutionary forces has only been achieved when the correct strategy of the authentic revolutionary tendency has been 7 demonstrated in practice.
(4) Since every concrete revolution is directed in the first instance against one national state, the authority that a revolutionary: party: may-win within one country before the revolution does not translate into international authority. National, social and historical differénces are too great for a
strategy in one country to win acceptance elsewhere as strategy.
(5) Nevertheless, @ successful proletarian revolution carries such prestige in the international revolutionary movement that the party in question may well be able to gain the global hegemony on the movement and construct an international party within which it formulates and carries out a global strategy.
(6) A world revolutionary centre can only be situated within a revolutionary state.Impreialism could never tolerate the H.@. of a revolutionary inter - national in its territory.
(7) The history of the Comintern shows that despite Lenin's call in 1914 for a new International, the revolutionary tendencies up to October 1917 were disparate and divided and unlikely to be submissive to any central authority. After October 1917 the success of the Bolsheviks was such a magnet on the working class in Europe and on the national liberation movements in Asia that it pulled many different tendencies together around the authority of the Bolshevik leadership. This done, a process of Bolshevisation, which purged the Comintern somewhat, transformed the Comintern into a single world party on the Bolshevik model, which carried out the strategy of the Bolshevik leadership (and inevitably degenerated with it).
(8) Trotsky's attempt in 1938 to found a Fourth International met with failure (a) because it took place in a period of world-wide ebb of the revolutionary movement. The one growth-point at the time - Mao's base in Yenan - was no more interested in Trotsky than he was in it. (b)} because the Communist parties of the West, far from being exposed as counter-revolutionary, still organised the most active sections of the working-class. Indeed the Comintern was never counter-revolutionary in the sense that the Socialist International was after 1914. The contradiction between the interest of the Soviet state and world revolution was secondary to the primary contradiction between working-class, national liberation movements and the Soviet leadership on one hand and imperialism on the other. The subservience of the Comintern to Soviet state interest made its strategy structurally deformed with respect to the world revolution, but the Moscow wing of the world Communist movement could never play a directly counter-revolutionary role until the advent of nuclear weapons finally enabled the Soviet state to co-exist peacefully with imperialism. (c) because although Trotsky's personal authority was substantial, it could not substitute for a concrete proletarian revolution as a rallying-point for all genuine revolutionary tendencies that saw through Stalinism - and these were few apart from isolated: intellectuals. And after Trotsky's death every dispute on strategy inevitably split the Trotskyist movement into tendencies that quarreled less rationally and more dogmatically because what was at stake was the symbol of Trotsky which alone provided their legitimacy, Hence there are today four F.I's (Pablos, Frank, Healy, Posadas) and tomorrow ~ who knows?
But if Trotsky's attempt in 1938 was an honorable failure, the project of a Fourth International 40 years later is outright utopian. For added to the organisational obstacles to a revolutionary international not tied to @ victoriousproletarian revolution, there is the brute fact that at least two such revolutions exist ~ China and Cuba - that each provides a certain degree of leadership for¥substantial part of the revolutionary vanguard today, and a rallying-point even for those that are not directly led by them.
In 1938 the zenith of Stalinism provided the conscious internationalists in the West with a certain negatively imposed unity - Trotsky could be seen as alone representing the world revolution. But in 1968 Cuba and China both have highly influential strategies for world revolution - each with possible weaknesses, and in certain respects mutually contrary, but bewteen them defining a complex strategic space to which any revolutionary Marxist group must relate itself. The idea that a Fourth International can be built outside and in opposition to these two revolutionary states is absurd. :
The Unified Secretariat does of course hitch itself very firmly to Cuba, and supports the OLAS strategy in Latin America. This is commendable but hardly compatible with the project of a Fourth International, uniess they are asking the Cuban leadership to take over the functions of the Unified Secretariat in this area.But inthe construction of revolutionary parties elsewhere the utopianism of the Fourth International is an obstacle to the revolutionary movement. Although the Unified Secretariat has freed itself from dogmatism to the extent that it can see the importance of some revolutionary organisation that develop independently of it and uninfluenced by it (eg the Castroite movement, the SDS in Germany), although it has an avowediy non-sectarian attitude towards party-building, the fact that the majority of revolutionary forces will continue ~ correctly - to deny the relevance of the Fourth International, even though sharing much of its analysis, and that the F,I. will not be able to persuade them to the contrary, will lead the F.,I. tendency, when a revolutionary party in a particuler country is constructed, to be faced with the choice of either breaking with it or of submerging itself in it. And just as the Trotskyists broke with the Chinese CP under Mao, and submerged themselves in the Cuban revolutionary organisation under Castro, so we may expect that if an anti- Trotskyist leadership wins revolutionary hegemony in one country then the Fourth International will break with it, and if a non-anti-Trotskyist leadership wins revolutionary hegemony in another country then the Unified Secretariat -(being 'non-sectarian')- will submerege itself in it. In no case will a revolutionary party adhere to the Fourth International unless the F.I, builds that party. As the Fourth International is everywhere one revolutionary tendency among many, to expect to do this in more than one or two countries would be absurd, and even if the F.I. succeeds in creating one or two mass parties, the centripetal attraction of a weak international centre on strong national sections would be inadequate for the Fourth International to hold its own organisation together. The project of an independent Trotskyite international is therefore utopian, and since utopian, sectarian, as sooner or later the organisational fetishism of 'Fourth Internationalism' will tnterfere with the concrete strategic needs of each particular revolutionary movement. . 3
This is not to quarrel in the least with the thesis that a total understanding of the world situation and of the global needs of the world revoluticnary movement is essential to the formulntion of s revolutionary strategy in any country. What we dispute is that the most effective translation of revolutionary internationalism into national strategies can be m-de via the Fourth International, precisely because the F.I. is in each country one tendency among many and its attempt to impose itself organis~ ationally(es opposed to ideologically) involves a sectarien deviation.
Only a successful proletarian revolution was able for a while to unite the world revolutionary vanguerd into one organisationswith the multiplicity of proletarian revolutions a new international mayne possible, although each successful revolution in a new ares is certainly in a position to unite and lead revolutionary forces in its section of the globe. To sum up + revolutionary internetionsalism yes, Fourth Internationalism not
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