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THE FOUNDING DOCUMENTS OF THE AN INTRODUCTION
1. The Crisis of International Proletarian Leadership and the Regeneration of the Fourth International In the view of Trotskyists today—as in the view of the revolutionary generation of Lenin, Trotsky, and Luxemburg before us—humanity faces a stark choice between socialism or barbarism. Today's barbarism confronts us cruelly enough in the starvation of hundreds of thousands in the Sahel while imperialism relentlessly presses unprecedented masses of the wealth of humanity into the morbid absurdity of a global arms race. But our future is threatened with the ever-growing possibility of a degree of barbarism hardly imaginable to our revolutionary forebears. For we face the very real danger that world capitalism in its death agony will convulse the globe with a nuclear holocaust and shroud it with a nuclear winter, achieving in a single, fatal moment of human history, the irretrievable extinction of human civilization—if not of the human species itself. For Trotskyists, the decisive key to achieving the historically evolved alternative possibility of world socialism is the resolution of the crisis of international proletarian leadership. Now, as for Trotsky at the founding of the Fourth International in 1938—
Over the course of the four and a half decades since the founding of the Fourth International, the crisis of the Fourth International has itself become central to the crisis of international proletarian leadership. Opportunist and/or sectarian trends dominate most of the organizations which trace their political origins to the revolutionary theory and practice summed up in the Transitional Program of 1938. The fight for the political regeneration of the Fourth International now lies at the center of the struggle to resolve the crisis of international proletarian leadership.
2. The Founding of the International Trotskyist Committee Drawn together by a shared history of commitment to the struggle for the political regeneration of the Fourth International, delegations from Europe, North America, and the Middle East met in Britain on 22-28 July 1984 to consider the possibility of taking a small but important step toward resolving the crisis of proletarian leadership. In the end, this international conference brought to culmination an already prolonged process of political struggle and discussion, founding the International Trotskyist Committee (ITC). The founding documents published in this first issue of the International Trotskyist Review, are the public founding documents of the ITC and sum up the most essential political conclusions on the basis of which the forces represented at the July conference decided to found a democratic- centralist international tendency. Historically derived mainly from the forces of the Trotskyist International Liaison Committee (TILC), founded at the initiative of the Workers Socialist League of Britain in December 1979, the ITC could only come into being after its component forces had reached agreement on a critical analysis of the history—including the eventual crisis and split-of TILC. While the ITC's balance sheet of TILC is major omission from these founding documents, in fact the July Conference voted to found the ITC only after a lengthy report and discussion ended in a unanimous vote on the line to be taken in a document drawing up a balance sheet of TILC. Such a balance sheet will appear shortly in a subsequent issue of this Review, which will also describe and document the struggle of the current forces of the ITC within TILC against both opportunist and sectarian distortions and revisions of TILC's original, essentially principled perspective for the regeneration of the Fourth International. The four documents published here, however, express in themselves the political fundamentals of the ITC's relationship to TILC. The first two documents are careful, extensive revisions of documents originally drafted by what was to become TILC's Italian section. What is now the ITC's "Programmatic Principles" was, in its shorter 1979 version, amended and adopted by TILC as one of TILC's three founding programmatic statements. The considerably shorter 1979 version of "The Crisis of the Fourth International and the Tasks of Consistent Trotskyists" was submitted by Italian and French comrades as a discussion document at TILC's founding conference. (The texts of these 1979 documents are available from the ITC.) As amended and adopted by the ITC's founding conference, these two documents embody both a deliberate assertion of political continuity with TILC and a series of major political developments based on a critical assessment of the contradictions which led to the crisis and eventual split of TILC. The two resolutions, on international work among women and international work among lesbians and gay men, were originally submitted for discussion within TILC by the Revolutionary Workers League/US, respectively in July 1982 and April 1983. They partially express the critical importance of the special-oppression issues in the crisis of TILC and in the struggle within TILC by the forces now with the ITC. Taken together, these four documents provide fundamental political indications of the character of the theoretical and practical struggle the International Trotskyist Committee has resolved to wage for the regeneration of the Fourth International on a consistently proletarian and consistently revolutionary basis.
3. "The Programmatic Principles of the International Trotskyist Committee" In effect, "The Programmatic Principles of the International Trotskyist Committee" is the platform of the ITC as an international tendency fighting within the movement of consistent Trotskyists and "Trotskyist-centrists" for the political regeneration of the Fourth International on the basis of orthodox Trotskyism. It defines what the ITC means by "orthodox Trotskyism." The "Programmatic Principles" is not an exhaustive restatement of the programmatic heritage of revolutionary Marxism. Rather, the document takes the Transitional Program of 1938 and the revolutionary-Marxist heritage summed up in it as its starting-point—declaring that "it is only on this basis that a revolutionary politics can be built today"—and focuses its own attention on "the task of developing and updating the Transitional Program itself in the light of the events since World War II and the contemporary situation" (section 8). More particularly, the "Programmatic Principles" focuses on the key questions which have divided Trotskyists in the postwar period. It defines in positive terms what orthodox Trotskyism is today over against the conceptions underlying the principal revisionist deviations—in particular in the Pabloite tradition—which have characterized the process of political degeneration and crisis through which the Fourth International has gone.
4. "The Crisis of the Fourth International and the Tasks of Consistent Trotskyists" "The Crisis of the Fourth International and the Tasks of Consistent Trotskyists" takes up the central political question of our time in fourteen precisely worded theses. The document begins with an extremely concise summary of the history of the Fourth International from its founding in 1938 to the present. After summing up the processes of disorientation and degeneration following World War II, which culminated in Pabloism and the split of the Fourth International in 1953, the document examines objectively the processes of degeneration which took place in both the Pabloite and anti-Pabloite sides after the split, from 1953 through the 1970s. Thesis 12 presents specific summary characterizations of the main trends existing today at the end of these historic processes of political degeneration and organizational fragmentation. However sharp these characterizations may seem to some, they do not express a sectarian attitude. In the first place, the ITC realizes that no such set of characterizations can be final. The situation of some of the trends discussed is so volatile that any such document is bound to be to some degree out of date by the time it is published. And in some cases the ITC has had to make assessments based on rather limited information and discussion. On balance, even in such instances, the ITC preferred to take the risk of having to revise information or modify some of the judgements in this document rather than maintain any sort of diplomatic silence or a pretense of having no definite views at all. Moreover, the ITC's analysis recognizes that the process of degeneration through which the forces of the Fourth International have gone has led, overall, not to the consolidation of a set of consistently opportunist, counterrevolutionary organizations, but rather to the development of a set of centrist organizations. And, more importantly, a substantial number of these organizations preserve sufficient, living links with the revolutionary program of Trotskyism—the only explicit, conscious expression of revolutionary proletarian politics in our time—so that they must be viewed in a significantly different light than conventional centrist organizations, in which the Trotskyist program plays no role—or no meaningful role-at all. Theses 13 and 14 elaborate the ITC's view of the tasks of orthodox, consistent Trotskyists under such conditions. The ITC argues that orthodox Trotskyists must function as an organized, international tendency within the whole set of consistently Trotskyist and "Trotskyist-centrist" groupings, fighting intransigently for the political regeneration of the Fourth International on a fully orthodox-Trotskyist basis—combining this struggle with a fight for exemplary revolutionary work in the struggles of the workers and oppressed, based on the method, strategy, and general tactics of the Transitional Program.
5. "Resolution on International Work among Women" and "Resolution on International Work among Lesbians and Gay Men" The two obviously parallel resolutions on international work among women andinternational work among lesbians and gay men present a focus of especial importance to the ITC in defining what orthodox Trotskyism means. Trotsky himself repeatedly emphasized the differentiation and divisions within the working class and the importance of a correct orientation by revolutionaries to those sectors of the working class least affected by the illusions of social mobility, bourgeois democracy, and eternal progress under capitalism. Such illusions strongly affect the most privileged sectors of the working class (the "labor aristocracy'), are actively promoted by the bureaucratic and parliamentary apparatuses which have grown up on the back of the workers' movement, and are constantly kept alive through the myriad processes of interaction and exchange of positions between the working class and the lower strata of the petty bourgeoisie. The opportunist and sectarian trends in the process of the degeneration of the Fourth International have inevitably been associated with tendencies to orient, in practice, towards relatively privileged sectors of the working class and/or the petty-bourgeois sectors and leaderships of the movements of the specially oppressed groups. Sectarian tendencies have been particularly prone either to ignore the special-oppression issues altogether or to attempt to deny the need for any genuine focus on the special-oppression issues by reducing them to mere special varieties of capitalist exploitation. In either case, in practice, the special-oppression issues are treated primarily as if they were "divisive" of a supposedly otherwise united working class. The typical opportunist stance has been to accept the specially oppressed as targets of intervention but to treat their special concerns and struggles as fundamentally not proletarian and not of central concern to revolutionary strategy. Opportunism characteristically views the special-oppression issues as essentially petty-bourgeois and narrowly democratic in character. Over against such opportunist and sectarian attitudes—both of which played highly destructive roles in the crisis of TILC—the ITC's two resolutions counterpose what is actually the original historic orientation of Trotskyism, as summed up in the passage quoted from the Transitional Program in the "Resolution on International Work among Women." At the same time as the ITC, in adopting these resolutions as two of its four public founding documents, declares that a special orientation to the specially oppressed is an essential aspect of its fight for orthodox Trotskyism, it also recognizes that Trotskyism—has yet to go substantially beyond initial analyses or general statements of orientation has yet to achieve a fully adequate, concrete Marxist understanding of either the special oppression of women or the special oppression of lesbians and gay men. It follows that neither of these resolutions expresses a fully elaborated analysis or fully developed practical perspectives. Rather, the resolutions sum up the most essential aspects of a Marxist and revolutionary-proletarian approach to the questions of women's and lesbian/gay oppression and commit the ITC to work to develop the analysis and perspectives required—and long overdue. Both resolutions therefore open discussions which the ITC will be carrying out over the next period. In line with the aims stated in the resolutions, each ITC section will be developing documents on the woman question and the lesbian/gay questions on the basis of its own experience, including analysis of the feminist and lesbian/gay movements in its own country. As part of the process of developing complete analyses of these questions, the ITC will also be examining other documents, in particular the resolution adopted by the 1979 world congress of the USFI, "Socialist Revolution and the Struggle for Women's Liberation," and the material produced in March 1983 by a number of leading women comrades of the Workers Socialist League of Britain in support of their struggle within the WSL for a clear working-class orientation for work among women. As a first step in consolidating the analyses needed, the ITC will develop a programmatic document on the woman question for the next ITC international conference, recognizing that such a document cannot be a definitive analysis, starting as the discussion does from a situation in which Trotskyists have long delayed adequate analysis: in reality, there has been very little development of Marxist theoretical work on the woman question or the question of the nuclear family since Engels' Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. In part because of this, revolutionary organizations have made many mistakes, including a general failure to understand the role of the women's movement in the 1960s and 1970s. In publicly expressing its commitment to the systematic development of theoretical and practical work on the woman question and the lesbian/gay questions, the ITC expresses as well its more general commitment to all the struggles of the specially oppressed, which have assumed greater and greater importance over the course of the period since World War II. This commitment, in turn, underlines the practical relationship between the ITC's struggle for the regeneration of the Fourth International and its orientation to the politically advanced workers, who can to a great extent be defined by their willingness to fight against all forms of oppression and their opposition to all forms of bigotry—and many of whose most militant fighters necessarily come from specially oppressed backgrounds. Finally, in its attitude toward the special-oppression issues as in its approach to the question of the Fourth International, the ITC's firm drawing of the class line and its activist, flexible, and dialectical method represent a clear break with the sterile opportunism and sectarianism which have characterized the crisis of the Fourth International.
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