Movement of the internationalists in struggle against the Stalinist degeneration of the Third International and against the defensist degeneration of the Fourth International from 1942 onwards.
Origins of the communist left
The rise of Stalinism did not go unchallenged within the Russian Communist Party. From 1923 onwards, sometimes amid great confusion, the tendencies that resisted the hollowing out of the soviets in favor of the state apparatus, and the accompanying assertion of the interests of national capital over the world Revolution, gradually gathered around the Left Opposition, which saw in Trotsky and Rakovsky its most qualified spokesmen.
The struggle of the Left Opposition in the years 23-28 took place on different levels. We will not go into a detailed analysis. Let us briefly recall the main issues:
On the domestic level: struggle against the growing bureaucratization of the party and the State, struggle against the kulak danger [agrarian bourgeoisie] and, increasingly openly, against the "nepmen" [private petty bourgeoisie born in the heat of the state capitalism of the NEP].
The Opposition advocates a new course of anti-bureaucratic measures, a policy towards the peasantry relying on the poor peasants and directed against the kulaks, and a progressive collectivization of the countryside grounded in greater industrial development and economic planning.
On the international level: struggle against the Stalin-Bukharin course (Anglo-Russian Committee, alliance with Chiang Kai-shek in the Chinese revolution).
On the theoretical level, which guided the whole international policy: struggle against the theory of "socialism in one country", and defense of the Bolshevik program, which Trotsky upholds in the theory of "permanent revolution".
Jacques Roussel. "Les enfants du prophète"
From the proclamation of "socialism in one country" in 1928, various opposition groups took shape in the International. When Trotsky arrived in exile in Turkey, he became their natural point of reference.
Trotsky was expelled from the party in 1927 and then from Russia. Most members of the Left Opposition were forced to submit and "repent" after being expelled from the party. All of them alike would be sent to prisons and "socialist" deportation camps, where they would all end up murdered or executed as traitors and foreign agents. The Russian opposition was physically liquidated. Then came the turn of the Stalinists themselves who had known the October revolution. The Bolshevik party was also physically liquidated.
For the Revolution and for the International Opposition it was an immense loss. Nowhere else had there been a revolutionary party comparable to the Bolshevik party, tempered in the harsh privations of clandestinity, of revolution, of civil war, of power. With its extermination all the communist revolutionary traditions perished. The disappearance of the Russian left oppositionists was, in particular, an irreparable loss, for they were the bearers, to the very end, of the revolutionary, theoretical and organizational capital amassed over many years. Communist continuity was carried on practically by Trotsky alone.
Jacques Roussel. "Les enfants du prophète"
Between 1930 and 1931 Trotsky managed to lay a fragile basis for joint work among the various groups and tendencies that were springing up in each country. His battle was above all to define the "International Left Opposition" within a world political framework, breaking with the tendency of various groups, from Urbahns in Germany to the Bordigists in Italy, to form tendencies exclusively on the basis of a specific national experience or, at least, on the limited basis of a national organization.
I consider your conception of internationalism to be mistaken. In the last analysis, you conceive of the International as a sum of national sections or as the product of the mutual influence of national sections. This conception of the International is, at best, one-sided, undialectical and therefore wrong. If the communist left throughout the world consisted of only five individuals, they would nevertheless be obliged to build an international organization simultaneously with one or more national organizations.
It is wrong to regard the national organization as the foundation and the international as the roof. The relationship between the two is of an entirely different kind. Marx and Engels started the communist movement in 1847 with an international document and with the creation of an international organization. The same thing happened with the creation of the First International. The Zimmerwald Left followed the same path in preparing the Third International. It is far more imperative to follow this path today than in Marx's time. It is of course possible, in the epoch of imperialism, for a revolutionary proletarian tendency to arise in this or that country, but it cannot thrive and develop in an isolated country; on the day after its creation it must seek or establish international ties, an international platform, an international organization, because this is the only way that can guarantee the correctness of the national line. A tendency that shuts itself up within national limits for years condemns itself irretrievably to degeneration.
"To the editorial board of Prometeo", Leon Trotsky, June 19, 1930
The "International Left Opposition" would group most of the communist lefts as an "opposition", that is, still claiming to be part of the degenerating Third International and setting itself the goal of rescuing it.
The Fourth International
When in 1933 the KPD and the International cleared Hitler's path to power and accepted that he should take over the leadership of the German state without an insurrectionary response, it became evident that the International and its parties were already a dead body from the standpoint of the class program. The "International Left Opposition" could no longer conceive of itself as a mere fraction of it, because the prospect of rescuing it had become utopian. Reality would be even worse. The International was not only a dying organization beyond any possible resuscitation. The Spanish Revolution would show that the Communist parties had gone from passive accomplices to organizers and vanguard of the counter-revolution.
Precisely when the revolution was reaching its peak in Spain, in 1936, the Stalinist counter-revolution was consolidating its power in Russia for many years to come, through the extermination of millions of people. Consequently, its Spanish branch deliberately behaved, from July 19 onwards, as the standard-bearer of the counter-revolution, covertly at first, brazenly from May 1937. With full premeditation and on strict orders from Moscow, it fell upon a proletariat that had just annihilated capitalism. That fact, attested by thousands of Stalinist documents of the time, represents a definitive reactionary mutation of Stalinism abroad, in keeping with the previous mutation of its matrix, Russian Stalinism.
A conditioned reflex of the various fragments of the Fourth International, and of others who look on it with disdain, assigns to Stalinism an opportunist and reformist role, of class collaboration, comparable to that of Kerensky or Noske. A grave error, for what Stalinism did was to lead the counter-revolution politically and to carry it out with its own weapons, its own henchmen and its own uniformed and secret police. It immediately stood out as the party of the reactionary extreme right in the red zone, indispensable for annihilating the revolution. As in Russia, and long before Eastern Europe, China, Vietnam, etc., the so-called Communist Party acted as owner of capital, monopolized by a State of its own. It is impossible to imagine a more thoroughly anti-communist policy. Far from collaborating with the bourgeois republican parties or with the Socialist party, which still retained a reformist bent, it was these that collaborated with it, and they soon appeared to its left, as traditional democrats. Both were at once astonished and fearful, watching the treacherous anti-revolutionary skill of a party they still regarded as communist. But they consented, for with their own devices they were faltering before the immense flood of workers.
"Reaffirmation". G. Munis, 1977
The defeat of the Spanish Revolution by two hands - the Spanish Republic led by Stalinism, and fascism led by Franco - left the way open for a new imperialist world war. The Bolsheviks had judged that one of the causes of the lack of synchronization and the weaknesses at the start of the revolutionary wave against the first great imperialist war had been the absence of an international revolutionary political organization after the betrayal of social democracy. The answer would be the founding of the Fourth International in 1938... at the height of the counter-revolution, with the aim of preparing a worldwide agitation on the principle of revolutionary defeatism that could serve to turn the impending imperialist world war into a global communist revolution.
The skeptics ask: But has the moment come to create a new International? It is impossible, they say, to create an International "artificially". Only great events can bring it into being, etc. All these expressions prove only that the skeptics are no good for creating a new International. Generally speaking, skeptics are no good for anything.
The Fourth International has already arisen out of great events: the greatest defeats of the proletariat in history. The cause of these defeats is the degeneration and betrayal of the old leadership. The class struggle does not tolerate interruptions. The Third International, following the Second, is dead for the revolution.
Long live the Fourth International!
But the skeptics do not keep quiet: But has the moment already come to proclaim it? The Fourth International, we reply, has no need to be "proclaimed". It exists and it fights. Is it weak? Yes, its ranks are still few because it is still young. So far it consists mainly of leading cadres. But these cadres are the only hope of the revolutionary future; they are the only ones truly worthy of the name. If our International is still numerically weak, it is strong in its doctrine, its tradition and the incomparable temper of its leading cadres. That this is not visible today is of no great importance. Tomorrow it will be more evident.
The Fourth International already enjoys the well-deserved hatred of the Stalinists, the social democrats, the bourgeois liberals and the fascists. It has not and cannot have any place in any popular front. It irreconcilably fights all political groupings tied to the bourgeoisie. Its mission is to do away with the domination of capital; its aim is socialism; its method, the proletarian revolution. Without internal democracy there is no revolutionary education. Without discipline there is no revolutionary action. The internal regime of the Fourth International is governed by the principles of democratic centralism: complete freedom in discussion, absolute unity in action.
The present crisis of human civilization is the crisis of the proletarian leadership. The revolutionary workers grouped around the Fourth International show their class the way out of the crisis. They offer it a program based on the international experience of the proletariat and of all the oppressed in general; they offer it a spotless banner.
Workers and working women of all countries, rally under the banner of the Fourth International.
It is the banner of your coming victory!
"Under the banner of the Fourth International", Leon Trotsky, 1938
In theory, the formation of a new International closed the fractional stage and therefore the historical time for a "communist left". Among other reasons because, although some tendencies inside and outside the Fourth International went on calling Stalinism "centrist", there was no longer either a right or a center. The Third International had become the active organizer of the counter-revolution and was getting ready to be the main recruiting sergeant for a new imperialist war.
The communist left... of the Fourth International
The road to the collapse of the International began, while Trotsky was still alive, with the "Emergency Conference". German troops had entered Paris and nothing seemed more prudent than to move the organs of the International to the US, then a neutral country that would take another two years to enter the war. Doing so meant that the SWP would become the center of the organization, a center counterbalanced and supervised only from afar - at a time when travel and communications were little short of heroic - by a Trotsky who lived harassed and besieged in Mexico until his assassination by Stalinist agents in 1940.
Within a few weeks of Trotsky's death, the SWP began to adopt an increasingly "defensist" discourse, close to "anti-fascism". War on war, the transformation of the imperialist war into revolutionary civil war, turns into an ambiguous non-support and non-intervention. Cannon, the main leader of the SWP, offers to support the Roosevelt government, should it enter the war, if the military training of the workers before they go to the front, regimented in the regular army, is left in the hands of the unions. Even so, and although it is obvious that under this policy the SWP will pose no danger to the war effort of the American bourgeoisie, in 1941 the main leaders of the party are put on trial in Minneapolis. Their defense, unlike that of Luxemburg or Liebknecht, is shameful. At one point in the trial he goes so far as to say:
Both our members and the workers we influence have to go to war and do what the rulers of this country tell them. As long as we do not have a majority behind us, we are in no position to do anything but obey orders.
Instead of turning the trial into a trial of militarism and imperialism, they play with ambiguity, reducing the party's aspirations to a political opposition that Cannon sums up as continuing to write and speak for a different foreign policy for America.
Russia was still out of the war when the first symptoms of going astray appeared in the American party (Socialist Workers Party). Shortly afterwards, with the whole world now in the slaughter, the S.W.P. deliberately withdrew its revolutionary formulations against the imperialist war and refused to take any action of struggle against it. It justified itself by claiming to camouflage itself from the eye of the police and to adapt its tone to what the then patriotic ears of the proletariat could take in. But what is most despicable and at the same time tragic about opportunism is that, while cutting itself off from the revolutionary education and mobilization of the masses, it does not escape the blows of reaction unless it submits to it entirely. Thus the leaders of the S.W.P. found themselves sarcastically accused by their government of internationalism and revolutionary defeatism, the very things they were dodging, and went to prison for a year and a half or two for a crime they had the duty to commit, but which they always took good care not to commit. [...]
The American leaders of the S.W.P. had little of the fiber and mental consistency of a Liebknecht. Before their judges they proclaimed the need to transform the imperialist war not into civil war but into a genuine war against fascism. They clumsily accused the American government of being incapable of finishing off Berlin, and their press put forward splendid programs for defeating Hitler. The words "revolutionary defeatism" set their teeth on edge, and they vetoed them. All internationalist formulations were carefully struck out of magazine and newspaper, even the mere word "imperialism" unless it referred to the national enemy. Throughout the war - an overwhelming argument in itself - they did not organize a single action against it, nor hand out a single leaflet. Finally, comparing their policy with that of the centrist parties of the day, the British I.L.P. and the Spanish P.O.U.M., the similarity between them went as far as identity of terminology. In a word, the S.W.P. replaced revolutionary policy with the bourgeois and Stalinist policy of anti-fascism, a mere imperialist recruiting trick, twin of the Hitlerite struggle against plutocracy.
All this was done in the name of tactics and educational efficiency. It is an old habit of opportunists to present their abandonment of principles as practicality or as making things easy for the masses, and at the same time, in moments of repression, as an unavoidable protective legalism. They claim to be deceiving the class enemy when in reality they are receiving its influence; they boast of educating and winning the masses, while softening the revolutionary content of their own militants. The masses cannot be drawn to revolutionary principles and action except by formulations and attitudes of the utmost clarity.
The example of the S.W.P. spread. Shortly after its opportunist turn, the British section of the Fourth International, which had achieved considerable growth by supporting the strikes that Labour and the Trade Unions patriotically condemned, was also put on trial. Its main leader and defendant chose to defend himself, also invoking practical reasons, with the miserable opportunist verbiage of the Socialist Workers Party.
The pernicious repercussions of these two examples cannot be properly understood without bearing in mind that the United States was then the seat of the world Executive Committee and that, owing to the war, the press of the American party - and to a lesser degree that of the British - was the only one able to reach all the sections and groups in the countries not occupied by Germany and Japan.
In spite of everything, cries of alarm and indignation were heard at once. The author of these lines, then a member of the world Executive Committee, raised the alarm as early as 1941, when the first warning symptoms of opportunism appeared, before the shameful brazenness to which the trial gave rise. After the trial, the Spanish Group in exile in Mexico, which included French militants and militants from other countries, publicly dissociated itself from the American majority and from the Executive Committee, following an independent policy from then on. At the same time, it drafted a vigorous document criticizing the majority and vindicating proletarian internationalism, submitting it for discussion in all the sections with a view to a future world congress. We shall see later what became of it. But that was not the only condemnation of opportunism. Others arose in China, in South America, within the S.W.P. itself. It was later learned that others also arose in France.
Thus, still in the midst of the world war and with the victory of either side still undecided, the policy of the Fourth International, set out mainly by the American party, appeared as a grave abandonment of internationalist principles and tasks. This failure, this capitulation, it must be said without mincing words, led those responsible for it to a contemptible subterfuge. Since it was plainly impossible for them to display fidelity to proletarian internationalism, they invented their own fidelity to principles in the defense of Russia as a degenerated workers' state, all the more comfortable since Russia, after its friendship with Hitler, had become the beloved ally of the opportunists' respective fatherlands.
In the Fourth International, the defense of Russia was never anything but a debatable opinion, subject to the test of experience. Within it there lived tendencies radically opposed to the notion of the degenerated workers' state without anyone setting the dogs on them, as the S.W.P. and the executive committee did after their surrender to jingoistic anti-fascism. On the other hand, the lack of internationalism, and all the more so its abandonment during the war, was incompatible with membership of the organization, since those who have not remained unscathed by the immense pressures and snares of national defense evidently disqualify themselves from any decisive revolutionary action. In New York, the internationalism of the Fourth was beheaded, and the defense of Russia became the main criterion of membership. The consequences of that travesty were bound to be devastating.
G. Munis. "The Fourth International". 1959
The political response would come, as early as 1941, from Natalia Sedova - veteran militant and Trotsky's recent widow - who would be joined by the group of the Spanish section exiled in Mexico. Sedova, Munis and Péret try to force a debate, denouncing the attitude first of the SWP and then of the International Secretariat. They demand the holding of the second congress, which is mandatory under the statutes and which the Americans and their allies in France and Great Britain will manage to delay until 1948. Their criticisms gradually refine a set of positions that will end up producing a left fraction within the organization, starting from the critique of the betrayal of internationalism under way at the hands of the American leadership.
It is no coincidence that the internationalist fraction also draws on Spaniards, that is, on militants who lived through the Spanish revolution, with the section in exile - including the part of it in the camps in France - joining en bloc, as well as Greeks, Vietnamese, Italians... that is, militants from the countries where the proletariat is confronting the war in a revolutionary way: Italy in '43, Greece in '44, Vietnam in '46... The role of Stalinism as the head of the counter-revolution, first seen in Spain, repeats itself country after country... and the International fails to place itself at the revolutionary vanguard. When in 1946 the IS published a Manifesto for the pre-conference with which it intended to tie up the 2nd Congress, downgrading it in passing to a Conference, the left responded with what, over the previous four years, had already become a practically complete programmatic alternative.
The Fourth International will not be able to fulfill its revolutionary mission unless it abandons without reservation the defense of the USSR in favor of a policy of relentless struggle against capitalism and its accomplice, Stalinism. To lead this struggle victoriously, the counter-revolutionary character of the Russian bureaucracy, which sets itself up at home as a class in the process of formation and which oppresses Eastern Europe and Asia, must be exposed at every step and in practice. The lie of its "nationalizations" and agrarian "reforms" must be unmasked, and fraternization between occupiers and occupied must be developed, declaring clearly that neither has anything to defend in Russia, but everything to destroy, just as in any capitalist State, as well as the agents of the Kremlin, whether or not they take part in the government. Fraternization between occupiers and occupied must be the central theme of our agitation in the occupied territories, whatever the occupying power. It is the only way to combat chauvinism among the vanquished as well as among the victors, and to prepare the international front of the exploited against the exploiters. At the same time, the evacuation of all occupied territories, including those occupied by the Russians, must be demanded with growing insistence.
In the rest of the world, we must show at every moment that Stalinism is only the national agent of the Kremlin's foreign policy, whose interests are always opposed to those of the socialist revolution, which would be its final ruin; that the fate of the workers is a matter of total indifference to it; that it is the best defender of the national bourgeoisie, because it foresees no future other than one tied to the fate of the Russian counter-revolution.
Therefore, the slogan of a PS-PC-CGT government for France, and every similar slogan in any other country, must be abandoned, since it aims only at breaking the revolutionary drive of the masses by handing the vanguard over to the GPU.
The policy of the united front from organization to organization must, at the present stage, be abandoned as far as the traditional "workers'" parties are concerned. It must be replaced, from now on, by proposals of united front to minority workers' organizations likely to give immediate results, such as the anarchists. However, the united front for precise and immediate tasks must be advocated tirelessly in the factory, in the locality and, if possible, in the region.
Our transitional program must be pruned in the same way. The demand for the Constituent Assembly must disappear for the moment, as must all the slogans resting on a gradualist conception of our program for the masses at the present stage. The world is going through an acute revolutionary crisis today, and our organization must prepare for the decisive struggles ahead, since no development of capitalism, peaceful or otherwise, can be expected. We must therefore tirelessly raise, popularize and explain the slogan of the formation of democratically elected workers' councils in the workplaces, so that it can be applied at the first opportunity. To this slogan must be added all the consequences it implies: formation of workers' militias obeying only the committees elected by the masses, disarming of the bourgeois forces, congress of workers' committees, dissolution of the bourgeois State and creation of the workers' State.
At the same time, on the economic level, agitation must insist above all on the sliding scale of wages, combined with the sliding scale of working hours without reduction of wages, in all its ramifications: restarting by the workers of factories closed by the capitalists, seizure of the capitalists' assets by the workers starting with war and black-market profits, and finally the confiscation of factories and land by workers' committees democratically elected in the workplaces.
Benjamin Péret. "The Exegetes' Manifesto", 1946
When the 2nd Congress of the Fourth International was finally held in 1948, the sections and groups that from 1943 onwards had been taking a position independent of the International Secretariat (IS) were a minority, depleted by repression and by the infamous maneuvers of the IS itself to reduce their representation. The leadership prevented even a discussion of the renunciation of internationalism by its reference groups during the past war. Denunciation and rupture were as inevitable as the drift of the majority, which would end up approving, at the third congress of the no-longer-International, that the main contradiction of capitalism was no longer the class struggle (bourgeoisie against proletariat) but the confrontation between the US and Stalinist Russia - an explicit renunciation of Marxist continuity, of communism, of internationalism... and even of decency.
the 1948 Congress refused to condemn participation in capitalist national defense under the guise of resistance, and approved a political resolution that raised the Russia-United States rivalry to the rank of the main world contradiction. In reality it turned its back on the irreducible opposition of proletariat and capitalism on a world scale, the sole guide of a revolutionary organization. On both counts, the Fourth International ceased to be one from that congress onwards. Henceforth it could deform revolutionaries, but in no way form them.
G. Munis. "Fifty Years After Trotskyism", 1982
The fact is that the renunciation of internationalism crumbles and sterilizes any evolution or position that does not start from the most radical rectification. It is not Trotsky's errors that produce the degeneration of the International, just as it was not Lenin's that led to those of the Third; it is the renunciation of internationalism that makes any programmatic correction impossible and leaves them room only as the left, democratist wing of the Stalinist counter-revolution.
Notwithstanding the irrefutable evidence of experience, the main Trotskyist parties, lightened of internationalism during the war and committed to national defense by way of the resistance, drew the opposite conclusion: Stalinism extends socialist property, however much it may grieve the proletariat itself. They simply had to cover up their grave revolutionary deficiencies with something. Hence their present position, which the League adopts, has much more of a Stalinist swindle about it than of a political or sociological error.
The errors of the masters often turn into a mortal wound for the disciples. Thus what in Trotsky was a mistake, at most a clouding of thought, reaches in present-day Trotskyism proportions of falsehood, of crass opportunism and even of capitulation. But it must be stressed that in this metamorphosis, too, existence precedes consciousness. Having turned its back, in the midst of the world conflict, on the principle "against imperialist war, civil war", this Trotskyism stripped itself of what is essential and most life-giving in revolutionary thought, barring itself from the possibility of correcting errors and making the slightest theoretical progress. From its compromises with national defense (resistance) onwards, one no longer finds in it any theoretical knowledge, or even any attempt at it, but a string of sophistries and self-justifying attitudes, ever more base as one calls forth the next. And it has ended up in its present position. Formally and organically it has gone back to what the Left Opposition to the Third International was during the mid-twenties and the first two years of the thirties, despite the criminality and filth that has piled up in Stalinism since then; politically, it stands dazed and head bowed before the extension of that same Stalinism (feats, in its eyes) in Eastern Europe, in China, Korea, Vietnam, Cuba and even in Egypt, where 15 or 20,000 Russian soldiers hold up the sacred standard of Islam against that of Israel.
In sum, the regression of Trotskyism was caused by its break with internationalism, not by Trotsky's error concerning the nature of the Russian system, as shallow critics claim. The practical and theoretical defense of internationalism demanded during the world war, and continues to demand today, an outright rectification of the idea of the degenerated workers' state and of all the presuppositions that engendered it. Conversely, neither the defense of Russia nor that of any Stalinist country can be practiced without giving internationalism the slip, that is, the world proletariat, in order to go and enlist under the orders of the enemies of that same proletariat.
G. Munis. "Analysis of a Void", 1971-72
The break-up of the International and the departure of its internationalist tendency coincide with the moment when, in its program, the phase opened with the formation of the International Communist Left in 1929-30 is culminating:
- The transitional program has been pruned of everything deriving from the conception of state property as a socialist element or one tending towards socialism, a conception inherited from the Third and Second Internationals.
- The nature of Stalinism and of the bureaucracy has gradually been clarified in the critique and overcoming of the concept of the degenerated workers' state, and Stalinist Russia is now regarded as an imperialist state capitalism.
- The program of the Third International, for its part, has had workers' control pruned from it, and the immediate postwar period has made necessary a critique of the tactic of the united front with social democrats and Stalinists, who are by now definitively integrated into the state.
- The impossibility of a national liberation not opposed to the working class, both in the occupied and in the colonial countries, as had become clear first in China, then in Europe and in Vietnam at the end of the war.
The critique of the working-class nature of Stalinism and the affirmation, for the first time, of a program that takes as its basis what is distinctive of decadent capitalism, mark the culmination of the work of the Communist Left stage opened by Trotsky in 1929. There still remains, however, a very important element for the definition of communist tactics: the trade unions. But that debate, which already begins at the end of the war, will have to unfold in a new international framework that will only materialize after the definitive rupture, anticipated at the 2nd Congress. The denunciation is made formal at the 7th Plenum in April 1949. In September it is made public and definitive with the publication of the "Explanation and Appeal to the Militants, Groups and Sections of the Fourth International" by the Spanish section, renamed GCI (Internationalist Communist Group) and later FOR (Revolutionary Workers' Ferment). The Appeal gathers around it militants from all over the world: Vietnamese who are taking refuge in France after the persecution and massacre at the hands of the Stalinists with the complicity of the French colonial government, such as Ngô Văn; French militants coming from the groups that had tried to practise revolutionary defeatism during the occupation and in Vichy France, such as Maximilien Rubel, and the Pennetier-Gallienne current of French Trotskyism, with well-known militants such as Sonia Gontarbert, Sophie Moen or Edgar Petsch. Counting Munis and Benjamin Péret - who have returned from Mexico - and the core of Spanish militants who lived through the struggle during the Spanish revolution and are at that moment refugees in France - Esteban Bilbao, Jaime Fernández, Paco Gómez, Agustín Rodríguez - the grouping numbers more than fifty people in France alone. Soon the Communist Workers' Party of Italy (founded by Nicola di Bartolomeo, "Fosco") and revolutionary fractions from Mexico, Denmark, Yugoslavia, Greece and Germany will draw closer.
The end of the "communist left" stage
With the formal departure of the internationalists from the Fourth International and the defeat of the last revolutionary attempts of the proletariat at the close of the war (Greece, Vietnam), a new historical period opens.
On the programmatic level, the tasks and the historical phase as a "communist left", that is, as the left of a degenerating International, have come to an end. The essentials of the lessons of the counter-revolution have already been refined by the internationalists. But these are now reduced to a few groups whose impact on real struggles will be only occasional in the following decades.