Fourth International - Since Reunification

Since Reunification

Since the 1963 reunification, a number of approaches have developed within international Trotskyism towards the Fourth International.

• The reunified Fourth International is the only current with direct organisational continuity to the original Fourth International at an international level. The International Committee and International Secretariat reunified at the 1963 congress, but without the Socialist Labour League and Internationalist Communist Organisation. It is sometimes known as the United Secretariat of the Fourth International (USFI) after the name of its leading committee, although that committee was replaced in 2003. It is also the only current to have continuously presented itself as "the" Fourth International. It is the largest current and leaders of some other Trotskyist Internationals occasionally refer to it as "the Fourth International": ICFI secretary Gerry Healy, when proposing reunification discussions in the 1970s, described it as "the Fourth International"; the International Socialist Tendency also usually refers to it in this way.

• The International Committee of the Fourth International member groups customarily describe themselves as sections of the Fourth International, and the organisation as a whole describes itself as the "leadership of the Fourth International". However, the ICFI presents itself as the political continuity of the Fourth International and Trotskyism, not as the FI itself. It clearly dates its creation as 1953, rather than from 1938.

• Some tendencies argue that the Fourth International became dislocated politically during the years between Trotsky's murder and the establishment of the ICFI in 1953; they consequently work to "reconstruct", "reorganise" or "rebuild" it. This view originated with Lutte Ouvriere and the international Spartacist tendency and is shared by others who diverged from the ICFI. For example, the Committee for a Workers' International, whose founders dropped out of the reunified FI after 1965, call for a new "revolutionary Fourth International". Indeed, the Fourth International (ICR) reproclaimed the Fourth International at a congress attended by ICR sections in June 1993.

• Other Trotskyist groups argue that the Fourth International is dead. They call for the establishment of a new "workers' international" or a Fifth International.