International Committee of The Fourth International - 1953 To 1963

1953 To 1963

In the eyes of the ICFI, Pabloite liquidationism meant permanent dissolution into the Communist Party in every country. After the ICFI withdrew from the FI in 1953, many sections of the ISFI entered communist parties. However, it later became clear that the sections of the ISFI did not dissolve, or enter permanently. Nevertheless, the ISFI's political trajectory led its sections to mistakes as well as, in one case, participation in bourgeois governments when the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) entered the government of Ceylon and was expelled from the International. The ICFI sees similar pressures at work now: describing as "Pabloites" those former Trotskysists who today are enforcing IMF dictates in Brazil as members of the Lula government.

Some sections of the ICFI have practiced temporary entryist policies, but continually emphasized to their membership that this was a short-term move. They maintained, however, the principle that only the Fourth International, as a consciously Marxist organization of the working class can lead the world revolution.

The SWP, partly because of McCarthyism and politically repressive laws, found it hard to cooperate on a world scale in a democratic centralist International. The first conference could not take place until 1958, and the SWP officially only acted as observers at the event, being prevented from affiliating to the ICFI by US law.

As early as the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, the leadership of the American SWP was beginning to show signs of convergence with the developing political line of the organisations grouped in the ISFI. The disappearance of the Socialist Union, the American affiliate of the ISFI, removed one such barrier to a political reunion. Ever greater agreement with regard to the Algerian War of Independence, and the Cuban Revolution of 1959 also brought the SWP and the ISFI closer together. In 1960, the Indian and Japanese sections of the IC reunified with the ISFI sections. Meanwhile, inside the ISFI, Pablo had lost much of his political influence, removing yet another barrier to reunification. In 1962, the ICFI and ISFI formed a Parity Committee to organise a World Congress of the two factions.

ISFI and the leadership of SWP revised the basic Trotskyist principle that only a conscious Marxist leadership can ensure a successful socialist revolution. Instead they argued that "unconscious Trotskyists" would come to power in colonized countries as well as within the Stalinist bureaucracies. It was no longer necessary to build a mass Trotskyist party. Anyone who opposed these conceptions was silenced or expelled, breaking with the basic Leninist principle of inner-party democracy.

In 1963 the SWP and the smaller Austrian, Canadian, Chinese and New Zealand sections of the ICFI agreed to reunite with the ISFI at the World Congress, to form the United Secretariat of the Fourth International.

This was immediately opposed by the Revolutionary Tendency of the SWP, and by the SLL in Britain and the PCI in France, as well as many orthodox Trotskyists throughout the world. Those currents still valued the political lessons learned from the 1953 split. They saw the SWP's decision as an abandonment of the most basic principles of the Fourth International, and of Trotskyism, and as an attempt to ingratiate itself to the growing middle class protest movement in the United States.

The RT, SLL and PCI argued that the anti-war movement in the US contained the same types of people the Pabloites had sought to attract during the mass exodus of people from the Stalinist Parties after the revelations of Stalin's atrocities in the 1950s. They called this "opportunism" because it represented what they saw as a revision of Marxism for the sake of attracting new members from the radicalizing middle class.