Weekly Worker 628 Thursday June 8 2006 Subscribe to the Weekly Worker

Comintern and the Trotskyists

What sort of international does the workers’ movement need? Mike Macnair looks at the negative lessons of previous attempts

Summer Offensive 2006 No nonsense I have excellent news to report in this, the first of my weekly columns detailing the progress of this year’s Summer Offensive, the Communist Party’s annual fundraising drive. In the first seven days of the campaign, we have already received just under £3,210 towards our £30k minimum, with a number of comrades taking large chunks out of their individual targets. In particular, thanks go out to comrade PK, who has stumped up £700 - courtesy of a nicely timed rebate from the taxman. In addition, comrades MJ and MM have produced a sturdy £200 and £140 respectively, comrade AM has pushed her standing order contributions to the party up to £300 a month for the duration, comrade AD has given us £100 and PM £200, a no-nonsense start to his push for £1,000 by the end of July. The same comrade writes: “Last year I set myself a modest target initially - I was tight for cash and thought I would be stretched for both time and money. But I had a few good badge sales (the Make Poverty History event in Edinburgh and the SWP’s Marxism proved productive) and I also organised some extra classes where I teach. In the end I notched up just over £1,000. So this year I have decided to be more ambitious and set my target at £1k from the off. Again I am teaching once a week right through July and will use all the extra income for the SO.” (read full article) Click here to download a standing order form - regular income is particular important in order to plan ahead. Even £5/month can help! Send cheques, payable to Weekly Worker, BCM Box 928, London WC1N 3XX Donate online:

The idea that became the Communist International began, as we have already seen in the fifth article in this series, with the anti-war wing of the Second International and with Lenin’s and Zinoviev’s struggle within this left for an international split (Weekly Worker April 20). Comintern was able to emerge because of the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power in October 1917 and the survival of the revolutionary regime into 1919, when the 1st Congress of Comintern met.

The result was that Comintern had a double character. On the one hand, it was an international of the anti-war left, attempting to redeem the honour of socialism after the ignominious political collapse of the Second International. On the other, it was a fan club for the Russian Revolution and its leaders.

The fan-club aspect became more prominent with the defeat of the Hungarian and (especially) the German and Italian revolutionary movements. On the one hand, the Russians had the prestige of victory and the material resources of state power. On the other, the Germans had lost some of their most eminent leaders - and the westerners in general had failed where the Russians had succeeded. It was natural for Comintern in these circumstances to become a body that propagated the idea of the Russian Revolution as a universal model.

In international strategy, this had two aspects. The first was that defence of the Soviet regime was the central touchstone of the communist parties’ internationalism. The idea that it might be appropriate to admit the defeat of a proletarian socialist policy in the face of the defeat of the western revolutionary movements of 1919-20 and of peasant resistance in Russia, and carry out a controlled retreat to capitalism, was literally unthinkable to Comintern.

Whether such a retreat was a possible option is doubtful; but the inability of the communist parties to think it probably contributed to the fact that the degeneration of the Soviet regime into open tyranny brought the communist parties down with it. It also produced among the Trotskyists a bizarre body of competing theological dogmas about the Stalinist regime that provided ideology for the Trotskyists’ endless splits.

Back to separate national revolutions

The second aspect was a political retreat to the idea of a series of discrete national revolutions. This was a retreat in the first place because, as we saw in the fifth article, Lenin’s and Zinoviev’s policy of dual defeatism supposed a struggle by an organised international movement to bring down the belligerent states simultaneously.

It was a retreat secondly because it was quite clear to the Russian leadership that the proletariat could not hope to hold power in Russia for long - how long was uncertain - unless the western workers’ movement came to their aid. October 1917 was thus a gamble on the German revolution. By January 1918 this gamble had failed; it was only gradually that the possibility of ‘hanging on and waiting for the Germans’ for a year or two was transmuted into the idea of a prolonged period of isolation of the Soviet regime, and from there in turn into ‘socialism in one country’.

In the third place, Comintern at the outset and down to 1921 expected a generalised European civil war in the short term, and in the civil war and the 1920 invasion of Poland the Russian CP had been willing to ride roughshod over national self-determination to carry the arms of the Red Army to the borders of the former tsarist empire. In 1920 they hoped to carry them to the eastern border of Germany, ready to intervene if the German communists could provide the casus belli.¹  Only military defeat held them back here (and in Finland and the Baltic).

By 1921 this policy was effectively over. This fact was signalled both by the retreat in Russia represented by the New Economic Policy, and the turn to the struggle to ‘win the masses’ urged on the communist parties at the 3rd Congress.

‘Do what the Russians did’

The shift into a policy of separate national revolutions - even if these might turn out to be close together in time - carried with it an increased emphasis on copying the Russian Revolution. The struggle for soviets; intervention in the bourgeois parliaments; the struggle to win the trade unions; the worker-farmer alliance; ‘Bolshevising’ the organisational norms of communist parties; the united front; the workers’ government; the policy of the right of the self-determination of nations; and what became ‘transitional demands’. All these were justified primarily on the basis that they were validated by the victory of the Russian Revolution, and only secondarily (and sketchily) on more general, theoretical grounds. There was only one example of a successful revolution - Russia - and socialists everywhere had to learn from it.

If it were not for the immediate context of defeats in Hungary, Germany and Italy, and the general belief that revolutionary crisis and civil war were on the agenda in the immediate term in the west, this claim would have been utterly extraordinary. Russia was a country in which the proletariat was a small minority. Communications in the Russian countryside were highly patchy, and in many areas the technology in use in agriculture and the density of market towns was more comparable to the west European 12th century than to the 16th (let alone the early 20th).

Trade unions and political parties alike had existed in Russia before the revolution illegally and on a small scale. The German Reichstag had limited powers, but looked more or less like a French or Italian chamber of deputies; the Russian duma was far more limited. There was little reason to suppose that the tactics that had brought down the fragile and not very democratic regime of the 1917 provisional governments and the shallowly rooted Cadet, Menshevik and Socialist-Revolutionary parties would work on the far more deeply entrenched and experienced political parties of western Europe, the US or even Latin America.

Imitating the Russians was not utterly disastrous, as attempts to imitate the Maoists in more developed countries were in the 1960s and 1970s. This is attributable to the fact that most of what the Russians endeavoured to teach the Comintern in 1920-23 was in fact orthodox Kautskyism, which the Russians had learned from the German SPD. But there were exceptions. The worker-peasant alliance was utterly meaningless in the politics of the western communist parties before 1940, and after 1945 was a force for conservatism, as the European bourgeoisies turned to subsidising agriculture.

The ‘Bolshevisation’ of the communist parties, and the savage polemics against Kautsky and others over “classless democracy”, which became part of the common inheritance of ‘official communism’, Maoism and Trotskyism, deeply deformed these movements. In the end, the Bonapartist-centralised dictatorship of the party bureaucracy produced kleptocrats in the USSR and the countries that copied it. In the western communist parties and the trade unions associated with them, it produced ordinary labour bureaucrats with more power to quash dissent than the old socialist bureaucracy had had (a feature gratefully copied by the social democratic right). In the Trotskyist and Maoist groups, it produced petty patriarchs and tinpot dictators whose interests in holding onto their jobs and petty power were an effective obstacle to unity. It thus turned out to be in the interests of … the capitalist class.

Moreover, casting out “the renegade Kautsky” cut off the communists from the western European roots of their politics. Lenin and his co-thinkers’ transmission of the inheritance of the Second International into Russian politics became Lenin’s unique genius on the party question, feeding into the cult of the personality of Lenin (and its successors …). Perfectly ordinary western socialist political divisions, pre-existing the split in the Second International, had to be cast in Russian terms. Communists began to speak a language alien to their broader audiences, the language that has descended into today’s Trot-speak.

The ‘general staff of world revolution’

Trotsky described Comintern as the “political general staff of the world revolution”, and the phrase to some extent stuck.² 

The idea of a ‘general staff’ was, in fact, taken from the German imperial armed forces: the Prussian Grosser Generalstab had been the first such institution, and the imperial version had conducted the strategic planning that was put into effect in 1914. It carried with it a very centralised concept of command: the imperial general staff to a considerable extent micro-managed the particular fronts. In the latter part of World War I the imperial general staff headed by Hindeburg and Ludendorff became the effective government of Germany.

This background in Prussian military thought carried with it a willingness in Comintern’s leadership to micro-manage the national parties. At the very beginning of the Comintern, the Russians pressed their closest German co-thinkers for an early split with the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD), a decision the German leaders regretted. The ECCI had no hesitation in issuing instructions to the French Communist Party (PCF) about, for example, the composition of its leadership and the reorganisation of its Seine federation, and pressed the German Communist Party (KPD) in 1923 to make military preparations for an insurrection.³ 

Not wholly wrong

So far this point is familiar from the Eurocommunists’ and their followers’ attacks on Comintern and on Trotskyism. It is important, however, to be clear that the “general staff of world revolution” was not simply ‘wrong’.

If it had been the case that Europe was on the verge of generalised civil war, the creation of a European-wide military command structure capable of giving orders to the national movements would have been entirely justified. In war that is to go beyond guerrilla harassment of the enemy to take and hold territory, it is necessary to have a centralised command. It is also sometimes necessary for units to sacrifice themselves in diversionary attacks that will enable victory elsewhere (or, for that matter, in attacks that will lead to breakthroughs by attrition).

It might thus have been justified to wager the KPD on the possibility that a breakthrough in Germany would bring down the whole European state system. Trotsky certainly went on thinking so for the rest of his life, blaming the KPD leadership for fumbling the crises of 1923.

But still wrong in its time

There were two underlying problems. The first is that “war is the continuation of politics by other means” (Clausewitz). War is not reducible to politics, nor politics to war. Creating a top-down military command structure in the Russian Communist Party, Comintern and the other communist parties tended to eliminate or subordinate the local and sectoral mediations that link a workers’ party to its broader working class constituency and feed back on the centre the political ideas and mood current in this constituency. It thus reduced both the communist parties’ and the Comintern’s ability to form the political judgments that necessarily underlie decisions for military action.

Second, the communists were nowhere near having political majority support in Europe or even in Germany. The task of the communists once the revolutionary wave of 1919-20 had ebbed was - as Comintern recognised at the 3rd and 4th Congresses - to win a political majority. It was not to launch a civil war. A “general staff of world revolution” was therefore inappropriate.

… and bureaucratic degeneration

The military-centralist character of Comintern had the practical effect of making the leaderships of the communist parties dependent on the Comintern centre in Moscow. This took the form of material dependence in the case of the small communist parties - such as the CPGB - which received subsidies from Moscow, and equally in those parties that were illegal, so that the party leadership was located in Moscow.

But it was equally present in the stronger communist parties such as the KPD and PCF. The ‘democratic centralist’ character of Comintern - within the terms of the 1920-21 idea of ‘democratic centralism’ - had the effect that the leaders of these parties were answerable to and removable by the Comintern centre. They could not both be in this position and be answerable to and removable by their own membership.

The problem was accentuated by the fact that the relation to the Comintern centre in Moscow was necessarily clandestine. In the first place, if the KPD (or the CPGB) openly took orders from Moscow, prosecution could follow, all the more if (as in Germany in 1923) the orders were to prepare for and launch an insurrection. Second, because it was based in Moscow, the Comintern centre lacked the sort of legitimacy that had been possessed by the general council of the First International or by the congresses of the Second. It was all too easy to accuse it of being merely an instrument of the Russian state.

Clandestinity meant secrecy, and secrecy meant that the members had even less chance of holding the leaders to account than would have been the case if there had been open and transparent subordination of the leaderships of the communist parties to the international centre. There was no chance, in this regime, of the western communist parties resisting the development of open bureaucratic tyranny in the USSR and the accompanying degeneration of Comintern.

Vertical connections only

In 1919-20 there was a West European Bureau of the Comintern, based in Amsterdam. It turned out that the Left Communists had a majority, and their split brought it to an end. The bureau was overlapped with and was succeeded by an equally short-lived Western European Secretariat, based in Berlin, involving (at least) Radek and Levi. A Central European Secretariat was slightly more long-lasting.

The short life of these organisations reflected the fact that the military or Bonapartist character of the centralism of 1921 was counterposed to them. Horizontal connections between neighbouring parties, and sub-centres, would inevitably compromise the pure centralism of the international. There were to be the national parties and the international centre.

This structural form reinforced the idea of separate national revolutions. Formal horizontal collaboration might identify concrete common political features, or common tasks. The same would be true of intermediary levels of organisation, such as European (or, by analogy, Latin American, or Pan-African) conferences and leading committees. Within national parties such intermediary structures are common, although bureaucratic centralism tends to close them down or turn them into mere transmission belts for the centre. Channelling everything through Moscow had the effect, in contrast, that there could only be national tasks and global tasks - and global tasks were defined by the view from Moscow.

Trotsky’s call for the Fourth International

This background character of Comintern helps to explain the peculiar character of Trotsky’s decision in 1933 to denounce it as dead for the purposes of world revolution and call for a new, Fourth, international. The peculiarity of this decision is the fact that Trotsky denounced the Third International on the basis of events in a single country (Germany).

The First International had been founded on the explicit basis of the international tasks of the proletariat as a class; the Second, more indefinitely, on the basis of the international common character of the proletariat’s interests and struggles. The Third, at least formally, had been founded on the failure of the Second in World War I. To denounce the Comintern and call for a new international on the basis of a defeat in a single country was therefore something quite new - even if the country, Germany, had been the historical centre of the Second International and home to one of the strongest communist parties.

Trotsky seems to have imagined that the Comintern would be defined for ever by the disaster in Germany, as the Second International was defined for ever by August 1914. The choice to support the existing states in war did indeed turn out to be a permanent choice that defines Labourite and socialist parties to this day.

But 1933 was not comparable to August 1914. By 1935 the Comintern had abandoned the sectarian ‘third period’ politics that led to the disaster of 1933 and turned to the people’s front policy.⁴  In spite of a brief return to the ‘third period’ in the period of the Hitler-Stalin pact in 1939-41, the people’s front was to be the main strategic line of ‘official communism’ permanently (and still is today). The ‘third period’ and its role in the disaster in Germany has become a matter of interest to historians and Trotskyists.

The 1933 call for a Fourth International was therefore plainly premature. It was only with the people’s front turn, as the communists more and more plainly abandoned both working class political independence and criticism of the social democrats, that the Trotskyists’ project began to win broader support. Even then, the growth was limited: the ‘Fourth International’ founded in 1938 could account for about 7,500 organised militants worldwide.⁵ 

Part of the explanation for Trotsky’s premature call for the Fourth International is that - as can be seen from his writings in the 1930s - he had become fully convinced that Lenin was right and he was wrong between 1903 and 1917. He was therefore determined not to do anything that could amount to conciliationism or postponing the necessary struggle to create a new party and a new international.

Cominternism

There is, however, another and in some ways more fundamental aspect. Trotsky’s conception both of the International Left Opposition (ILO), formed in 1930, and of the projected Fourth International as a revival and continuation of the Comintern of 1919-23. The documents of the first four congresses of the Comintern were part of the ILO’s platform and of its successor, the International Communist League.

This unavoidably meant that the ILO, ICL and ‘Fourth International’ carried in their roots the ideas of a chain of national revolutions (starting, now, perhaps somewhere other than in Russia) and of an international whose tasks were mainly to create parties of the ‘Bolshevik type’ in every country. On the one hand, this meant that defeats and disasters in single countries formed the real basis of the critique of the Comintern - and of those, such as the Spanish POUM and French PSOP, with whom the Trotskyists broke on the road to the ‘Fourth International’.

On the other, the idea of tasks of the international as such in constructing international unity of the working class in action had no strategic ground in the Trotskyists’ ideas. A tiny group, of course, could do little practical along these lines. But the ‘Fourth International’ was bound to appear as a micro-miniature Comintern with a leftist version of Comintern strategy.

The ‘Fourth International’ also inherited from the Third the utter centrality to its identity and programme of the defence of the Russian Revolution and hence of the USSR in wars with capitalist states. In 1939-40 this position was to split it down the middle over the Russo-Finnish war and the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland, with Trotsky insisting that the minority (in the US and elsewhere) should not have the right to express its views in public. The minority took a third of the membership of the US Socialist Workers Party, the largest group represented at the 1938 congress, and half the ‘international executive committee’ elected at that congress.

Bureaucratic centralism

The refusal to accept public factions in 1940 was in contradiction with the Trotskyists’ own history. The Trotskyist movement had originated in the 1920s as an illegal public faction of the Russian Communist Party and the ILO launched in 1930 had been an illegal public faction of Comintern. The Russian oppositions, indeed, had had as part of their core politics a critique of bureaucratism, albeit one that was cautious and imperfectly articulate.

Part of this critique survived in the culture Trotsky sought to create in the ILO and ICL. The 1933 resolution, ‘The International Left Opposition, its tasks and methods’, said that: “The foundation of party democracy is timely and complete information, available to all members of the organisation and covering all the important questions of their life and struggle. Discipline can be built up only on a conscious assimilation of the policies of the organisation by all its members and on confidence in the leadership. Such confidence can be won only gradually, in the course of common struggle and reciprocal influence …

“The frequent practical objections, based on the ‘loss of time’ in abiding by democratic methods, amount to short-sighted opportunism. The education and consolidation of the organisation is a most important task. Neither time nor effort should be spared for its fulfilment. Moreover, party democracy, as the only conceivable guarantee against unprincipled conflicts and unmotivated splits, in the last analysis does not increase the overhead costs of development, but reduces them. Only through constant and conscientious adherence to the methods of democracy can the leadership undertake important steps on its own responsibility in truly emergency cases without provoking disorganisation or dissatisfaction.”⁶ 

These statements are a standing rebuke to the post-war Trotskyists.

The aspirations of the 1933 resolution were at least partly reflected in the conduct of the international secretariats of the ILO and ICL and in Trotsky’s correspondence. The secretariats were willing to accept partial splits and public fights in the sections, and Trotsky urged the creation of horizontal relations between the sections (ie, that their debates should be carried into the other sections) as well as vertical section-secretariat relations.

However, Trotsky’s response to the 1939-40 minority that rejected Soviet-defencism was bureaucratic centralist, and it drew on the idea of splits as purging and proletarianising the movement that had been initiated in the split in the Second International, as we saw in the sixth article in this series (Weekly Worker April 27). Trotsky was assassinated in 1940. His writings on the US 1939-40 split thus left, as his last legacy to the post-war Trotskyists, bureaucratic centralism and the idea of the ‘proletarianising’ and ‘purging’ split.

Two, three, many internationals

In the world between the opening of the cold war in 1948, and the beginning of the open political crisis of the USSR in the 1980s, ‘official communism’ appeared to be a strategic way forward for the global working class, and apolitical trade unionism and social democratic coalitionism appeared to be a strategic way forward for the working class in the imperialist countries.

Although Comintern had been wound up in 1943, the ‘official communists’ had a form of international, the Cominform: the CPSU had discovered that a ‘consultative’ international secured freedom from accountability as effectively as an open bureaucratic dictatorship and with fewer overhead costs.

This situation posed to the Trotskyists the question: what was their international for? In 1953, they split between the ‘Pabloite’ advocates of a tactic of large-scale fraction work in the communist parties, and their ‘anti-Pabloite’ opponents, who insisted on building parties organisationally separate from the ‘official communists’ among the milieux of the French socialists, British Bevanites and Rooseveltian Democrat trade unionists.

The split was characterised by bureaucratic centralism on both sides, as first the international executive committee expelled the majority of the French section, and then the US SWP and British section expelled minorities in their organisations that supported the ‘Pabloite’ international majority.

The minority formed an ‘international committee’, but turned out to be unable to produce anything more than occasional liaison meetings between the French, British and US full-timers. In due course the national components went their separate ways, with the usual round of expulsions. Each created an openly bureaucratic centralist ‘Trotintern’, or a formally ‘consultative’ ‘Trotinform’, with its own party in the role of the CPSU.

This was the legacy of Comintern’s ‘chain of revolutions’ idea and the ‘leading role’ in Comintern of the ‘most advanced’ party, with the American , British and French each imagining that they were the ‘most advanced’.

The ‘Pabloites’ (after 1960, the Mandelites) did a little better: they preserved the forms of an international organisation with centre, leadership, international congresses and press, and a degree of internal democracy in their organisation. In the early 1970s, they even began to develop continental perspectives and centres and horizontal relations between sections. But if you asked them what their international was for, the only answer they could give was to be a “centre where the international experiences of the mass movement and of the revolution are progressively assimilated”.⁷ 

At the end of the day this is to say no more than the Fourth International must exist because it must. Their international had become the Mandelites’ sectarian shibboleth, which distinguished them from their Trotskyist competitors in individual countries.

The insistence of the Mandelites that no-one could be a Trotskyist without the Fourth International pressed the national groups (even quite large ones such as the French Lutte Ouvrière, British Militant and SWP) to create their own. The 1953 split and - all the more - the 1971 split between the British and French anti-Pabloites had the effect of legitimising multiple ‘internationals’ among Trotskyists. At this point we have arrived at today’s world of Trotskyist sect ‘internationals’, although the full baroque elaboration was not to arrive until the 1980s.

The ‘Trotinforms’ are, like the Cominform, just as much creatures of bureaucratic centralism as Comintern and the ‘Fourth International’ in its most centralist period. For example, the British SWP’s International Socialist Tendency is not formally ‘democratic centralist’ (ie, bureaucratic-centralist), but this ‘tendency’ can nonetheless expel the US International Socialist Organization for … supporting a minority faction in Greece.⁸ 

Fight for an international

The need for an international is posed because the working class has concrete, immediate, practical international tasks. These are tasks of class solidarity - because the bourgeoisie uses national divisions in the working class to defeat strikes, etc. They are also tasks of formulating an independent class perspective on world affairs. These were the lessons of the First International.

The need for an international is also posed because the working class can only really understand its own strength and become conscious as a class for itself as an international class. This was the lesson of the symbolic role of the Second International.

In the third place, the need for an international is posed because the working class cannot take power in a single country and wait for the proletariat of other countries to come to its aid. This is the fundamental lesson of the degeneration and collapse of Comintern and the eventual fall of the ‘socialist countries’. It was a lesson that was not learned by the Trotskyists.

The strategic task that this lesson poses for an international is an internationally united struggle of the working class for political power.

It should be apparent that the objective political conditions do not yet exist for such a struggle. But they do exist for continental united struggles for political power, which fight for continental unification: a Communist Party of Europe, a Pan-African Communist Party, and so on. A dynamic towards the continental unification of politics is already visible in bourgeois politics, not just in Europe, and in the Latin American ‘Bolivarians’. It is even present in an utterly deformed and reactionary manner in the islamist movement in the Middle East.

Comintern was not sterilised by the decision to split from the social democrats. It was sterilised by bureaucratic centralism, the idea of a chain of national revolutions and the Comintern as a fan club for the Russians. Its failure was about the inability of Comintern to think of international tasks except either as immediate civil war, which called for a general staff, or making the national communist parties copy the Russians as the road to victory in a single country.

The Trotskyists’ 1933 call for a new international was premature. But it was not this premature split that turned their project into a swarm of malignant international sects. Rather it was their too great faithfulness to the ideas of the early Comintern, which committed them to the same bureaucratic centralism and the same idea of a chain of national revolutions. This in turn produced the ‘anti-Pabloite’ ‘Trotinterns’ and ‘Trotinforms’ on the one hand, and the Mandelite empty form of an international without political tasks on the other.

The struggle for an international is a present, concrete task of communists. It is clear, however, that this struggle cannot be carried on by creating yet another micro-‘international’. It has to be carried on by fighting, on every occasion that allows, against bureaucratic centralism and the nationalism that goes hand in hand with it, and for the concrete tasks of an international: the global struggle for solidarity in the immediate class struggle, for the symbolic unity of the working class as an international class; and the continental struggle for working class political unification and political power.

Notes

1. The speech by Lenin on Poland and article by Tukhachevsky on the Red Army provide clear illustrations. See Al Richardson (ed) In defence of the Russian Revolution book 4.

2. ‘Speech at the ceremonial meeting in the military academy of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army devoted to the fourth anniversary of the academy, December 7 1922’, www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1922-mil/ch15.htm.

3. For several items on France, see L Trotsky First five years of the Communist International www.marxists.org.uk/archive/trotsky/works/1924/ffyci-2/index.htm. On Germany, L Trotsky The Third International after Lenin www.marxists.org.uk/archive/trotsky/works/1928-3rd/ti04.htm#b3. Jones, ‘German communist history’ letter What Next No4, www.whatnextjournal.co.uk, reports the claim of KPD leader Brandler that detailed timetables for a German insurrection were settled in Moscow, and confirms it from work in Russian archives published by historians in the 1990s.

4. Discussion in Weekly Worker March 31 2005. On the historical details of the turn, Haslam Historical Journal Vol 22, pp673-691 is illuminating.

5. Minutes of the founding congress, in Documents of the Fourth International (1973), p289. The figures are probably an underestimate, since the list shows several organisations for which the secretariat did not have figures. However, it is most unlikely that the real numbers were much above 15,000 worldwide.

6. Documents of the Fourth International p29.

7. Mandel in ‘Ten theses’ (1951) in Towards a history of the Fourth International Vol 4, part 4; variant forms have been consistently repeated by the Mandelites down to the present day.

8. Weekly Worker October 9 2003.

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