Fourth International - From The Fourth World Congress To Reunification

From The Fourth World Congress To Reunification

Over the following decade, the IC referred to the rest of the International as the "International Secretariat of the Fourth International", emphasising its view that the Secretariat did not speak for the International as a whole. The Secretariat continued to view itself as the leadership of the International. It held a Fourth World Congress in 1954 to regroup and to recognise reorganised sections in Britain, France and the U.S.

Parts of the International Committee were divided over whether the split with "Pabloism" was permanent or temporary, and it was perhaps as a result of this that it did not declare itself to be the Fourth International. Those sections that considered the split permanent embarked on a discussion about the history of the split and its meanings.

The sections of the International that recognised the leadership of the International Secretariat remained optimistic about the possibilities for increasing the International's political influence and extended the entrism into social democratic parties which was already underway in Britain, Austria and elsewhere. The 1954 congress emphasised entrism into communist parties and nationalist parties in the colonies, pressing for democratic reforms, ostensibly to encourage the left-wing they perceived to exist in the communist parties to join with them in a revolution. Tensions developed between the mainstream around Pablo and a minority that argued unsuccessfully against open work. A number of these delegates walked out of the World Congress, and would eventually leave the International, including the leader of the new British section, John Lawrence, George Clarke, Michele Mestre (a leader of the French section), and Murray Dowson (a leader of the Canadian group).

The Secretariat organised a Fifth World Congress in October 1957. Mandel and Pierre Frank appraised the Algerian revolution and surmised that it was essential to reorient in the colonial states and neocolonies towards the emerging guerrilla-led revolutions. According to Robert Alexander, Ernest Mandel has written that an organisation in Indonesia, the Partai Acoma, was affiliate to the FI from 1959 until the 1965 coup in that country.

The Sixth World Congress in 1961 marked a lessening of the political divisions between the majority of supporters of the International Secretariat and the leadership of the SWP in the United States. In particular, the congress stressed support for the Cuban revolution and a growing emphasis on building parties in the imperialist countries. The sixth congress also criticised the Lanka Sama Samaja Party, its Sri Lankan section, for seeming to support the Sri Lanka Freedom Party, which they saw as bourgeois nationalists; the U.S. SWP made similar criticisms.

In 1962 the IC and IS formed a Parity Commission to organise a common World Congress. The supporters of Michel Pablo and Juan Posadas opposed the convergence. The supporters of Posadas left the International in 1962. At the 1963 reunification congress, the sections of the IC and IS reunified (with two exceptions: the British and French sections of the IC). This was largely a result of their mutual support for Ernest Mandel and Joseph Hansen's resolution Dynamics of World Revolution Today and for the Cuban Revolution. This document distinguished between different revolutionary tasks in the imperialist countries, the "workers' states", and the colonial and semi-colonial countries. In 1963, the reunified Fourth International elected a United Secretariat of the Fourth International (USFI), by which name the organisation as a whole is often still referred.