Background
The ISFI was the leadership body of the Fourth International, established in 1938. In 1953 many prominent members of the International, and supported by the majority of the Austrian, British, Chinese, French, New Zealand and Swiss sections together with the U.S. Socialist Workers Party organized against the views of Michel Pablo, a central leader of the ISFI who successfully argued for the FI to adapt to the growth of the social democratic and communist parties. This led to disagreements between supporters of the ISFI and those parties on how to build revolutionary parties. These tensions developed into a split, leading to the suspension of those parties which had formed the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) late in November 1953.
Over the following ten years a majority of the two sides developed similar approaches to a number of major international problems: opposing Stalinism during the 1956 crises in Poland and Hungary, and supporting the Algerian War of Independence and the 1959 Cuban Revolution. At the same time, parties in the ISFI had retreated from Pablo's orientation to the communist parties. In 1960, the sections of the ICFI and ISFI reunited in Chile, India and Japan. In 1962, the political convergence between the majorities on both sides was strong enough for the ISFI and ICFI to establish a Parity Commission to prepare a joint World Congress. That congress aimed to reunify the Fourth International.
Some groups on both sides did not support the movement towards reunification. In the run-up to the 1961 congress of the ISFI the supporters of the Argentine Juan Posadas, a leader of the Latin American Secretariat, found themselves in agreement with the supporters of Michel Pablo in stressing the primacy of the anti-colonial revolution: the majority in the ISFI placed a greater emphasis on developing activity in Europe. However, Posadas and Pablo developed different reactions to the split in Stalinism: Posadas tended towards Mao Zedong, while Pablo was closer to Nikita Khrushchev and Josip Broz Tito.
A similar development happened on the ICFI side. By 1961 the ICFI had split politically, the Internationalist Communist Party (PCI) in France and the Socialist Labour League (SLL) in Britain arguing that a workers' state had not been created in Cuba, putting them at odds with the American SWP and the other organisations in the ICFI. By 1963, the split was also organizational. Each side held a congress at which it claimed to be the majority of the ICFI. On the one hand, the Austrian, Chinese and New Zealand sections met at a congress with the SWP and voted to take part in the reunification congress. On the other hand, Pierre Lambert's PCI and Gerry Healy's SLL called a "International Conference of Trotskyists" to continue the work of the ICFI under their own leadership.
Read more about this topic: Fourth International (post-reunification)
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