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Other documents in English
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Fifty years after the foundation of the Fourth International - What perspectives for internationalist revolutionaries today? Pamphlet published by the ICU
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winter 1988
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The militants of the other European Communist Parties
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When Mussolini's, Hitler's and Franco's booted thugs scattered the European revolutionary ant-hill, the damage was enormous. Yet
these dictatorships, brown or black, could not have killed the hope or the tradition. The failure of the leadership, leaving the
working-class movement disorientated, did far more damage.
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The nazi terror did not deter communist militants - the most resilient, the most convinced and the best prepared among them -
from trying to rebuild organisations locally. It did not prevent communist slogans from blossoming again on the walls, including
such slogans as Long live Trotsky, long live the Red Army in Berlin during Stalin's great purges. Nor did it prevent the
circulation of a whole range of underground opposition literature, most of which was communist. The activists sought to
re-invent what they needed. But what they lacked as dramatically as before was a policy - the policy which Stalin's Comintern,
by then politically dead, had for a long time already been unable to offer.
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All these fragile organisations which were brought back into activity were like ships without a rudder. In each country, in each
section of the Communist International, militants went against the storm, striving to put together their energies and skills so
that their ideal would not sink.
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In Mussolini's Italy, where the repression was less severe than in Hitler's Germany, communist militants maintained small local
underground organisations. They did it on the basis of what they considered a correct communist line. But after World War II,
the Moscow Stalinist apparatus rewarded them by calling them Bordigo-fascists or Bordigo-Trotskyists while urging the Italian
Communist Party into an alliance with the king in government.
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In Spain, despite Franco's victory, some militants remained undeterred and carried on uninterrupted political fight. Militants
like Quinones, a middle-rank party cadre of Russian and Romanian origin, who succeeded in setting up the first national
underground leadership of the Spanish Communist Party in April 1941. He had arrived in Spain in 1931 as an instructor sent by
the Communist International. Jailed for a period, after the defeat of the Republican troops he gained credit amongst other
militants thanks to his knowledge both of politics and underground work. He gathered around him an 'internal leadership of the
Spanish Communist Party' which started sending representatives to every region in order to regroup all the available forces.
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These communist militants were not Trotskyists. They were Stalinists. They knew nothing of the Fourth International. When they
did, they had only hate or contempt for it. But despite the political aberrations imposed on them by their leadership, they
remained communists to the core and militants of great value. Because there were tens of thousands of such militants, Trotsky
decided to launch a new International. He hoped that whatever their present feelings, their eyes would at some stage be opened
by the policies of the Stalinist bureaucracy which went from betrayal to catastrophy. Raising the political flag of a new
International was to prepare for this, providing these militants with a perspective to which they could turn.
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