Documents of the Fourth International: The Formative Years, 1933-40 - Softcover

9780873483001: Documents of the Fourth International: The Formative Years, 1933-40

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0873483006 ISBN 13: 9780873483001

Publisher: Pathfinder Press Inc.,N.Y., 1973

"The tumultuous decade of the 1930s saw the Great Depression, Hitler's rise to power, the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, Japan's invasion of China, the French Popular Front, the Spanish Civil War, the Moscow Trials and Soviet purges, and the outbreak of World War II. These events transformed the fabric of political life on a global scale and tested the capacities of all political movements. In the face of these events, the Second (Second Democratic) International and the Third (Communist) International proved incapable of developing an adequate analysis and policy. That task fell to the international Trotskyist movement The International Left Opposition, under Trotsky's leadership, began as a left faction of the Third International. In 1933, however, when the German Communist Party capitulated to Hitler without a struggle, the Left Opposition broke with the Third International and began to lay the framework for the organization of the Fourth International. Between 1933 and 1940 the Left Opposition and its successors held four international conferences to assess Stalinism and other world political developments and to coordinate activity on an international scale. The analyses developed by these conferences were incorporated into the fundamental program and outlook of the Fourth International. This volume contains the documents adopted by these four international conferences, as well as selected additional documents issued between 1933 and 1935 and the minutes of the 1938 founding conference of the Fourth International. Many of them have never before been printed in English outside of the internal bulletin of the Fourth International and its sections. They are a basic source for tracing the development of the positions of Stalin's left-wing opponents."

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