In the years 1933-35 Trotsky advised his supporters to use various tactics to get as close as possible to the workers radicalised by the impact of Hitler’s victory in Germany in 1933.

First the Trotskyists of the International Communist League tried to unite with the left centrist parties that had emerged in the political space between the Stalinist Communist International (Comintern) and the old Second International of socialist parties. The “Declaration of the Four”, signed with three of these parties had limited results, succeeding only in Holland and the United States.

In France the struggle for a new International urgently required entry into the French Socialist Party the SFIO. In the USA it led to a fusion by the Communist League of America (the ICL section) with the American Workers Party, led by A J Muste. The resultant Workers Party of the USA that year played a magnificent role in the Minneapolis teamsters’ strikes, giving the US Trotskyists a solid base in the working class. In Britain it led to an entry into the Independent Labour Party.

Trotsky endorsed the variety of all these attempts but at the same time he stressed the underlying unity of principle and purpose – the founding of new revolutionary parties and a new International:

“...on whatever arena, and whatever the methods of functioning, [the Trotskyists] are bound to speak in the name of unqualified principles and clear revolutionary slogans. They do not play hide-and-seek with the working class; they do not conceal their aims; they do not substitute diplomacy and combinations for a principled struggle. Marxists at all times and under all conditions openly say what is.”

During 1935-38 the adoption by the Comintern of the strategy of the Popular Front, first in France and then in Spain drew the Trotskyists into a new field of battle. It was a highly dangerous one too since the new tactic was realised as a bloc between the two mass Internationals which necessarily pitted them against the movement for a new Fourth International. The Stalinists and social democrats systematically channelled the last pre-war upsurge of the class struggle, which in France and Spain at least reached objectively revolutionary proportions, into compromise with the bourgeoisie and ultimately betrayal.

France

The roots of the Popular Front strategy lay in Stalin’s desperate search for an alliance with French imperialism against a re-arming Nazi Germany. In the sphere of diplomacy this led, in 1934 to the Franco-Soviet Pact.

Maurice Thorez, the Communist Party leader, claimed that it was neglect of the “middle-classes” which had enabled Hitler to come to power. This meant that the Radical Party – the largest bourgeois party in France – had to be drawn into Popular Front committees.

The enormous impact of the Franco-Soviet pact for working class strategy soon became clear. Stalin announced that he had “complete understanding and approval of the national defence policy pursued by France with the object of maintaining its armed forces at a level consistent with its security requirements”.

L’Humanité hailed this with the headline “Stalin is right!” Out went the Leninist policy of revolutionary defeatism in an imperialist country – a policy on which the party and the Communist International had been founded. All that was needed was for a state to be an ally of the USSR for social patriotism to be the correct policy for communists there. In France the CP dropped its campaign against conscription and its call for independence for the colonies was replaced by calls for “colonial reform”.

Trotsky characterised Stalin’s and the French CP’s support of Laval’s rearmament programme as a critical moment in post war working class history: “Stalin has signed the death certificate of the Third International. For the first time Stalin has openly said what is: i.e. in full view of the entire world, he has repudiated revolutionary internationalism and passed over to the platform of social patriotism.”

In August 1935 the 7th Congress of the Comintern endorsed and generalised the “broad anti-fascist Popular Front”. The programme of the French Popular Front appeared in January 1936. It made no promise to nationalise anything except the war industries, promised no legal rights for workers who suffered a veritable tyranny within the workplace. Even the loudly touted disarmament of the fascist bands took the form of a dissolution of all para-military organisations and thus of workers defence guards and thus renounced the arming of the proletariat.

The elections were completed on 3 May 1936. The results were a stunning victory for the Popular Front. A wave of strikes broke out. By 10 June over two million workers were on strike, many of them using the new tactic of the sit-in. Blum did all he could to settle the strikes and get the workers back to work. He conceded trade union recognition, collective agreements, freely elected workers committees in the factories, paid holidays, a 10-15 per cent hike in wages, compulsory arbitration. This wave of major reforms- never before seen in France – passed through the parliament with the speed of an express train.

The CP, the SFIO and the trade union federation, the CGT, now threw all their weight on the brakes to bring the movement to an end. Thorez exclaimed: “To seize power now is out of the question!”. The strike movement must be limited to the “satisfaction of demands of an economic character.” He uttered the immortal words: “It is necessary to know how to end a strike”.

The immediate result, as well as the wage increases, the paid holidays etc. was a massive increase in the membership of the unions. The CGT with around one million members before the strikes, saw its membership rise to 2,500,000 by mid-June 1936. It was to double again within six to eight months.

Only one small grouping offered a revolutionary perspective for the French working class. the Parti Ouvrier Internationaliste, the section of the International Communist League. Its weekly paper Lutte Ouvnere contained an article by Trotsky headlined, “The French Revolution Has Begun!” Trotsky scathingly attacked the CP and the CGT line that only economic and sectional strikes were needed. Trotsky’s estimation was that: “This is the open rallying of the oppressed against the oppressors. This is the classic beginning of revolution.”

A further wave of struggles came in 1938. But this time it was to end in defeat for the workers. For two years the bourgeoisie shifted the Popular Front ever more to the right, embroiling it in attacking those sections of workers who demanded “too much”. Through the mechanism of the Radical Party’s manoeuvrings in parliament, they eventually ousted Blum as premier and put Daladier back in power, finally dumping the Popular Front altogether. At every step the combined policies of the Communists and Socialists paralysed any fightback by the workers.

What had been gained by breaking the great upsurges of the working class in 1936 and in 1938? What became of the “immediate and palpable gains” to which the possibility of revolution had been sacrificed? Peace? But war was to come nine or 10 months after the workers’ defeat.

The defence of the Republic and democracy? After the French military disaster of 1940 Marshall Petain installed a bonapartist dictatorship in the southern part of the country while the Gestapo controlled the north.

The defence of the Soviet Union? In 1941 Hitler was to launch an onslaught that caught Stalin and his gang totally by surprise and resulted in the deaths of 20 million Soviet workers and peasants.

The Spanish Republic? Franco smashed it in March 1939. The wheel had come full circle since June 1936. Everything was lost.

Yet in the name of these objectives and via the Popular Front strategy the workers were poisoned with chauvinism. The way was prepared for the “democratic imperialisms”, France and Britain, to lead the masses into another barbarous world war.

Spain

The leading figure in the Spanish Left Opposition had been Andreu Nin. One of the founders of the Communist party, Nin had fully backed Trotsky in his struggle with Stalin in the 1920s. With great authority in the international and Spanish working class movement, a name known to millions, Nin could have played a crucial role in the Spanish revolution.

Yet before the outbreak of the civil war in 1936, Trotsky had already broken with Nin after he led the small forces of Spanish Trotskyism into a fusion with a party called the Workers’ and Peasants’ Bloc, led by Maurin. This was a centrist party, which had supported the pro-Bukharin Right Opposition in Russia and internationally.

The fusion created a new party, the POUM (Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification). The POUM was certainly hostile to Stalinism, and declared that the war against Franco and the social revolution were inseparable.

Yet the POUM did not have a clear revolutionary programme for the Spanish working class. It confusingly talked of a “democratic socialist revolution”. It was totally unclear as to whether it was necessary to fight for a workers’ and peasants’ government and the dictatorship of the proletariat. Therefore its attitude to the Spanish Popular Front government installed in 1936 was equivocal in the extreme.

In the first weeks of the civil war the POUM showed great bravery, taking a lead in the land and factory seizures, and playing an important role in the arming of the working class. Their membership rose from 8,000 to over 35,000 in the first months of the civil war, and the party recruited over 10,000 members of the workers’ militias.

With a correct policy, the POUM could have used this mass influence to fight for the spontaneously formed revolutionary committees and workers’ parties and unions to build councils of workers’ delegates – like the soviets in Russia in 1917. These could have become an alternative centre of power to that of the Popular Front government in Madrid. Providing a revolutionary party acted within these councils, the civil war in defence of the workers democratic rights could have grown over into a socialist revolution.

But the POUM’s confused politics – typical of centrism – left them unable to take advantage of this exceptional situation. On 7 September 1936 Nin made a speech to thousands of workers in Barcelona. When he correctly called for the capitalist ministers to resign from the Popular Front the crowd went wild with enthusiasm.

But then Nin himself joined the government of Catalonia. The POUM changed their tune, and declared that they would “leave the question open” as to whether capitalist parties should be allowed in the government (i.e. they would not oppose this). They in practice endorsed the local version of the Popular Front. Worse still, instead of using the POUM’s influence in the revolutionary committee in the district of Lerida to build workers’ councils, the POUM went on to call for “an authentic government of the Popular Front”, and actually helped the government to demobilise the committee.

This confusion on the real nature of the Popular Front was built in to the POUM’s ideas at the time of the fusion with Maurin. Trotsky’s handful of supporters in Spain warned that taking part in the government and failing to fight for workers’ councils would mean that the POUM would miss the opportunities that existed for leading the revolution to victory.

Small forces committed to a revolutionary policy did emerge from expulsions and splits from the POUM – the Bolshevik-Leninists of Spain. But they were to have little time to put the programme of Lenin and Trotsky into practice. For events were moving to a decisive showdown between the working class and the Popular Front government.

In Barcelona the anarchist trade union CNT, together with the POUM and many rank and file supporters of the socialists, occupied and ran many key industries and buildings. When the Communist Party organised a counter-attack to remove workers from the telephone exchange socialists called on their union members to stop fighting and to take down their barricades. Then the anarchist CNT leaders did the same.

Anarchist workers, outraged, tore up their CNT cards and newspapers in disgust. But the POUM leaders, still clinging to the popular front, refused to criticise the CNT leaders and appeal to them to form a common front against the government. Then the POUM itself abandoned the barricades under instruction from its leaders, even whilst the fighting was still going on.

Although the Spanish Bolshevik-Leninists fought for a revolutionary response to the government’s attack on the workers of Barcelona the revolutionary forces were too small and isolated to turn the tide.

The price was the crushing of the left. Stalinist police, trained and led by agents of the Soviet secret police, hunted down, tortured and killed hundreds of revolutionary fighters. The CNT and the POUM were banned. Nin himself was arrested and taken away to a Stalinist prison. Despite torture, he refused to sign a forced confession that would have led hundreds more to the cells and an early grave. Instead he died a hero’s death. But his tragic end could have been different. With a correct strategy he could have led the POUM and the Spanish working class to power.

The programme and perspectives of Trotsky and his supporters had been proven not to be “sectarian” at all but rather the distillation of the vital lessons of the Russian revolution. Trotsky had been proved right once again to insist on building the Fourth International only on the basis of real agreement on programme.

The Moscow trials

In August 1936 first of three waves of show trials and mass purges took place in Moscow. The principal defendants were absent – Trotsky and his son Leon Sedov. In the USSR mass arrests of former oppositionists began. The conditions of those who had not capitulated and who were in the state labour camps and “isolators” (the Gulag), worsened, provoking them to heroic hunger strikes (132 days in Vorkuta) Thousands of Trotskyists were shot in the prison camps of the USSR towards the end of 1937 and in 1938.

In the three Moscow trials between 1936-38 Stalin’s aim was quite simply the liquidation of anyone who might act as an alternative leadership in the event of a major crisis caused by the war which was already looming on the horizon. Trotsky responded by encouraging the setting up of a Commission, made up largely of left liberal and socialist intellectuals. It was headed by John Dewey, the bourgeois philosopher and educationalist in the United States. They visited Mexico, where Trotsky was now exiled, and meticulously investigated the charges against Trotsky made in the Moscow trials of 1936-37. It delivered a not-guilty verdict for Trotsky and Sedov as well as the other victims.

The founding of the Fourth International

Events in France and Spain had shown beyond doubt the counter-revolutionary consequences of the Popular Front strategy. In each successive crisis the bankruptcy of the Second and Third Internationals had been revealed. A new world war was approaching, made possible by the defeats suffered by the workers in France, Spain and other countries and above all by the fact that both the Internationals had proclaimed in advance of the fighting that they would support the “democratic” imperialist powers. It was urgent not only to continue to rally the small forces of revolutionaries but to found a Fourth International as a banner of resistance in the coming war.

In discussions between Trotsky and the leaders of the Socialist Workers Party of the USA agreement was reached that the forthcoming world conference of the Bolshevik-Leninists in 1938 should actually found the Fourth International. In the view of James P Cannon – leader of the SWP (US), “the main elements of the Fourth International are by now crystallised.”

Trotsky agreed: “This International will become strong by our own action, not by manoeuvres with other groups. Naturally we can attract other intermediary groups, but that would be incidental. The general line is our own development. We had a test in Spain for all these intermediary organisations – the POUM was the most important part of the London Bureau and the same POUM proved to be most disastrous for the Spanish revolution.”

These intermediate groups were, in Trotsky’s words, “only an obstacle – a petrified centrism without masses.” In the approaching war revolutionaries needed to be bound together by a common programme and discipline in order to survive the enormous political pressures and proclaim their revolutionary message to the whole world.

Critics of Trotsky, from his first biographer Isaac Deutscher to Tony Cliff, founder of the British SWP, have argued that the founding of the Fourth International was a big mistake, a step too far. They pointed to the foundation of Second and Third Internationals, as mass organisations, and claim that the small forces of Trotskyism were simply too weak to set up a real world party of social revolution. Instead, they argued that strong national parties should been built first: only then could an international be founded.

This argument ignores the most important lessons of the 1930s. A party that grows up only on one national terrain will inevitably adapt to the pressures and prejudices that are most widespread in that country. The POUM, for example, thought that there was something special about Spain that made the fight for workers’ councils unnecessary. The French Trotskyists had first resisted any idea of entering the SFIO, then wanted to stay in it long term. Only the existence of an international organisation, presided over by Trotsky, kept these small group of revolutionaries on course.

The best possible way to resist these pressures is for each party to conduct its work not in isolation, but as an integral part of a democratic centralist international movement, one in which every national section is bound by the same discipline as a local branch would be within a national organisation.

So on 3 September 1938, 30 delegates from 11 countries gathered in the home of the veteran revolutionary Alfred Rosmer, just outside Paris, to adopt a new international programme and to formally found the Fourth International. Only the US section had a membership of around two thousand. A handful of others France, Belgium, Indochina, Poland, etc. a few hundreds and most of the others in dozens. Security considerations necessitated that the conference lasted only one day. At the same time, delegates from nine different countries founded a Youth International in sympathy with the Fourth International.

But the key achievement of the foundation conference was undoubtedly the Death Agony of Capitalism and the tasks of the Fourth International – what became known as the Transitional Programme. It did not claim to be the complete and final programme of the International, dealing with the entire epoch through to the establishment of a world classless society. It did not describe in detail the concrete tactics and tasks of the social revolution itself. Other documents of the FI and its predecessors the International Left Opposition, the International Communist League and the Movement for the Fourth International, had dealt with some of these issues. It was in a sense a world action programme for the years of war and revolution which lay immediately ahead.

Its central axis was presenting the immediacy of the social revolution in every partial and immediate struggle and attempting by posing the key demands, the correct tactics, the best forms of organisation so that the masses could pass on to an assault on the power of the capitalists. Thus workers’ councils, the workers’ militia, were presented not simply as the political and military forms of a future workers’ state, but as objectives to aid and take forward existing struggles. Likewise the “sliding scale of wages and hours” addressed the problem of mass unemployment and suggested the division of the total work needed by society by those available to do it. This demand was the only really reasonable response to millions on the dole. At the same time it was the basic principle of a socialist society, of a planned economy. This is what the concept of transitional demands, and a programme dominated by such demands, meant. Thus the programme stated:

“The strategic task of the next period – a pre-revolutionary period of agitation, propaganda and organization – consists in overcoming the contradiction between the maturity of the objective revolutionary conditions and the immaturity of the proletariat and its vanguard (the confusion and disappointment of the older generation, the inexperience of the younger generation). It is necessary to help the masses in the process of the daily struggle to find the bridge between present demands and the socialist program of the revolution. This bridge should include a system of transitional demands, stemming from today’s conditions and from today’s consciousness of wide layers of the working class and unalterably leading to one final conclusion: the conquest of power by the proletariat.”

It went on to point out that this was not a question of abandoning the struggle for “minimum” demands- i.e., reforms, ones that in themselves do not require the overthrow of capitalist private property or the bourgeois state, such as wage rises, social welfare, democratic rights. The programme makes it clear that the Fourth International “indefatigably defends the democratic rights and social conquests of the workers.”

But it does not restrict itself to such demands because in the present epoch every serious mass struggle, if it is not sold out before it gets underway, poses the question: who rules the economy and the state? This programme is thus aimed an enabling workers still under the influence of reformism, either in its old social democratic form or its new Stalinist variant, to find the road to revolution and to a new leadership. In short, it exists to help resolve what the programme calls the crisis of leadership in the world workers’ movement.

But the mighty machine of murder Stalin had forged and was closing in on Trotsky. In March 1939 Stalin is reported as ordering Beria the new head of the Stalinist secret police, the NKVD, “Trotsky should be eliminated within a year”. On 20 August 1940 this was finally done.