(Note: The title of this blog should not be misunderstood as suggesting that the writers of this blog constitute one of the competing "ICFI's", of which there are now three [following the USFI's rebranding.] One will note throughout this site that the ICFI [by which we have in mind the ICFI which publishes WSWS] is always referred to as a separate entity. The title of this blog owes its name to the subject of its focus.)
ICFI (1953) Supporters look to the history of the Fourth International, the World Party of Socialist Revolution founded by Leon Trotsky in 1938. Our aim is to help unite the global working class around the program of socialist internationalism, based on the perspective of "Permanent Revolution."
We root ourselves in the history of the Fourth International and its struggle against the nationalist and bureaucratic degeneration of the Soviet Union and the Communist International. We are implacable opponents of every form of national and bureaucratic opportunism and revisionism, including reformism, Stalinism, "national Trotskyism," objectivism, etc.
We agree with Trotsky's assessment of the central task facing the world movement of the working class. As he wrote in 1938: "The turn is now to the proletariat, i.e., chiefly to its revolutionary vanguard. The historical crisis of mankind is reduced to the crisis of the revolutionary leadership."
We also agree with the 1953 "Open Letter" to the world Trotskyist movement, which underlined the dangers of failing to resolve the crisis of leadership in the post-WW2 period:
"The death agony of the capitalist system threatens the destruction of civilization through worsening depressions, world wars and barbaric manifestations like fascism. The development of atomic weapons today underlines the danger in the gravest possible way.
The descent into the abyss can be avoided only by replacing capitalism with the planned economy of socialism on a world scale and thus resuming the spiral of progress opened up by capitalism in its early days.
This can be accomplished only under the leadership of the working class in society. But the working class itself faces a crisis in leadership although the world relationship of social forces was never so favorable as today for the workers to take the road to power." Proposed Statement of Principles
