[D66] “refounding” the Fourth International

[A.O.]

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/06/07/crfi-j07.html

Workers Party in Argentina seeks to “refound” Fourth International in 
alliance with Stalinism
By Eric London and Bill Van Auken
7 June 2018

On April 2 and 3, 2018, the Partido Obrero (Workers Party) of Argentina 
hosted a conference in Buenos Aires in the name of the Coordinating 
Committee for the Refoundation of the Fourth International (CRFI).

The slogan of “refounding” or “reconstructing” the Fourth International, 
founded by Leon Trotsky in 1938, is hardly a new one. The Partido 
Obrero, (PO) has been involved in such efforts for some 45 years, going 
back to its alliance with the French OCI (Internationalist Communist 
Organization) of Pierre Lambert in the 1970s in what was known as CORQI 
(Comité d’Organisation pour la Reconstruction de la Quatrième 
International). That venture fell apart as Lambert turned to the 
Socialist Party in France and to all manner of right-wing bourgeois 
nationalist movements in Latin America, while denouncing his erstwhile 
CORQI allies as police agents. The PO would later ally itself with the 
extreme Pabloite tendency in Argentina led by Nahuel Moreno in a 
similarly abortive—and even more short-lived—attempt at “refoundation.”

All of these ephemeral alliances are based upon a common agreement that 
the Fourth International does not exist, and even that it never existed. 
What is actually meant by “reconstruction” is the amalgamation of 
politically heterogeneous organizations, without any agreement on 
essential questions of program and strategy. The only point on which 
they absolutely agree is the right of each organization to pursue 
whatever national policy that is deemed to be in its own best interests. 
This utterly unprincipled approach to politics has absolutely nothing in 
common with Trotskyism. Its attitude to the experiences and lessons 
accumulated by the Fourth International since 1938 is defined by a 
combination of political hostility, theoretical indifference, 
shortsighted national opportunism and the crudest ignorance.

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