[D66] Introduction to The Fourth International

[R.O.]

(Definition of apron string

: the string of an apron —usually used in plural as a symbol of 
dominance or complete control)

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/06/19/intr-j19.html

Introduction to The Fourth International and the Perspective of World 
Socialist Revolution: 1986–1995
By Joseph Kishore
19 June 2020

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[...]

Outside the Fourth International, Trotsky had written in 1938, “there 
does not exist a single revolutionary current on this planet really 
meriting the name.” The Fourth International, he continued, 
“uncompromisingly gives battle to all political groupings tied to the 
apron-strings of the bourgeoisie.” [Leon Trotsky, The Death Agony of 
Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International, The Transitional 
Program (New York: Labor Publications, 1981), p. 42]

By the early 1950s, Pablo had rejected Trotsky’s revolutionary 
opposition to the political agencies of the bourgeoisie. “What 
distinguishes us still more from the past [i.e., from Trotsky],” he 
wrote, “what makes for the quality of our movement today and constitutes 
the surest gauge of our future victories, is our growing capacity to 
understand, to appreciate the mass movement as it exists—often confused, 
often under treacherous, opportunist, centrist, bureaucratic and even 
bourgeois and petty-bourgeois leaderships—and our endeavors to find our 
place in this movement with the aim of raising it from its present to 
higher levels.” [Cited in David North, The Heritage We Defend: A 
Contribution to the History of the Fourth International (Oak Park: 
Mehring Books, 2018), pp. 192–93]

By 1953, it had become clear that Pablo and Mandel’s liquidationist 
perspective and practice threatened the Fourth International with 
destruction. James P. Cannon, the founder of the Trotskyist movement in 
the United States and still the central leader of the Socialist Workers 
Party, issued an Open Letter which called on Trotskyist organizations to 
break irrevocably with Pablo, Mandel and their supporters. Cannon and 
other signatories to the Open Letter, which included Gerry Healy, the 
leader of the Trotskyist movement in Britain, formed the International 
Committee of the Fourth International. This historic split brought to an 
end the second phase of the history of the Fourth International.

The third phase spanned more than three decades, from the issuing of the 
Open Letter in 1953 to the International Committee’s break with the 
British Workers Revolutionary Party in 1985–86. The dominant feature of 
this thirty-two-year period was the protracted struggle of the 
Trotskyist movement against the continuing influence of Pabloism, which 
was the political expression of the ideological, political, and 
organizational pressure exerted by imperialism and Stalinism upon the 
Fourth International.

Pabloism was a form of anti-Marxism that, in the final analysis, both 
reflected the outlook of and adapted itself to the large labor 
bureaucracies (both Stalinist and social democratic) and myriad forms of 
radical petty-bourgeois politics. The specific and peculiar conditions 
of the post-World War II economic boom—the apparent consolidation of the 
Stalinist regimes, the improved living standards of workers in North 
America and Western Europe, the rise to power of the Maoist regime in 
China and numerous bourgeois national regimes and movements, often 
spouting Marxist-sounding phrases, and the eruption of student 
radicalism in the 1960s—created a politically hostile environment for 
the Fourth International. The Pabloite movement, orienting itself to the 
petty bourgeoisie, did all it could—with both the open and covert 
support of the Stalinists and state agencies of imperialism—to 
politically isolate the orthodox Trotskyists of the Fourth International.

[...]