---
Title: Founding Conference of the Fourth International. Report (1938)
Description: The report of the sessions of the founding conference of the Fourth International, held near Paris on September 3, 1938, as published by the Socialist Appeal of New York on October 22, 1938: the delegates, the organizational report, the debates on the transitional program, on the Soviet Union and on the “proclamation” of the International, and the resolutions adopted.
Author: Founding Conference of the Fourth International
Date: 1938-09-03
URL: https://marxismo.school/archivo/congresos/originales/1938%20Report%20of%20the%20Founding%20Conference%20of%20the%20Fourth%20International
---


*Text from “Thirty Delegates From Eleven Countries Raise New Banner”, an unsigned report in the* Socialist Appeal *(New York), Vol. II, No. 46, October 22, 1938, section 1, pp. 1 and 3, transcribed from the [scan of the issue](https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/themilitant/socialist-appeal-1938/v2n46-sect-1-oct-22-1938-SA.pdf) in the Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line, with a few obvious misprints corrected. No minutes of the conference were published at the time; this report is the only contemporary account of its sessions in a free source. The conference met in Périgny, near Paris, at the house of Alfred Rosmer; for security, the press placed it in Switzerland. The headings within the report are those of the newspaper; the session heading is editorial. The documents adopted are not repeated here: the links lead to them on the page of the conference, [1938 Founding Conference of the Fourth International](https://marxismo.school/archivo/congresos/originales/1938%20Founding%20Conference%20of%20the%20Fourth%20International). [Traducción al español](https://marxismo.school/archivo/congresos/1938%20Actas%20de%20la%20Conferencia%20de%20fundaci%C3%B3n%20de%20la%20IV%20Internacional).*

## The Sessions of Saturday, September 3, 1938

The Fourth International has been founded.

Meeting in the midst of the threatening war crisis in Europe, 30 delegates from eleven countries proclaimed the new World Party of the Socialist Revolution. A Youth International was simultaneously created.

The delegates represented organizations in the United States, France, Great Britain, Germany, the Soviet Union, Italy, Latin America, Poland, Belgium, Holland, and Greece.

Unable to send delegates because of conditions of distance, illegality, and other adverse factors, were organizations affiliated to the Fourth International in Spain, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Indo-China, China, French Morocco, the Union of South Africa, Canada, a number of Latin American countries, Australia, New Zealand, Denmark, Norway, Lithuania, Palestine, Rumania, and several other countries. These organizations had already signified in advance their adherence to the new banner.

The world congress that raised the new internationalist banner met in strictest illegality “somewhere in Switzerland” on September 3, 1938. Because of the extremely difficult conditions engendered by the war crisis, observers elected to the Congress by the Workers and Peasants Socialist Party of France and the P.O.U.M. of Spain were unable to attend the actual sessions of the Congress. A special commission met later with representatives of the former organization.

No conference of revolutionists ever met under circumstances more tense and ominous or faced tasks of such supreme historical gravity than did this one.

More than five years have passed since the nucleus at work for the reconstruction of the revolutionary International drew up a courageous balance sheet of the humiliating defeat of the German proletariat which brought in its train so many other murderous blows against the working class of the world, and of Europe in particular.

Following the wretched capitulation to fascism of the only party in Germany which laid official claims to the traditions of the Russian Revolution—the Communist Party—and the cynically wholehearted endorsement of this capitulation by the entire Stalinist International, the Bolshevik-Leninists of that time, organized as the International Left Opposition, boldly proclaimed the need of organizing a new, Fourth International, true heir and continuator of the great traditions of the Internationals that had preceded it and implacable foe of the official traducers of the working-class movement.

Joined in 1933 in the famous Pact of Four for the new International by the Socialist Workers Party of Germany, and the Independent Socialist Party and Revolutionary Socialist Party of Holland, the Bolshevik-Leninists, the International Communist League gathering strength and influence in one country after another, alone and consistently remained loyal to the principles and promise enunciated in the Pact.

The best elements in the vanguard of the groups that had broken from the corrupt and incorrigible Third International, as well as the determined and serious elements from various centrist groups and even sections of the Second International, rallied to the movement for the Fourth International, despite the historically unprecedented hailstorm of abuse, misrepresentation, calumny and persecution to which it was subjected on all sides by its official adversaries.

The five years of unintermittent struggle for the ideas of the Fourth International enabled the movement representing these ideas to gather at its founding conference without having to face any serious claimant to the name or position of leadership of the revolutionary internationalist movement.

Our conference met at a moment of the most revolting self-exposure of what still goes by the name of the Second “International.” Confronted by the danger of a new world imperialist holocaust, the leaders of the biggest remaining section of that “International,” the British Labor Party, found nothing more appropriate to do than to shriek at the top of their voices for a speeding up of British imperialism’s war-armaments program.

Almost simultaneous with our assembly, Sir Walter Citrine and associates met with the leaders of the French Social Democracy to discuss the war crisis. Like their imperialist masters, they never bothered to consult the representatives of their Czech “sister” parties, to say nothing of their German and Austrian “comrades.” As for the Labor and Socialist International itself, its Executive never met during the crisis, or if it did, it did not let itself be heard from by so much as a syllable or a whisper. In the gravest moments of the crisis, in other words, the Second International did not even pretend to counsel, much less to lead, the labor movement of the world.

Just as significantly silent was the “Communist International,” self-avowed champion of the struggle for peace and against fascism—as silent as the Kremlin itself. Its French and British branches alone were active and vocal, chasing about in each country for agreements with the arch-nationalist bourgeois politicians and raising a furious clamor for a holy war against fascism to be directed by the notorious democrats of the English banks and the French steel trust—a clamor to which the working class fortunately paid not the slightest attention.

It was in this atmosphere created by the imperialists on the one side, and their servants in the official leadership of the labor movement on the other, that the conference of the Fourth International came together.

The G. P. U. kidnapping and brutal murder of comrade Rudolf Klement, noble and devoted militant who had served us so long and capably as administrative secretary of the Bureau for the Fourth International, had impressed every delegate with the extremely great responsibility he bore; and it will therefore be understood that our conference found itself compelled and well-advised to meet under such precautionary and illegal conditions as even made it impossible to conclude its sessions with the singing of the traditional battle hymn of the movement, “The International.”

In spite of the difficulties created by our enemies—the bourgeois police and their allies of the G. P. U.—the sessions and the work of the conference were successfully and efficiently concluded in one full day, with the attendance of thirty delegates, representing eleven countries, the former International Secretariat, and a delegation from the Youth Bureau for the Fourth International.

In addition, the secretary was able to report that the Workers and Peasants Socialist Party of France, as well as the P. O. U. M. of Spain, had accepted our invitation to attend the conference as observers—a mandate which the exceptional physical conditions under which we met unfortunately prevented these two parties from exercising.

### Organizational Report

When it is borne in mind that few social movements in history have ever been subject to the fierce and all-sided persecutions and repressions which have been our lot, it will be understood how gratifying was the organizational report given to the conference. It showed that the banner of the Fourth International now flies on every continent of the globe. If the numerous sections of the International were not all represented at the conference, it was due either to conditions of illegality in some lands or to financial difficulties—we are not financed by bourgeois governments, like the French social democracy, or by the Stalinist bureaucracy, like the Comintern as a whole—or both.

The conference opened under two auspicious signs: [the unification of the Bolshevik-Leninist groups in Great Britain](https://marxismo.school/archivo/congresos/originales/1938%20Founding%20Conference%20of%20the%20Fourth%20International#on-unification-of-the-british-section) into the Revolutionary Socialist League, embracing a new affiliate to our movement (the militant group of revolutionary Marxists of Scotland)—a unification already reported in detail in the *Appeal*—and [the fusion of the two Fourth Internationalist groups in Greece](https://marxismo.school/archivo/congresos/originales/1938%20Founding%20Conference%20of%20the%20Fourth%20International#on-the-greek-section), the one which had emerged from the former “Spartakos” group and the other from the former “Archio-Marxists”. In both cases, delegations of the International Secretariat had contributed decisively to the accomplished results.

### Integration of Movement

These two steps symbolized for the conference the growing integration of our international movement, made possible by our whole past course which was based not on the concept of superficial and temporary and deceptive advances but on the concept of the process of revolutionary selection which alone leads to the creation and victory of the tempered revolutionary party.

How our enemies and opponents sought to amuse themselves at our expense in the past by cavalier references to our alleged sectarianism and insignificance! As to the latter, they really dulled the edge of their cutting remarks by their permanent and increasing preoccupation with our existence, our criticisms and our activities. As to the small numbers in our movement which were the theme of so many feeble witticisms, the social democratic bureaucrats have judiciously turned to other butts for their humor, especially since their policies contributed so demonstratively in one country after another towards the annihilation of their “big organizations” and their conversion into impotent emigre sects.

### Stalinist Impotence

As for the Communist “parties”—which are no longer parties, properly speaking, but mechanisms operated by the Soviet Foreign Office—their doom was long ago pronounced. It was another impressive symbol of our conference that we met immediately after Stalin had offered the ruling Polish Colonels another token of capitulation in the form of the official dissolution of the Communist Party of Poland. He could scarcely have underlined more strikingly the obsolescence of the Third International and the fact that our International is unchallenged inheritor of its heroic traditions.

Although the Stalinists planned to deliver a heavy blow at our conference by eliminating comrade Klement—and it was and remains a heavy blow—the delegates managed to dispose of all the points on the agenda in a business-like manner. Against a background of firmly acquired agreement in fundamental principle, the conference was able to adopt the thesis in the “[Program of Transitional Demands](https://marxismo.school/archivo/congresos/originales/1938%20Founding%20Conference%20of%20the%20Fourth%20International)” (printed elsewhere in this issue) with only few minor modifications. This was made easier by virtue of the fact that a widespread international discussion of this program had already taken place throughout the membership of the International, enabling the delegates to come before the conference with concrete opinions.

In many respects, the program of transitional demands of the Fourth International is the most important single document ever to be produced in the fifteen long years of the history of our movement. What a contrast it offers to the vague generalizations and deceptive abstractions which the official leaderships of the working class offer as guides to action in the present tumultuous world situation! It is not, or rather it is not so much, the basic program of the Fourth International, as its *program of action* for the immediate period in which we live.

Fruit of a quarter of a century of social history, it presents to every worker and peasant the concrete replies which the Fourth International gives to all the pressing, immediate problems facing the exploited and oppressed. It is not only a criticism of that which is, but a guide to what must be if the working class is not to be bestially annihilated by virulent reaction and modern civilization itself hurled back for generations to come.

Where the Bolshevik-Leninists have been armed in the past mainly with a profound analysis of the present social order and, in general, with the knowledge of the principles and methods by which the new society may be attained, they are now additionally equipped with the indispensable program of action which can enable them to defend not only the tomorrow of the proletariat, but also its today. The program of transitional demands contains the guiding lines for the *day-to-day struggle*. It is not merely the program for the convinced revolutionary worker, for the vanguard, but for the working class as a whole; not merely for the struggle against capitalism itself, but for the struggle against the daily effects of the gnawing capitalist crisis—permanent unemployment, fascism and the horrors of imperialist war.

It is not an exaggeration to say that now, more than ever before, there is not a single group or tendency in the working class to present an answer to the burning questions of the day in so complete, so realistic, so comprehensible and so concrete a manner as is done by the Fourth International in its program of transitional demands.

### On the Soviet Union

The debate at the conference occurred essentially over individual sections of the program. The conference thereupon endorsed the line of the program on the Soviet Union, often enough discussed in our ranks, and rejected the standpoint of the minority in some sections which affirmed the capitalist nature of the Soviet state. At the same time, on the request of the American Party committee, arrangements were made to permit the continuation of discussion on the program’s formulations with regard to the relationships between the resurgent Soviets and the Stalinist bureaucracy and labor aristocracy; the formulations were, however, adopted by the conference as the position of the International.

Discussion also occurred on the question of applying the line of the program with regard to factory occupation (sit-down strikes) and shop councils, to the concrete situation in the various countries, and also on the part of the program which deals with the question of pacifism and patriotism as manifested among the masses themselves. On the last-named point, an editorial reformulation of the program-draft was decided upon in order to eliminate all possibilities of misinterpretation or misunderstanding of the position of the Fourth International.

### On the International

The longest debate took place on the question of the so-called “proclamation” of the Fourth International, in which the delegates of the Polish section advocated that our movement continue as before under the name of movement “for the Fourth International.” They argued that the labor movement was in a trough between two rising waves and that no large parties having yet declared for the new International our movement was still too small to call itself the International and assume the functions devolving upon it. The rest of the conference was, however, unanimously in favor of altering the equivocal name of our world movement, which had been adopted two years earlier on the grounds of facilitating possible collaboration with centrist groups then still moving in our direction.

It was pointed out that particularly in this critical period, it was imperative that the movement be centralized into a functioning world party capable of guiding the development of the *only* current which today stands for the Fourth International; that our movement was already generally referred to as the Fourth International without the now meaningless qualifying term “for.”

After the vote, the Polish delegates presented a statement declaring their continued affiliation with the International in the name of the Polish section. In accordance with the new decision, [statutes were adopted for the Fourth International](https://marxismo.school/archivo/congresos/originales/1938%20Founding%20Conference%20of%20the%20Fourth%20International#statutes-of-the-fourth-international), declaring its purpose, its organizational structure, providing for disciplined and centralized operation and international party democracy, and providing for a regularly functioning, representative International Executive Committee and International Secretariat, plus sub-secretariats which may be established under different circumstances and in different parts of the world.

The conference found time to discuss and decide upon the problems which had arisen in various national sections. Reference has already been made to the welcome progress achieved in the unification of the movement in Great Britain and Greece. In addition, there were reports of contacts already established or in the offing with significant revolutionary groups in the colonial countries and, for the first time, in Ireland. [Resolutions also were adopted on the situation in the French Party](https://marxismo.school/archivo/congresos/originales/1938%20Founding%20Conference%20of%20the%20Fourth%20International#resolution-on-the-tasks-of-the-french-section), in connection with which a delegation of the International had been elected to deal with [the letter of the Molinier group](https://marxismo.school/archivo/congresos/originales/1938%20Founding%20Conference%20of%20the%20Fourth%20International#statement-of-the-i-s-on-the-molinier-group) asking admission into the movement (the results of its negotiations are referred to elsewhere in this issue).

### Other Problems Considered

[The situation in Poland](https://marxismo.school/archivo/congresos/originales/1938%20Founding%20Conference%20of%20the%20Fourth%20International#resolution-on-the-situation-in-poland), where the Bolshevik-Leninists have been working in the Bund and in the Socialist Party, was also treated in detail, especially in light of the vast prospects now opened to us by the dissolution of the Stalinist party. The resolution of the preliminary All-America Conference on [the reorganization of the Mexican section](https://marxismo.school/archivo/congresos/originales/1938%20Founding%20Conference%20of%20the%20Fourth%20International#on-the-mexican-question) was reviewed by the International Conference, which dealt with the appeal of the Galicia group, and the original decision was substantially endorsed.

Among the other important decisions of the conference, besides [the Manifesto](https://marxismo.school/archivo/congresos/originales/1938%20Founding%20Conference%20of%20the%20Fourth%20International#against-imperialist-war-a-manifesto) printed elsewhere on the burning issue of the war danger, [the greetings to the revolutionary fighters against fascism in Spain](https://marxismo.school/archivo/congresos/originales/1938%20Founding%20Conference%20of%20the%20Fourth%20International#greetings-to-the-fighters-in-spain), and [the resolution on our fallen martyrs and class-war prisoners](https://marxismo.school/archivo/congresos/originales/1938%20Founding%20Conference%20of%20the%20Fourth%20International#salute-to-our-living-martyrs-and-our-heroic-dead), was the adoption of [a document outlining the necessity of an international defense and relief organization](https://marxismo.school/archivo/congresos/originales/1938%20Founding%20Conference%20of%20the%20Fourth%20International#on-organizing-defense-and-relief-for-persecuted-revolutionists) to aid the fighters and refugees who have been left in the lurch by the Stalinist and social-democratic organizations, [a resolution on the youth question](https://marxismo.school/archivo/congresos/originales/1938%20Founding%20Conference%20of%20the%20Fourth%20International#resolution-on-the-youth) which outlined the policy to be followed at the International Youth Conference that took place afterwards, and [resolutions on the war in the Far East](https://marxismo.school/archivo/congresos/originales/1938%20Founding%20Conference%20of%20the%20Fourth%20International#the-war-in-the-far-east-and-the-revolutionary-perspectives) and [on the position of American imperialism in the world today](https://marxismo.school/archivo/congresos/originales/1938%20Founding%20Conference%20of%20the%20Fourth%20International#thesis-on-the-world-role-of-american-imperialism).

Before closing, the conference adopted [a letter of cordial greetings](https://marxismo.school/archivo/congresos/originales/1938%20Founding%20Conference%20of%20the%20Fourth%20International#world-congress-greetings-to-leon-trotsky) to the absent—and yet not absent!—leader of present-day revolutionary Marxian thought and action, Leon Trotsky.

Without bombast or fanfare, the international conference met and accomplished its task to the full. Basing itself on the rich experiences of recent times and the unpostponable needs of the situation, standing firmly on the ground of internationalism, it launched the Fourth International, not without difficulties, not lightmindedly, and not in the calmest social sea—but profoundly aware that it is sufficiently fortified by the past against whatever storms lie ahead, sufficiently confident in its chart, to go forward with the conviction that the final victory, the freeing of mankind from slavery, lies ahead and will be attained.