Fourth International

The Fourth International (FI) is the Communist international organisation consisting of followers of Leon Trotsky, or Trotskyists, with the declared goal of helping the working class bring about socialism and work toward international communism. The Fourth International was established in France in 1938: Trotsky and his supporters, having been expelled from the Soviet Union, considered the Comintern or Third International to have become "lost to" Stalinism and incapable of leading the international working class to political power. Thus, Trotskyists founded their own, competing "Fourth International".

Today, there is no longer a single, cohesive Fourth International. Throughout the better part of its existence, the Fourth International was hounded by agents of the Soviet secret police, repressed by capitalist countries such as France and the United States and rejected by followers of the Soviet Union and later Maoism as illegitimate—a position these communists still hold today. It struggled to maintain contact under these conditions of simultaneous illegality and scorn around much of the world during World War II, because when workers' uprisings did occur, they were usually under the influence of Soviet-inspired, anarchist, social democratic, Maoist, or militant nationalist groups, leading to further defeats for the FI and its Trotskyists, who never gathered similar support. Even after the Soviet repudiation of Stalin and de-stalinization, Trotskyism continued to be regarded as politically discredited and there was very little renewed support for Trotskyist ideas, particularly from those already committed to another form of communism. Ideologically, Maoists, left communists, and anarchists all consider Trotskyism, and thus also the Fourth International, to be ideologically bankrupt and impotent. Despite this, many parts of Latin America and Europe continue to have large Trotskyist groupings, with followings both young and old, who are attracted to its "anti-Stalinist" positions and its rhetoric of workers' internationalism. Quite a few of these groups carry the label "Fourth Internationalist" either in their organisation's name, major political position documents, or both.

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