As part of our ongoing commitment to revolutionary ecosocialism, AntiCapitalist Resistance has joined the Fourth International (FI). With the growth of the authoritarian populist right, the collapse of the biosphere and rapid global warming, the worsening global crisis means that we must get organised across borders. From solidarity with the Kazakh uprising in 2022, the conflicts in Palestine and Ukraine to building links with ecosocialists in numerous countries through the Global Ecosocialist Network, internationalism is at ACR’s heart. Being an isolated group in England and Cymru/Wales was not part of our perspectives – we need a practical internationalism, not just fine words on a page.
Some of our members were already in the Fourth International through their affiliation with Socialist Resistance, one of the founding organisations of ACR. After several internal discussions within ACR, we agreed to apply for membership as a section together with comrades in Scotland. The International agreed upon this at its 18th World Congress, held in Belgium at the end of February.
The Fourth International was set up by revolutionary Leon Trotsky and his allies in 1938. It is named the Fourth International because there had been three others before. The First International (1864-1876) was led by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and brought together working class organisations and revolutionaries worldwide. The Second (Socialist) International was founded in 1889 and brought together mass socialist parties like the Labour Party in Britain and the German SDP. This international split at the start of World War One when the different national parties supported their capitalist classes in the war. The Third (Communist) International was set up in 1919 after the Russian Revolution to collect revolutionaries in sympathy with the ideas of the Bolsheviks, who set up communist parties worldwide dedicated to getting rid of capitalism.
The Third International politically degenerated during the 1920s and 30s after Stalin took power in Russia, becoming bureaucratically dominated by the Soviet state and subordinated to Stalin’s foreign policy goals. Trotsky and his sympathisers attempted to challenge this by forming a new, fourth international, which was in the tradition of revolutionary socialists who opposed both capitalism and Stalinism and who fought for consistent internationalism.
ACR is itself a product of the regroupment of different socialists from different traditions, so we are not expecting all our members to defend every historic position that the FI has taken. We join the FI because of its clear commitment to ecosocialism as a strategic approach to the crisis of the modern age and its openness to help regroup revolutionary Marxists and other class struggle activists.
At the same World Congress, the FI admitted the MES in Brazil, an organisation from a different revolutionary background, and admitted Solidarity in the USA as a full section. Fraternal relations with Socialist Action were ended due to their pro-Moscow position around the Ukraine war.
ACR is represented in the international leadership of the FI, and we are keen to deepen our connections with ecosocialist revolutionaries worldwide and learn from their struggles. We will work for wider regroupment and to build mass revolutionary organisations that can make a difference in the late capitalist hellscape we live and struggle in.