Quick questions on Trotsky and the Fourth International: HSC Modern History Personality

The International Left Opposition was founded by Trotsky in April 1930, while at Prinkipo, as a faction inside the Communist International (Comintern). Its members were the small groups of Trotskyists expelled from the national Communist Parties from 1928. The largest groups were in France (Pierre Naville, Alfred Rosmer, then later Pierre Frank), Germany (Kurt Landau), the United States (the Communist League of America led by James P. Cannon and Max Shachtman), Belgium, and Spain.

Hitler's appointment as German Chancellor on 30 January 1933 and the collapse of the German Communist Party (KPD) without significant resistance through February-March 1933 destroyed Trotsky's reform perspective. The KPD had been the largest Communist Party outside the Soviet Union and the centre of Comintern hopes. Its policy of treating the Social Democrats as "social fascists" and refusing the united front had been Comintern doctrine since 1928.

In July 1933 Trotsky's article "It Is Necessary to Build Communist Parties and an International Anew" called for a Fourth International. The decision was a major doctrinal break. The Comintern (founded 1919) was the institutional inheritance of the October Revolution. To call for its replacement was to declare it lost to the working-class movement.

The First (Founding) Conference of the Fourth International met on 3 September 1938 at Alfred Rosmer's house at Perigny near Paris. Twenty-one delegates from 11 national sections attended in a single day's meeting, conducted under conditions of high security after Sedov's death and the disappearance of Trotsky's secretary Rudolf Klement (murdered by the NKVD in July 1938).

The Transitional Programme (full title: The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International) was drafted by Trotsky at Coyoacan in spring 1938. The programme's distinctive feature was the concept of "transitional demands": demands that bridged current working-class consciousness and the socialist revolution.

Trotsky's assassination in August 1940 left the new International without its theoretical leader. The Second World War interrupted the International's operations. The Third (Reunification) World Congress of 1951 split the International into a Pabloite and an anti-Pabloite wing; further splits followed in 1953, 1963, and the 1980s. The contemporary inheritance is divided among the Reunified Fourth International (the largest fragment), the International Committee, the Lambertist Fourth International, and several smaller bodies.

Trotsky shifted from inside-the-Comintern to outside-the-Comintern in July 1933.

January 1933 is the decisive moment in Trotsky's break with the Comintern.

3 September 1938 at Perigny near Paris.