The Fourth International (FI) is a revolutionary socialist international organization consisting of followers of Leon Trotsky, also known as Trotskyists, whose declared goal is the overthrowing of global capitalism and the establishment of world socialism via international revolution. The Fourth International was established in France in 1938, as Trotsky and his supporters, having been expelled from the Soviet Union, considered the Communist International as effectively puppets of Stalinism and thus incapable of leading the international working class to political power. Thus, Trotskyists founded their own competing Fourth International.
The Communist International (Comintern), also known as the Third International, was an international organization founded in 1919 that advocated world communism, headed by the Soviet Union. The Comintern resolved at its Second Congress to "struggle by all available means, including armed force, for the overthrow of the international bourgeoisie and the creation of an international Soviet republic as a transition stage to the complete abolition of the state". The Comintern was preceded by the 1916 dissolution of the Second International.
The German revolutions of 1848–1849, the opening phase of which was also called the March Revolution, were initially part of the Revolutions of 1848 that broke out in many European countries. They were a series of loosely coordinated protests and rebellions in the states of the German Confederation, including the Austrian Empire. The revolutions, which stressed pan-Germanism, demonstrated popular discontent with the traditional, largely autocratic political structure of the thirty-nine independent states of the Confederation that inherited the German territory of the former Holy Roman Empire after its dismantlement as a result of the Napoleonic Wars. This process began in the mid 1840s.
The League for the Fourth International (LFI) is a Trotskyist international organisation, whose most noteworthy section is the Internationalist Group/Grupo Internacionalista in the United States. It has other affiliates in Mexico, Brazil, Italy and Germany. All of these are very small and based in at most one or two cities. Like other international Trotskyist groups, it fights for "international socialist revolution, the conquest of power by the working class, led by its Leninist party."
Under Tsar Nicholas II, the Russian Empire slowly industrialized repressing opposition in the economic center and on the far-left. During the 1890s Russia's industrial development led to a large increase in the size of the urban middle class and of the working class, which gave rise to a more dynamic political atmosphere and the development of radical parties. Because the state and foreigners owned much of Russia's industry, the Russian working class was comparatively stronger and the Russian bourgeoisie comparatively weaker than in the West. The working class and the peasants became the first to establish political parties in Russia, because the nobility and the wealthy bourgeoisie were politically timid.
The Communist Workers' Party (CWP) was a far-left Maoist group in the United States. It had its origin in 1973 as the Asian Study Group established by Jerry Tung, a former member of the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) who had grown disenchanted with the group and disagreed with changes taking place in the party line. The party is mainly remembered as being associated with victims of the Greensboro Massacre of 1979.
The Vienna Uprising or October Revolution of October 1848 was the last uprising in the Austrian Revolution of 1848.
The Catholic Church and politics and concerns the interplay of Catholicism with religious, and later secular, politics. Historically, the Church opposed liberal ideas such as democracy, freedom of speech, and the separation of church and state under the grounds that "error has no rights". It eventually accommodated these ideas and began to view religious liberty as a positive value during and after the Second Vatican Council.
Revolution, or Revo, a revolutionary socialist youth organization, was founded in the UK by Workers Power, part of the League for the Fifth International. According to its statutes and manifesto it is organizationally independent from Workers Power, although there are disagreements about the degree of independence. It has official sections in the United Kingdom, Germany, Sweden, Austria, Czech Republic, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal and the USA.
The International Socialist Left was a Trotskyist group in Germany. The isl was an organizational descendant of the International Marxist Group (GIM). It was one of two factions that form the German section of the Fourth International was affiliated with the Association for Solidarity Perspectives (VsP).
Workers' Power is the German section of the Troskyist League for the Fifth International. It publishes two periodicals: the monthly newspaper Neue Internationale and the theoretical organ Revolutionärer Marxismus.
The Necessary International Initiative, often shortened to NII, was a Trotskyist international grouping formed in March 1976 by groups considered to the left of the Fourth International, which the NII characterised as "centrism sui generis", although the British section disagreed with this analysis. It consisted of the FMR, Spartacusbund (BRD) and two Austrian groups which become the IKL. The British International-Communist League joined in September 1976. The group was based on common agreement over positions of other Trotskyist internationals on the Portuguese revolution of 1974/5. One of the groups that came out of them was Workers Power (Germany) which is now a member of the League for a Fifth International, as is part of the British section which split in 1976.
The Revolutions of 1848, known in some countries as the Springtime of the Peoples or the Springtime of Nations, were a series of political upheavals throughout Europe in 1848. It remains the most widespread revolutionary wave in European history to date.
The International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) is the name of two Trotskyist internationals; one with sections named Socialist Equality Party which publishes the World Socialist Web Site, and another linked to the Workers Revolutionary Party in the UK.
The Fourth International (FI), founded in 1938, is a Trotskyist international. In 1963, following a ten-year schism, the majorities of the two public factions of the Fourth International, the International Secretariat and the International Committee, reunited, electing a United Secretariat of the Fourth International. In 2003, the United Secretariat was replaced by an Executive Bureau and an International Committee, although some other Trotskyists still refer to the organisation as the USFI or USec.
The Workers Party (WP) was a Third Camp Trotskyist group in the United States. It was founded in April 1940 by members of the Socialist Workers Party who opposed the Soviet invasion of Finland and Leon Trotsky's belief that the USSR under Joseph Stalin was still innately proletarian, a "degenerated workers' state." They included Max Shachtman, who became the new group's leader, Hal Draper, C. L. R. James, Raya Dunayevskaya, Martin Abern, Joseph Carter, Julius Jacobson, Phyllis Jacobson, Albert Glotzer, Stan Weir, B. J. Widick, James Robertson, and Irving Howe. The party's politics are often referred to as "Shachtmanite."
The League for the Fifth International (L5I) is an international grouping of revolutionary Trotskyist organisations around a common programme and perspectives.
The International Communist League , earlier known as the International Spartacist tendency is a Trotskyist international. Its largest constituent party is the Spartacist League (US). There are smaller sections of the ICL (FI) in Mexico, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, South Africa, Australia, Greece and the United Kingdom.
Anarchism in Austria first developed from the anarchist segments of the International Workingmen's Association (IWA), eventually growing into a nationwide anarcho-syndicalist movement that reached its height during the 1920s. Following the institution of fascism in Austria and the subsequent war, the anarchist movement was slow to recover, eventually reconstituting anarcho-syndicalism by the 1990s.