Our Tendency

It was born as the International Communist Left, driven by the Russian Left Opposition in the struggle against the degeneration of the III International. It constitutes external left-wing fractions with the aim of recovering the parties of the Komintern and incorporates different tendencies -many of them founders of the different national parties- in the construction of a world class perspective.
It founds the Fourth International in 1938 when the road to a new world war was opened by the International's capitulation without a fight to Nazism in 1933 and, above all, after the defeat of the Spanish Revolution in 1937, in which Stalinism took on for the first time the role of driving force and director of the counter-revolution.
From 1942 onwards, it fought against centrism in the Fourth International, denouncing the International Secretariat's renunciation of revolutionary defeatism and the betrayal of internationalism by the member parties that supported "national resistances". It follows an independent policy of that of the centrist leadership in 1944, calling for the conversion of the imperialist war into revolutionary civil war and denouncing the imperialist character of the Russian military occupation in the countries of Eastern Europe. The split is made formal at the second congress of the International (1948).
In 1949 it is constituted as the "International Workers Union", grouping together the internationalist sections and fractions in rupture with the surrender policy of the International. Among them, the two sections that have lived the two characteristic revolutions of the period - the Spanish and the Vietnamese - and fractions and groups of the extinct International that have participated in the attempts of the class to turn the imperialist war into a revolutionary civil war in Greece, France, Germany and Italy. It political framework recognized Stalinist Russia and its satellites as state capitalisms and reject the "defense of the [Stalinist] USSR," the possibility of progressive national liberation and in general the progressive character of any alliance with bourgeois factions. They initiate the criticism of the union as a structure integrated into state capitalism and it is the only internationalist group to maintain a militant structure under the conditions of repression of the Franco dictatorship.
It reorganizes internationally from 1958 under the acronym FOR ("Workers' Revolutionary Ferment"), organizing from the 60s to the 90s sections in France, Spain, Italy and Greece. In this stage the criticism of national liberation -already started in the 1930s by the Communist Left in Argentina- and the role of the trade unions in state capitalism, started in the 1940s in the IWU, is paramount. In 1961 FOR published "For a Second Communist Manifesto", a fundamental text of balance of the revolutionary experience under the conditions of decadent capitalism.
From 2011 onwards, initiatives appear in different countries that accentuate and regroup on the programmatic positions of the tendency. In 2017 the process accelerates and culminates in June 2019 with the constitution at the Llerena Congress of "Emancipation" as a world and internationalist political organization.
Today we are Emancipation/ Emancipación/ Émancipação /Émancipation/ Emancipazione

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Tag: organisation

Educational work in the Third International

10 November, 2019 · History

«Books, please, about all fields of knowledge», Rodchenko 1924

Ninety-nine years after the congress in which the International discussed the educational work of the PCs, cultural associations of workers, gatherings and self-training initiatives among workers continue to emerge.