From the IMG to A*CR: Whatever Happened to the Fourth International?
At the recent Your Party inaugural conference in Liverpool, the usual assemblage of Trotskyist organisations was out in force – Socialist Workers Party, stray sects, vetero-Leninist grouplets doing that haunting-the-edges-of-history thing. Listening to the reports, I found myself wondering whether any former comrades from the Fourth International tradition – the old Ernest Mandel “United Secretariat” current – were actually present.
Is there still a British section of the FI in any meaningful sense, and if so, what on earth are they doing these days?
Back in 1972-76, when I was an IMG member, the politics were straightforward, whatever the internal (in retrospect) absurdities. We were Marxist, Leninist, Trotskyist: pitched at a genuinely high intellectual level. I possessed - and studied - Lenin's Selected Works in two thick volumes, Trotsky's classic works, and a smattering of modern texts on Marxist economics (Capital was too boring for me in those days).
You might have mocked our delusions of revolutionary imminence, but you couldn’t say we hadn’t done the reading. Fast forward fifty years and the contemporary FI seems unrecognisable: a loosely-connected ecosocialist talking shop, with a politics that looks like faddish environmentalism plus identity-adjacent moralism.
Not much attention to the conquest of power: the old, hard arts of street-fighting victory over the bourgeoisie.
The IMG: a flawed but serious attempt at Leninism
The IMG of the early seventies was, for all its faults, a serious organisation.
Structurally, it was a party project, not a lifestyle collective. Branches, fractions, organised interventions in the labour movement and student unions. There was an assumption that we were training the future leadership for a British October which would, sometime soon, be pencilled into the calendar. Discipline and education were not optional extras - we were truly in the End Times.
Theoretically, we were orthodox in the Trotskyist sense: transitional method, workers’ government, permanent revolution, the united front, democratic centralism. People argued furiously all the time, but they were arguing inside a shared conceptual framework; Leninism was the grammar of the organisation. You could reasonably say, “These people are wrong about the nature of the Labour Party, or the dynamics of Portugal, or the women’s movement,” but we were at least trying to locate those things inside a theory of the state, class power, and revolutionary praxis.
The FI today: ecosocialist salon with Trotskyist wallpaper
By contrast, the contemporary British section of the FI - Anti*Capitalist Resistance (A*CR), plus its Scottish cousin - reads and behaves very differently. This may be their public face rather than the inner life of any given branch - but politics, like theology, exists in its outward forms.
The centre of gravity has visibly shifted:
– 'Climate catastrophe' is now the organising horizon. Capitalism is bad not because it immiserates the working class and blocks human potential, but because it incinerates the planet. The class problematic is presented, but often as a kind of grey backdrop to a green foreground. Naturally none of this is properly analysed.
– The daily diet is social-movement work around race, gender, sexuality, refugees, and so on, refracted through current academic fashions. They tend to appear as self-contained spheres rather than mediated expressions of the underlying class structure - as we would have demanded.
– Trade-union implantation is patchy and modest. There is very little sense that the organised working class is still the decisive lever of social transformation, as opposed to one “movement” among many in an archipelago of resistances.
– Above all, there is a palpable aversion to anything which smells of Leninist party-building. “Centralism” is suspect; “vanguard” is practically a slur. The organisational imagination hovers somewhere between a campaigning NGO, a reading group, and a loose federation of activists.
It is still recognisably left-wing, often morally serious, occasionally insightful – but it is not what anyone in 1972 would have recognised as a revolutionary Marxist organisation in the Bolshevik sense. Trotsky may be there in the quotations; he is not there in the method.
What broke: historic mission and strategic seriousness
Two great demolitions reshaped the FI and its British fragments.
First, the collapse of the “historic mission” story.
For decades, the Ernest Mandel FI lived on the thesis that Trotskyism was the rightful heir to the classical Marxist tradition, temporarily overshadowed by Stalinism, but destined to come into its own once “actually existing socialism” collapsed under its contradictions. The workers would reassess; the Fourth International would stand revealed; history would resume its proper course under the leadership of sections of the FI.
Then the Eastern Bloc fell - and no Trotskyist current became the organising centre of anything. Instead, we got neoliberal restoration, gangster-capitalism, and a demoralised proletariat. That wasn’t in the script.
At that point, Trotskyism ceased to be the heir apparent and became, at best, one tradition among many revisionist Marxisms. The FI bent towards the surviving currents that still seemed alive – environmentalism, feminism, various identity movements – in order to avoid total irrelevance. In doing so it shed much of its doctrinal paradigm, energy and focus.
Second, the intellectualisation of impotence.
As the practical horizon of revolution receded, the new FI became, in effect, a think-tank for radical critical theory: eco-Marxism, feminist Marxism, queer Marxism, decolonial discourse. This colonised the mental space once occupied by close study of the state, class struggle dynamics, and revolutionary strategy.
The result is a politics of moralism. The organisation proclaims the need for rupture; it does not seriously address the mechanics of taking and wielding power. Revolutionary politics without a theory of victory is mere performance, not preparation.
Would Lenin or Trotsky recognise their supposed heirs?
They would see an “International” in which:
– The proletariat has dissolved into a soup of movements and identities, each with its own discourse, none clearly primus inter pares.
– “Seizure of power” appears, if at all, as a distant eschatological symbol rather than a concrete strategic objective one might plan for in pragmatic, logistical detail.
– Political questions are approached primarily in ethical and cultural terms – will this stance make us more inclusive, more intersectional, more attuned to X oppression? – rather than in terms of changing the relation of forces at state level.
– The old transitional method – demands which pose the question of power – has been largely replaced by programmatic-maximalism and movementist-minimalism, with very little in between. Back to the old Second International.
Three exits from Trotskyism
The Trotskyist diaspora has generally taken one of three available exits:
1. Sectarian petrification - preserve the 1970s schema in aspic and insist that nothing fundamental has changed. This is the path of the hardened sects, still doing paper sales as if Wilson were in Downing Street and factories still employed thousands of horny-handed blue-collar workers. Hello SWP.
2. NGO-ification – dissolve into the movements, rebadge as “ecosocialist” or “radical left”, retain some Marxist language but operate in practice as a campaigning network with an intellectual journal attached. This is more or less where the FI and A*CR have ended up.
3. Labourist absorption – accept that the only serious arena is the broad workers’ party and become, in effect, a pressure group on its left wing. Variants of Militant and the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty live here, endlessly reconciling themselves to the rhythms of Labourism.
From militants to curators
So yes, my younger IMG self would barely recognise today’s A*CR as comrades in the old sense. They occupy a different niche in the ecosystem. We were trying, in our hapless way, to train cadres for a future insurrection that never arrived. They are curating a moral and intellectual discourse – ecosocialist, intersectional, movementist – in a world which has largely given up on the idea of revolution altogether.
It's humbling to read the declassified papers of the old Special Branch in the early 1970s, when the IMG (and other Trotskyist organisations) were written off as earnest talking shops: zero threat to the state. But then the objective situation never unwrapped into that October uprising: if it had, we would have known - at least intellectually - what to do and been up for it. Would the comrades today denounce such a mass popular revolt against the state as - 'Populism'?
I rather think Your Party would.
