Indian supporters of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) will hold a public meeting in Kolkata, the state capital of West Bengal, on Sunday, March 10 to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the founding of the Fourth International (FI).

The Indian Trotskyists hosted a similar public meeting on November 18 in Chennai on the same topic which was addressed by Deepal Jayasekera, the assistant secretary of the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) in Sri Lanka. The Kolkata event will also be addressed by a leading member of the Sri Lankan SEP.

The FI was founded in 1938 by Leon Trotsky, co-leader with Lenin of the 1917 Russian Revolution, to defend the perspective of international socialism against the betrayals of the Stalinist bureaucracy. Since its formation, the Fourth International has conducted a principled fight for the program and perspective of world socialist revolution against imperialism and all its political agencies, including Stalinism and Social Democracy.

The ICFI was founded in 1953 in a split with Pabloite revisionism which had repudiated the political and theoretical foundations of Trotskyism. The ICFI alone embodies the entire 80-year struggle to defend and develop the perspective of international socialism.

The forthcoming Kolkata meeting has immense significance. It will be held as increasing numbers of advanced workers and youth are seeking an alternative to India’s main Stalinist parliamentary parties—the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPM and the Communist Party of India or CPI—that have propped up bourgeois rule in India.

The CPM-led Left Front government that ruled West Bengal for more than 30 years ruthlessly imposed the big business, free-market reforms demanded by India’s capitalist class.

The Kolkata meeting will review the historical lessons of the fight for the Fourth International and the life and death battle against Stalinism, and their vital significance for the struggle for socialist internationalism today. We urge workers, students, youth, intellectuals and WSWS readers to attend the meeting and participate in this crucial discussion.

Date and Time: March 10, at 5 p.m.
Venue: Indian Association,
62 B.B. Ganguly Street, Kolkata 700012
(Near Central Metro, Gate No.4)