This document was adopted at the founding congress of the SEP (US) in 2008. By examining the lessons of the essential historical events and political experiences of the working class and socialist movement spanning more than a century, it establishes the theoretical and political basis of the struggle for socialism today.
Gerry Healy (1913-1989) was a longtime leader of the Fourth International, whose struggle in the British and international Trotskyist movement spanned five decades, until his break with the International Committee in 1985. This book contains a critical Marxist assessment of the life of Healy and its relationship to the historical development of the Fourth International.
The origins of this work lie in the political struggle waged by the ICFI and the Workers League, the predecessor of the Socialist Equality Party (US), from 1982-1986, to defend Trotskyism against the nationalist opportunism of the ICFI’s former British section. It establishes the continuity of orthodox Trotskyism in the political struggles inside the Fourth International in the 20th century.
In January 1998, the ICFI held its first-ever International Summer School. Their central premise is that an answer to the burning issues of the day—growing social inequality, deepening economic crisis, the decline in the cultural level of society and the prevailing political paralysis in the workers’ movement—is bound up with examining and assimilating the lessons of the 20th century.
These speeches addressed critical problems of the 20th century. Lecturers addressed the foundations of Marxism, the science of perspective and the defense of objective truth; the origins of WWI; the rise of fascism in Germany; the origins of Stalinism in the Soviet Union, Leon Trotsky’s Theory of Permanent Revolution, and problems of art and culture in the Soviet Union.
In 1917, the Russian working class, acting under the leadership of the Bolshevik Party led by Lenin and Trotsky, overthrew the bourgeois provisional government and established the first workers’ state in world history. The ICFI commemorated the centenary in 2017 with an online lecture series.
These lectures address critical political and historical issues related to the struggle by the Trotskyist Left Opposition, founded by Trotsky in 1923, against the nationalist policies of the Stalinist bureaucracy and its usurpation of political power inside the Soviet Union and the Communist International.
These lectures address the history of the ICFI from 1982-1995: from the initial formulation of a detailed critique of the Workers Revolutionary Party’s revisions of the theory and program of Trotskyism, to the decision to transform the leagues of the ICFI into parties.