About the ITC
The basic objective of the International Trotskyist Committee (ITC) is to unite all
the consistent, orthodox Trotskyists, in the world in a determined struggle for the political
regeneration and organizational reconstruction of the Fourth International. Functioning
on the basis of international democratic centralism, the International Trotskyist
Committee seeks to provide international political leadership and organizational and
tactical coordination for the wide variety of struggles for Trotskyism developing, in many
arenas, throughout the world.
Where its sections function as publicly independent organizations, the
International Trotskyist Committee builds work in the proletarian class struggle aimed at
winning the advanced workers to the Trotskyist program, while also directing its message
to militants in the “Trotskyist-revisionist” and other organizations in which the vanguard
leadership of the working class may also be in process of formation. Within the
“Trotskyist-revisionist” organizations, it wages a fight for the full program of
revolutionary Marxism in a Bolshevik manner, building these organizations while
fighting to regenerate them politically through relentless exposure of all forms of
revisionism and through a struggle to win the political majority of their militants for
consistent Trotskyism and, on this basis, form a new, consistently Trotskyist leadership.
In any other organizations, the ITC seeks to win advanced workers moving toward
revolutionary positions to the revolutionary program of Trotskyism, fighting
intransigently for a break with reformist and centrist politics. Recognizing the
fundamental, qualitative programmatic leap which must be made for any
socialdemocratic, Stalinist, non-Trotskyist centrist, or petty-bourgeois nationalist
organization either to be won as a whole to Trotskyism or be the site of a long-range
struggle for Trotskyism, the forces of the ITC intervening in such an organization can
normally expect to remain only for the relatively limited period of time in which a given
struggle for this programmatic leap can be waged effectively.
The tactics of the International Trotskyist Committee must be extremely flexible and
fully dialectical, taking into account the concrete character of the struggle for the Fourth
International in every country and uniting all the various struggles into a single, complex
process of political development and regroupment. The ITC must recognize that its tasks
are extremely difficult and will subject it constantly to intense opportunist and sectarian
pressures—some taking quite unprecedented forms—both of which it must learn to
identify and struggle against with utter consistency and clarity. It must never turn aside
either from the revolutionary program itself or from the militants in any arena who are
fighting for it or being drawn toward it.
Whether its work takes the form of publicly independent organizations or activity within other organizations, the minimal conditions for the principled struggle of the International Trotskyist Committee will be the maintenance of its own political and organizational independence as a tendency, its international democratic-centralist functioning, and its absolute honesty, in small thingsas in large and, above all, in the defense and concrete development of the Trotskyist program.
The specific orientation of the ITC must always be determined by concrete developments in the ongoing evolution of the forces most pertinent to the struggle for the Fourth International. Its overall and strategic orientation, however, is always toward the working class and, in particular, toward the most politically advanced workers and toward the most militant layers of the working class. The ITC must also orient strategically toward the most oppressed and exploited layers among the nonproletarian masses, especially in the economically backward countries. It must fight to unite within itself consistently revolutionary leaderships and cadres from the imperialist, semicolonial, and Stalinist countries, as a necessary initial step in the reconstruction of the Fourth International as the genuinely international leadership of the working class.
The ITC’s necessary orientation toward the “Trotskyist-revisionist” and other political organizations of the workers’ movement must be linked with and shaped by its overall orientation toward the most politically advanced representatives of the workers and oppressed of the world, both in terms of the regroupment on a Bolshevik basis of Trotskyist cadres and through the development of work for the Trotskyist program in the ongoing struggles of the workers and oppressed.
However limited our initial resources and however difficult the initial challenges we face, only a struggle actually developed along these lines can win the first decisive battles for the resolution of the historic crisis of proletarian leadership: the actual political regeneration and organizational reconstruction of the Fourth International. To this struggle the International Trotskyist Committee dedicates itself.
Excerpt from the International Trotskyist Review #1
