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SPECIAL SUPPLEMENT ANNIVERSARY SUPPLEMENT 1 Jeff Mackler is co-National Socialist Action.

Leon Trotsky was driven from the country where he led the most powerful explosion of working class solidarity the world has ever seen. He was hounded and driven from nation to nation and finally assassinated by Stalin's agent in Mexico with a pickax through his brain.

Trotsky's co-thinkers who led the Russian Revolution were slaughtered. This includes virtually every member of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party with the exception of Trotsky, who escaped and later was killed, and Stalin. Most of Trotsky's family was murdered.

And yet Trotsky's ideas survived. His Henry Snipper What are these ideas? What are the central ideas that bind the Fourth International today, that give it life, that make it the expression of the best aspirations of humankind?

Trotsky's idea, Lenin's idea, Marx's ideas, Engels's idea, was very simple. There is no more simple idea. It was that only the working class and the oppressed masses could liberate themselves from the chains of capitalist exploitation, racism, and oppression. No other class is capable of the liberation of all humanity.

That is the fundamental difference between revolutionary socialists today, on the one hand, and Stalin and all those who have followed him, including Gorbachev, who continue to preach the need for the oppressed to look to sectors of the ruling denn frothrielibrantina Thin and han anlar class or melt mocrawon. duis rudu las umy led working people to bloody defeats.

Gorbachev is now posturing about rehabilitating some of those who died at the hands of Stalin and his heirs. But rehabilitation by the Stalinists means nothing because what was destroyed in the Soviet Union was not just a few names but the concept that was the very basis of the Russian Revolution: the concept that the working class should rule society, democratically, through its own organizations. That was the meaning of the word "soviets." The soviets were the first form of workers' rule.

Every time the masses rise, they give ine lie to Stalinism and all its ideologues. When a single child hurls a stone at an Israeli oppressor in Gaza, the power of the oppressed, of the Palestinian people, goes far beyond the entire power of the Zionist, racist, colonial state of Israel.

The Palestinian youth had no guns, no planes, no tanks. Their country had been robbed from them with the help of imperialism and the vote of the Soviet Union. And they stood up against the mightiest military power, and they demonstrated to every person who loves freedom on this planet that their cause was just. Their cause is our cause.

When they told us that the Shah of Iran had the seventh most powerful army in the world, and that 60,000 Iranians were in his jails, and that nothing could stop him, four million workers in Tehran toppled that been the masses, since the day the Russian masses took power, who have been at fault. In every case, the crisis in a particular country has been the crisis of leadership of the working class and the oppressed.

That's the function of the Fourth International: to help resolve the crisis of leadership; to give expression to the power of the masses; to put forward the simple idea that we, the overwhelming majority, can rule this world in our own interest— that we will not kill ourselves from the "greenhouse effect" by destroying the environment, that we will not blow up the people of the world with nuclear war, that we will only be able to live together in a world without exploitation, racism, sexCharlie Van Gelderen:

The following letter by Charlie Van Gelderen, a veteran South African Trotskyist, was read at the Aug. 6 rally.

Dear comrades, As perhaps the only person still active in the ranks of the Fourth International who was present at that historic founding conference of the Fourth International in 1938, I send you my warmest revolutionary greetings.

Throughout this half century, I have never doubted that, within the historical conjuncture of the time, we took the correct decision. The Third (Communist) International was dead-the victim of Stalin's policy of "socialism in one country."

In Germany, a heroic proletariat, betrayed by the leaderships of the Communist Party and the Social Democrats, was suffering under the jackboot of triumphant fascism. In Spain the civil war was drawing to an agonizing close, the sacrifices of the worker and peasant combatants not enough to overcome the misleadership of its traditional parties.

In the Soviet Union, scene of the first victorious proletarian revolution, the monstrous Moscow Trials were underway; the International. But this program can only be won by the oppressed themselyes-not by the Democratic Party, not by Gorbachev and the "reformers," not by paper reforms, not by substituting one great leader for another-but by organizing the workers to build a revolutionary party and take the future into their own hands.

Trotsky's ideas live because the masses realize there is no other way out. That's why you're here with us tonight. That's why 20 comrades, founding members of the Fourth International, stood up to be recognized. Together they represent 1000 years of struggle. And they still believe the simple idea that the masses will rule in their own name. leaders of October were being physically destroyed by the Stalinist bureaucracy.

It was in these conditions that, inspired once more unfurled the banner of revolutionary Marxism and proclaimed its faith in the ultimate victory of the international working class and announced a program which could meet the task of the day: the Transitional Program.

I was proud to be present on that historic occasion and I remain proud to still find myself in the ranks of the Fourth International.

Of those who were there with me, many are now dead; others proved too fainthearted to withstand periods of retreat and defeat. Despite our still small numbers we can look back with pride on our achievements. The Fourth International and only the Fourth International has carried forward the red flag of revolutionary socialism unsullied to hand to the next generation who will surely carry it on to victory.

Long live the Fourth International, builder of the world party of the socialist revolution!

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