The agenda for Latin America of the International Secretariat of the Internationalist Communist League (Trotskyist)

Abstract

[Peer reviewed article]

With the formation of the international movement of supporters of Leon Trotsky expelled from the USSR and the growth of dissidents in the communist parties that sought communication and coordination outside national borders and an ideological message justifying their own dissent, the need arises to a coordinating and leading body of the recently created International Left Opposition (OII). So was created the International Secretariat (SI) that assumed the task of forming the international Trotskyist movement and then the Fourth International. It was an admirable effort by a very small group of people with few resources to mount a movement of world dimensions in competition with the giant rival that was the Stalinist Comintern of Moscow. This text aims to describe the agenda of the International Secretariat in relation to Latin America, its Trotskyist groups and parties. The source base serves the collection of the Archive Henk Sneevliet, one of the secretaries of the SI, kept in the Moscow archive RGASPI which covers only 1932-1936, while Sneevliet remains in the SI. The author starts from the hypothesis that the relative failure of the international Trotskyist movement lies in its initial ideological and political heterogeneity combined with the commitment to centralization and ideological unification, loaded with political intolerance, inherited from Russian Bolshevism and the Comintern. The SI was unable to promote the unification of diverse and heterogeneous Trotskyist groups into a single solid movement, condemning it to marginal political existence.