Talk:International Committee of the Fourth International

message: I don't understand.  Is it a rule that only people hostile to Trotskyism can write about it?
:Hostile to Trotskyism?  I am a Trotskyist!  But we need to tell the truth about the world - and that means balanced articles on Trotskyist topics.
After all, not everyone in the SWP was "eager for reconciliation."  Whose interpretation is this?  And why does this interpretation take precedence?  How can you write about the Fourth International without a single mention of the concepts of "Stalinism" or "bourgeois nationalism", which are the main opponents of Trotskyists, who advocate a world socialist revolution?
:There's no need to go into the history of Trotskyism or the Fourth International except as it affects the split as we have separate articles on those topics.
The oppostion between the ISFI and the ICFI is precisely on these questions.
"In the ISFI, Pablo had lost prestige, and as both the SWP and the ISFI hailed the Cuban Revolution as unconsciously furthering Trotskyism, they grew together."
Unconsciously furthering Trotskyism?  Was this idea held by everyone in the SWP?  No, so why present it this way?  Only the ISFI believed in the unconcious furthering of Trotskyism, while the ICFI defended the tradition of Bolshevism, which stated that a revolution could only by won if led by a concious marxist leadership.
:I'm sure that you have a wide knowledge of the history of the ICFI and with a little discussion can improve the article no end.  It's important to present all points of view as neutrally as possible.  For instance, the ICFI (of course) claim that they defend the tradition of Bolshevism, but so did the ISFI (and do the USFI).  A discussion on shades of opinion in the SWP would be welcome.  However, I am concerned by your phrase "It's incontravertible that that is what Trotsky stood for, and that is what the Fourth International was founded upon."  Clearly there are disagreements about what Trotsky stood for, while there are also disagreements over whether the ICFI stands - and has stood for - them.
It's absurd that these ideas need to be edited out.  It's incontravertible that that is what Trotsky stood for, and that is what the Fourth International was founded upon.
And finally, for now, "*was* a Trotskyist..."???  It still is Trotskyist.
:Yes, this is an important correction! Warofdreams 12:41, 26 May 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: NPOV discussion

message: Reading through the minutes, I can't see any reference to the claim that "they were charged with refusing to give testimony on the split within the American movement". I;ve cut it until someone can produce a reference. (PS Sorry, I should have signed this) --Duncan 08:46, 14 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Sparts: they were charged with refusing to give testimony on the split within the American movement? 

message: Please do not revert.  If you disagree with something, remove it individually and give an explanation.  Then I can actually do the research and find the information you want to prove the claim.  If you make large reversions, it is impossible to respond and come to an agreement.
Questions before you revert again:
1.  What was the ISFI's policy towards the majority in Britain?  I think it's reasonable that they would be just as anti-democratic as they were in France.  Perhaps it was these traumatic experiences with Pabloism that made these sections less willing to compromise in 1964?
2.  Regarding Castro, Lula, etc.  Please reread: "They (ICFI) point as justification..."  That is, they look back at their predictions of the ISFI's direction and they believe they are proved correct by subsequent development.  They did not know everything the ISFI would do, but they did predict that the ISFI would abandon Trotskyism to support stalinist parties and to join nationalist movements.  It is not wrong to explain what a movement's current view of its history is.  Please be objective instead of attempting to remove all criticism of the ISFI!
3.  Why do you want to delete the fact that Wohlforth himself voted for his own suspension from the central committee?
4.  If you are not satisfied with saying that Fields was raised by a CIA agent, and you want to emphasise that he worked in the computer division, then why are you against explaining what he did in the computer division?  He was not a technician but a high level operative, adn they actually often had a former CIA director over dinner at home on multiple occasions.
5.  Why delete references to Seymour Hersh's articles in the NY Times, which clearly motivated the ICFI?  I am giving you the author and the source!
6.  Please cite source for claim that "Security" was only interested in assassinations.
7.  Why are you deleting references to what documents the ICFI studied?  During the late 50s, Soviet agents were tried in the United States, making available information not previously available.  The SWP, however, never investigated these.
8.  How can you reference Cliff Slaughter and ignore the role he played personally in the ICFI investigation?
9.  Hansen's laxness was summarized in his point of view that it's better to have a spy and provacateur in the movement than to sow distrust among members.  This is a lax approach to security.
In the future, if you make whole reversions with only partial comments, then I will just revert back again.  This is a waste of both our time.  Since you provided the source for the Gelfand thing, I am leaving it in.  I admit that my source was a google search and I found a government website that mentioned the case, and it only had the 1979 date.  This shows that I am not trying to hide the history but clarify it.  
You seem to be more interested in removing facts without offering a counter-explanation.  That is not a way to approach writing history.  We don't need to cite a source for every claim, only claims for which there are contradictory points of view and conflicting sources.  In that case, either one person concedes that the other source is more authoritative, or both sources are cited and the decision is left to the reader.  I hope this is clear to you.
:Hi there. I appreciate your comments; I understand that you're going your best, but we are hampered by a lack of references. Just to clarify. I am removing claims without sources, which is the way we work around here. I will do my best to answer your questions, but many of them really relate to other pages and other topics. However, it's your responsibiloity to find sources for clims you want to add into the article. For example, you continue to tweak the chronology to suggest that Gelfand went to court after he was expelled, but even The Gelfand Case, shows that these events happened the other way around.
:1. What happened in Britain was quite unlike what happened in France. 'The origins of the International Socialists' had a good essay on this topic by Richard Kuper which explains that the entrists and non-entrists voluntarily agreed to separate in the 1940s. Since Healy controlled his group, the IS was unable to expell anyone from there.
:2. Provide a reference.
:3. I didn't cut it. Look at this diff . 
:4. Provide a reference.
:5. The Gelfand Case argued that the case was prompted by the FBI papers from the 1940s. This is a reference to ConIntelPro. I can't find any reference that suggests that Hersch was the cataylst for the investigation.
:6. I took the quote from the Introduction to The Gelfand Case. I don't have it here, but it's probably on page 37.
:7. I didn't cut it. I changed 'admissions' to 'court testmony', which is a less loaded term. Look at this diff .
:8. The page already referenced Slaughter. I seem to recall him saying that the investigationw aqs run out of the US and that he had not role other than formally rubber-stamping it. If you have ereferences, then let's use them.
:9. I can't find a reference for Hansen saying that "it's better to have a spy and provacateur in the movement than to sow distrust among members", even if I spell it 'provocateur'. Can you find a reference?
:Please do let me know if you find any references. Thanks! --Duncan 12:59, 23 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Duncan's Reverting 

message: I have removed the floowing section:
"It was impossible, the Pabloites argued, to build an alternative to Stalinism in the form of the Fourth International. Instead, various sections of the bureacracy could be influenced under pressure to defend the working class."
This is not referenced, and does not fit with sources I have consulted. In particular, Pablo split with Mestre, Cochran and Lawrence on exactly these points. Are there any references that suggest that this, in fact, was Pablo's view at that time? --Duncan 18:13, 26 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Pablo: impossible to build the FI 

message: Actually, there are still TWO ICFI's not one as the article states. The smaller ICFI is still associated with the Shelia Torrance run WRP in the UK.
David Walters  —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 216.203.27.99 (talk • contribs) . (belatedly put in by Mr Stephen 23:13, 9 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I know they have a vague claim on their website to an international, but does it really still exist?  Who else is a member? Warofdreams talk 20:17, 9 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I think David is right on this --Duncan 13:00, 12 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Fine, but why?  Does it really exist?  Who else is a member? Warofdreams talk 17:06, 14 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I think it's likely to have no 'real' sections. However, we should at least refer to it as a way to avoid confusion. --Duncan 11:33, 16 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Fair enough. Warofdreams talk 22:52, 18 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Comment moved from article  

message: I am removing the HOAX and OR tags from ICFI because no comments have been made on the talk page to justify those tags. --Duncan 10:38, 12 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Hoax 

message: If effective leadership is defined as the ability to capture the stage, as it were, for some particular thing, in this case the bringing of the truth of revolutionary Marxism to the masses then page rank is probably as good an objective measure as anything available right now. That was the basis of prior body of the 1998-present §:
: After a year of internal consultation, in 1998 the american section of the ICFI lauched the World Socialist Web Site, which, by virtue of the page rank noted in the opening of this article and it's function in the primary task of a revolutionary leadership, viz. to raise the consciousness of the working class, establish the ICFI as the leading Trotskyist organization and indeed as the leading international socialist organization.
:: Lycurgus 12:40, 31 August 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Interesting. The view that leadership is the same thing as capturing an audience is original research and is not a claim that could thus go into a Wikipedia article. For example, Google gets more page hits than the US government, but Google does not lead the US. Page rank is not only a partial measure of website traffic, and it is strongly driven by the number of pages on a site: Alexa's data, for example, shows that the number of visitors to WSWS.org has fallen 25% this quarter, but each person reads more pages (as, over time, there are more pages). There are a number of important disclaimers about the accuracy of Alexa, which even the firm admits. Furthermore, around one-fifth of the traffic to the site goes to internal sub-domains, such as http://beta.wsws.org/, which are used only by the site's staff. --Duncan 18:52, 31 August 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  Well no Google itself does not "lead" the U.S. Government, but on the other hand the class interests of which it is a constituent owns and is said leadership so the given analogy perhaps not the best. Won't address the essential issue further since it's self-evident. Lycurgus 04:47, 1 September 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  Also with their revamped site going live tomorrow, appropriate to mention PR 6 is hardly that significant. My user page has PR4, Raul's has a 6. Lycurgus (talk) 07:06, 22 October 2008 (UTC)
replies: text:  My main user page apparently no longer has a PR but the MoCA page still has four and the POV page a 2. Raul still has a 6. 72.228.150.44 (talk) 14:25, 16 December 2008 (UTC)
replies: text:  The In Defense of Marxism and International Viewpoint sites still have PR 6 and 5 respectively. A survey of the whole field of these entities shows a lot of fractious and culty looking groups which if they were able to unify would be a significant political force. This is a new realization for me since I would have been of the opinion, as I'm sure most of them are individually, that it's just a matter of getting the message out and raising the consciousness of the masses. The real picture is more of a failure of these numerous groups to rise above their petty status to a unified grouping. 72.228.150.44 (talk) 22:25, 17 January 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  page rank vs. leadership 

message: Confused on the "government agent" bit about Joseph Hansen. Was he an FBI or GPU agent? Maybe someone can clear this up. -- 11:39, 7 October 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: He was neither. Hansen met with FBI in order to help identify those agents of the USSR involved in the assassination of Trotsky. The view of Gelfand was that although Hansen claimed to acting under the instructions of the Trotskyist movement at that time, the failure of Felix Morrow to corroborate that explaination suggests that Hansen was an agent and in some way was party to Trotsky's assassination. Indeed, it's rather unclear if he's supposed to be an FBI agent, helping them to root out Stalinist assassins hiding in the US, or an agent of the Stalinist assassins, meeting the FBI as part of a triple-cover play. Either way, it's barking mad. --Duncan 18:11, 7 October 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Just ran across a copy of Gelfand's 1978 letter (http://annotatedlife.blogspot.com/2006_07_01_archive.html). See the section titled "Excerpt from The Gelfand Case." -- Shinkansen 3013 06:33, 12 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Joseph Hansen: FBI or GPU Agent? 

message: In order to confirm the statement with a (citation needed)
Here's an in-depth article by wsws confirming the statement about what the ICFI thinks about the denial of globalisation by the spartacists :
http://www.wsws.org/exhibits/global/nblect.htm  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 90.13.193.183 (talk) 17:29, 24 January 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Citation needed about spartacists 

message: Please note that I made a series of additions and changes to this section  to make it more even handed and not a ICFI love fest. See the history section to compare differences 66.77.107.100 (talk) 08:48, 5 July 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  1971 to 1985 additions/changes/corrections 

message: In this article, the "Japanese section" of the ICFI is referred.  However, the ICFI never had a formal section in Japan.  There was a Trotskyist organisation called the JRCL (Japan Revolutionary Communist League), had contacts with both the Pabloite International Secretariat and the ICFI.  The JRCL joined the United Secretariat along with the SWP/US.East Japan International (talk) 05:52, 18 November 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Japanese section of the ICFI 

message: While the WRP(UK) still claims the ICFI label, they don't even claim to have other sections, do not appear to recognise any actual IC, and are derived from a group that denied the authority of the IC in 1985. (See here.)  It's unclear how they can really be considered just as much the ICFI as the group that had remained with the IC, but out of respect for balance, the article should state that the WRP(UK) still claims to be a section of the ICFI.  --Nixin06 (talk) 16:52, 17 April 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Two ICFIs? 

message: Many parts of the article read as polemical points justifying the ICFI at different junctures. Examples being the reference to ICFI supporters being "Orthodox Trotskyists" as counterposed to the IS orgs, and references to people who have "learned the lesson" of different events. 73.151.137.144 (talk) 03:05, 14 June 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  NPOV