One organisation that took the post-war IS position of the Fourth International to its logical, and absurd, conclusion was the IKD, an organisation of German and Austrian Trotskyists who had spent most of the war years in exile in Britain. It published a statement in 1943 in which it argued that the occupation of Europe by nazi Germany had led to an economic regression', that is, to the destruction of technology and advanced methods of production, in favour of small and even handicraft techniques. At the same time, the democratic rights of the masses had been completely destroyed. The conclusion they drew was that the basic tasks in the post-war period would be the struggle for democracy, not unlike the capitalist revolutions of the nineteenth century. The fundamental aim of the post-war regimes, they argued, was 'basically equivalent to a democratic revolution'.

After WWII, the leadership of the Fourth International were still repeating old and out-dated ideas. Among such leaders was Pierre Frank, one of the leaders of the Parti Communiste Internationaliste (PCI), the French section of the International. He wrote an article which argued that in Western Europe, there had been established only Bonapartist governments, ie 'Governments by the Sword', denying, in other words, that 'normal' capitalist democracy existed. Ted Grant's reply was a devastating critique of Frank's muddled and un-Marxist approach.

This is an extract from a resolution presented on behalf of the leadership to the RCP conference in 1946. Like the other documents dealing with Western Europe as a whole, it corrected the previous perspective of the RCP, of an immediate economic crisis after the war. The resolution went on to outline a perspective for British capitalism of 'relative stability', which, at a later stage, would give way to 'a catastrophe greater than she has experienced in the whole of her history.' 

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  1. Economic Perspectives 1946

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