Fourth International took place in 1938. As our contribution to a fifty-year balance sheet of the world trotskyist movement, we publish an article by Dave Packer on the continuing relevance of its founding 'programme': 'The Death Agony of Capitalism and Packer argues that not only is the transitional programme full of lessons and insights of great value to socialists in the 1980s and into the 1990s, We also publish interviews with Eileen Gersh, a revolutionary militant whose lifetime of political activity spans the entire period of the history of the Fourth International, and Charlie Van Gelderen, another militant who attended the founding conference of the Fourth International in 1938.
SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 10 November 1988
4TH INTERMATIONAL AMERICA SECTION 50 years of the Fourth the Tasks of the Fourth International: but it remains the bedrock of revolutionary socialist strategy.
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Socialist activism is often assumed to be the prerogative of the young, especially in Britain where a conservative labour movement establishment can often absorb today's youthful firebrands and turn them into tomorrow's comfortable bureaucrats. But there are some who have stayed the course and defended revolutionary socialist politics through a lifetime of political activity. Eileen Gersh is one of them. Dave Shepherd spoke to her at her home in Hackney, East London. Page 14
P AT SEVENTY-FIVE Eileen Gersh is still active as a supporter of Socialist Outlook, and has recently been very much involved in the Fight Alton's Bill campaign. But her political life started over fifty years ago in the early 1930s - a period dominated by capitalist depression, the rise of fascism and the approach of world war. A period, also, in which the young trotskyist movement was battling to keep alive revolutionary socialist politics of the kind that had led to victory in Russia in 1917.
As an undergraduate at Oxford University, Eileen got involved with the Labour Club. 'My parents were Liberals of the Lloyd George school but even while I was at school I realised that their's was an ob solete point of view and that the progressive possibilities were in the Labour Party and lay with socialism. It was obvious that if anyone was going to do anything about the depression it was the began to read Marx. It was mostly the political and economic situation that radicalised me.
An important memory for Eileen is of a hunger march from Wales which arrived in Oxford in 1934. 'We were drafted to help prepare meals for them, peel potatoes and things like that. We went out to meet the marchers and came in with them, shouting slogans. I was given a pail of water, a sponge and some rubbing alcohol to do their feet and treat their blisters! I don't think they would have dreamt of asking men to peel potatoes - and they didn't ask any of us women to do any of the important organisa tional tasks. But women were quite prominent among the speakers we invited to the Labour Club: 1 remember listening to Dora Russell, Charlotte Haldane, Naomi
'When Oswald Mosley's fascists organised a meeting in Oxford a group of us went to picket it, and some went inside to attempt to disrupt it. Then we held an impromptu anti-fascist demonstration through the city.'
Later in 1934 Eileen moved to London where she joined the
E M AN A trotskyist