The Comintern seen by the International Trotskyist Movement

This article aims to analyze how the International Trotskyist movement dealt with the Comintern. Up to 1933, the International Trotskyist movement considered itself the Comintern left wing, an internal opposition aiming to halt the “bureaucratic degenerative process” of the Comintern and to bring it back to the “right path”, that of its first four congresses. Instead, following Hitler’s victory in 1933, the International Trotskyist movement decided to disown the Comintern due to its indirect responsibility in Hitler's rise to power and in the debacle of German Communism. From then on, the International Trotskyist movement considered itself as a global Communist network alternative to the “Stalinized” Comintern: an alternative which officially became the Fourth International in 1938.