Includes a number of programmatic documents of the newly formed Revolutionary Workers league whose historic leaders were Tom Stamm and Hugo Oehler.

Fourth International (Revolutionary Workers league). Vol. 2. No. 1. June, 1936.

Contents: The Arabian and Jewish Question in Palestine, Programmatic Questions of the Cuban Revolution, Thesis on Communism; the Struggle for the Dictatorship of the Proletariat and the Utilization of Bourgeois Parliament. From the Second Congress of the C. I., The World Labor Movement- Synopsis of Chapter Four, Negotiation Documents of Revolutionary Workers League, League for Revolutionary Workers Party, Italian Left Fraction of Communism, The Revisionist Line of Cannon- Shachtman, Resolution on Negotiations. (Adopted at the Chicago Convention of the Revolutionary Workers League), Resolution on Stalinism, The Constitution of the Revolutionary Workers League.

International News was the theoretical journal of the Revolutionary Workers League (first calling themselves the Left Wing Group of the Workers Party), publishers of ‘Fighting Worker.’ It began with the split in the Workers Party in 1935. In 1936 it was renamed ‘Fourth International’ (not to be confused wit the SWP’s theoretical journal of the same name from 1940-56) from 1936 to 1939 and was renamed The Marxist in 1939 which lasted on that year. Fighting Worker was the newspaper of the Revolutionary Workers League from 1936 until 1947. The RWL was a 1935 split from the Workers Party of the U.S. led by James Cannon and allied with the Movement for the Fourth Interntional led by Leon Trotsky. Led by Hugo Oehler and Tom Stamm, the RWL opposed the ‘French Turn’ then happening in world Trotskyism whereby national sections were joining left-moving Socialist Parties. Fighting Worker and the RWL at first positioned themselves as oppositional Trotskyists, but by 1938 refuted Trotsky and his international movement as “degenerate.’, The exact date of Trotsky’s degeneration causing an organizational split between the group’s founders and, for a time, two rival Revolutionary Workers Leagues with papers called Fighting Worker. Oehler went to Spain to make contact with the POUM but was arrested during their suppression. Declaring a rival Provisional International Contact Commission for the New Communist (Fourth) International in 1938, they briefly joined with the Leninist League (UK) and the Revolutionary Communist Organization (Austria). Fighting Worker would be published monthly and then every two weeks in Chicago and New York. After suffering a series of splits in the late 1930s, including of Tom Stamm, the RWL went into decline and Fighting Worker ceased publishing entirely in 1947. In addition to Fighting Worker, the RWL published local, labor, and theoretical papers.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/fi-rwl/v2n02-jul-1936-FI-RWL.pdf