Editing Fourth International (section)

== Founding Congress ==
The International's rationale was to construct new mass revolutionary parties able to lead successful workers' revolutions. It saw these arising from a revolutionary wave which would develop alongside and as a result of the coming World War. Thirty delegates attended a founding conference, held in September 1938, in the home of [[Alfred Rosmer]] just outside Paris. Present at the meeting were delegates from all the major countries of Europe, and from North America (including three from the United States),<ref>{{cite journal|author-last1=Gurevitch |author-first1=Eric M. |title=Thinking with Sylvia Ageloff |journal=Hypocrite Reader |date=August 2015 |issue=55 |url=http://hypocritereader.com/55/thinking-with-sylvia |access-date=3 February 2021 |quote=She was one of three Americans to attend the Fourth International. |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210209042937/http://hypocritereader.com/55/thinking-with-sylvia |archive-date=9 February 2021 |url-status=live}}</ref> although for reasons of cost and distance, few delegates attended from Asia or Latin America. An International Secretariat was established, with many of the day's leading Trotskyists and most countries in which Trotskyists were active represented.<ref>{{cite web|author=M. S. |url=http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/fi/1938-1949/fi-1stcongress/ch01.htm |title=Foreword |work=Founding Conference of the Fourth International |date=1 January 1939}}</ref> Among the resolutions adopted by the conference was the ''[[The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International|Transitional Programme]]''.<ref>{{cite book|publisher=[[Socialist Workers Party (US)|Socialist Workers Party]] |url=http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/fi/1938-1949/fi-1stcongress/ |title=The Founding Conference of the Fourth International |date=1938}}</ref>

The ''Transitional Programme'' was the central programmatic statement of the congress, summarising its strategic and tactical conceptions for the revolutionary period that it saw opening up as a result of the war which Trotsky had been predicting for some years. It is not, however, the definitive programme of the Fourth International{{spaced ndash}} as is often suggested{{spaced ndash}} but instead contains a summation of the conjunctural understanding of the movement at that date and a series of transitional policies designed to develop the struggle for workers' power.<ref>{{cite web|author-first=Charlie |author-last=van Gelderen |author-link=Charlie van Gelderen |url=http://www.isg-fi.org.uk/spip.php?article206 |title=Sixty years of the Fourth International |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080928032352/http://www.isg-fi.org.uk/spip.php?article206 |archive-date=28 September 2008}}</ref><ref>{{cite magazine|author-first=Richard |author-last=Price |url=http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/transprog/wa01.htm |title=The Transitional Programme in perspective |magazine=Workers' Action |number=2 |date=April 1998}}</ref>