CALL FOR A WORLD CONGRESS
ON THE REFOUNDATION OF THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL
More
than a decade has passed from the collapse of the Soviet Union but World
capitalism did not succeeded to find a way out from its historical crisis and it
threatens humanity with a new wave of barbarism, massive attacks on all social
and democratic rights at home and an indefinite series of imperialist wars
abroad. U.S. imperialism’s drive for world domination in the post Cold War, in
the name of a terrorist “war on terror”, has already devastated Afghanistan
and Iraq and threatens with military aggression an indefinite number of
countries from the Middle East and Asia to Africa and Latin America.
The
war and occupation of Iraq marks the beginning of a new period of convulsions,
military confrontations, mass social and national struggles and popular
rebellions in the region and internationally. The unprecedented anti-war global
mobilization of millions of demonstrators, particularly from a new generation,
who flooded the streets in Europe, America and the entire world before and
during the war against Iraq, became a global political factor. Immediately after
the second Gulf War, a new wave of mass strikes has shaken France and Austria.
This upsurge of the masses in those countries coincides now with revolutionary
rebellions in the periphery, the Palestinian Intifada and the developing Iraqi
Intifada in the Middle East, the Argentinazo, and the revolts in Bolivia,
Ecuador, Peru, Uruguay and in the entire Latin American Continent.
Despite
the initial euphoria for a “final and complete victory” of Capitalism, its
sharpening world contradictions are expressing its historical tendency to its
dissolution on a world scale. The working class, all the exploited and oppressed
masses resist powerfully against the devastating effects of the world capitalist
crisis. But to confront victoriously a world capitalist system, striving
desperately to find a way out with the most violent means, the emerging
revolutionary subject of the fighting proletariat and the multitudes of the
oppressed need to elaborate a program for a socialist solution of the crisis, a
revolutionary strategy, an international perspective and organization: in other
words, it needs urgently an International, a World Party of the socialist
revolution.
The
organizations, whish sign this Call, have already launched from 1997 onwards an
international campaign for the establishment of the revolutionary International
of the 21st century, drowning on all the lessons and revolutionary
experiences of the 20th century and of the historical past, a combat
force in the present struggles and open to the future. We fight for the
re-foundation of the Fourth International that Trotsky and his comrades have
founded in 1938, in the darkest moments of History, to defend, complete
and extend world wide the “assault to heaven” started with the 1917 October
Socialist Revolution. This International was fragmented and its Program
abandoned or fossilized afterwards; but the actuality of the Fourth
International and of the method of its transitional Program, the actuality of
the struggle for a world October and the tradition of struggle embodied in it
are historically vindicated and urgently needed to be developed. The world
historical cycle opened in 1917 did not closed with Stalinism, the organizer of
defeats and gravedigger of the Soviet Union itself in 1991. The historic
character of the world crisis of Capitalism in the decade following this
collapse, producing wars and revolutions reasserts the nature of our epoch as
the transitional epoch of the decline of Capitalism and of world socialist
revolution. The much publicized ‘Globalization’ did not opened a new
historical epoch but deepened the decay of Capitalism; it did not solved the
crisis of the system but it ‘globalized’ it on a scale, which makes
necessary more than ever before a global solution to this crisis by
revolutionary means. This necessity is manifested as well in the movement that
erupted in Seattle and Genoa, the global anti-war movement and now the growing
class battles in Europe and internationally.
Because
of their crisis, the imperialists try to divert and neutralize this growing
movement of social struggle, to manipulate it with Center Left forms of class
collaboration and integration to stabilize bourgeois rule in crisis. The old
social democratic reformist bureaucracies and Stalinist Communist Parties as
well as the ‘new left’ leaderships of the “alterglobalization” movement
(World Social Forum, ATTAC etc. assisted by sectors of the ‘far left”,
including some of those referring themselves as “Trotskyists” such as the
“United Secretariat of the 4th International”) are inserted in
the framework of this phony Center Left “solution”. The example of the
vicious social liberal attacks against the workers and landless peasants waged
by the Lula government in Brazil- the embodiment of the Porto Alegre WSF “spirit”-
is a serious warning about the role of these forces.
Against
all these political forces that try to tie the masses and their vanguard
sections to the capitalist system and its international institutions trough a
“constructive dialogue” with the IMF-World Bank, the WTO, the European Union
etc. we re-assert the principles stressed to be necessarily included in the
discussion for the re-foundation of the Fourth International:
1.
The actuality of the struggle for the socialist revolution and the
dictatorship of proletariat
2.
The reaffirmation of the necessity to fight against any bloc with the
democratic bourgeoisie, against all forms of “popular-frontist” class
collaboration inescapably leading to the reduction of the proletariat and of its
Party into appendices of capital.
3.
The necessity of the social and/or political revolution in former Soviet
Union and Eastern Europe, in China, Indochina, North Korea and Cuba.
4.
The elaboration of a strategy for the overthrow of capitalism based on
the method of transitional demands.
On the basis of these principles, we call all the
vanguard fighters and revolutionary organizations of the class struggle Left to
join us in the discussion and elaboration of the
Program and Perspectives for the Re-foundation of the Fourth International in a
World Congress of elected delegates, which will take place in Buenos Aires,
Argentina, the last week of November 2003.
16
June 2003
The
Coordinating Committee of the Movement for the Re-foundation of the Fourth
International
Partido
Obrero (Argentina)
Luis Oviedo
EEK
(Greece) Savas Michael-Matsas
Associazione
Marxista Rivoluzionaria Progetto Comunista (Italy)
Franco Grisolia
Marxist
Workers League (Turkey) Ender Coscun
Socialist
Workers League (Palestine) Yitzhak Betzalel