manifesto of the congress for the refoundation of the fourth international

The World Congress for the Refoundation of the Fourth International, with the presence of delegates from Europe, Latin America, North America and the Middle East, speaks to workers all over the world in order to call for a common struggle against the exploiters of humanity and to openly present its platform and political strategy.  

Workers!

In this precise moment the heroic resistance of the Iraqi people is beginning to humble the troops occupying their country. We are witnessing a people's uprising that responds to the massacres and the genocide of the invader with the national unity of the oppressed, whose divisions imperialism thought to use in order to subjugate the Iraqi people. Imperialism's adventure of war has sparked a civil war of international character between the masses and imperialism that extends beyond the frontiers of Iraq itself.

It spreads from the territories occupied by the executioner Sharon, to Afghanistan. From Iraq it has ended in the development of an Intifada on the scale of the whole Middle East.

The World Congress for the Refoundation of the Fourth International calls to join the international mobilization to expel all the troops, occupiers of Iraq, Afghanistan, the Balkans, Chechnya, the Caucasus and Haiti.

Long live the people's rebellion in Iraq!

The failure of the imperialist military occupation in Iraq occurs in combination with the enormous world-wide mass movement against the war. After the debacle of the right-wing government of the Spaniard Aznar, a picture of general destabilization covers all the regimes "allied" with Bush's adventure. "Street pressure," that is, the mobilization of the masses, has been transformed into an active factor of the international situation.

Iraq has been transformed, for imperialism, into a quagmire. Twelve months after the invasion, the very governments which commanded the occupation are on guard against their own downfall.

In the United States itself, the clash between the security forces and the Executive reveals a division in the hard core of the State. The relations between the United States and Europe and within the Old Continent are dominated by clashes, friction and breakdowns. The failure of the attempt to subjugate the peoples of Iraq and the Middle East is creating a pre-revolutionary situation spanning the whole globe.

The world crisis of capitalism

Workers!

For more than 30 years the capitalist economy has been shaken by crises and bankruptcies of unusual extension and the collapse of gigantic capitalist monopolies, nations and whole regions. Mass unemployment abounds in a growing number of nations and poverty takes hold of hundreds of millions of more people.

The capitalist restoration in the former worker States has provided no way out for this crisis. Russia is dominated by economic disorganization and an unprecedented social regression. An unequalled destruction of productive forces is being carried out there; it has not been democracy that has grown, but rather a regime of mafias and of criminal despotism on the basis of the old Stalinist bureaucratic caste of the KGB.

In China, the invasion of foreign capital to exploit the historic backwardness of the country is giving way to an explosive and unilateral social development which is bringing about, together with an enormous polarization of wealth, the demolition of the mainly state-owned economy, a gigantic agrarian crisis and mass unemployment.

Workers!

We are facing a period of decomposition of capital. The sporadic US recovery is based on unsustainable economic unbalance. The inter-imperialist contradictions threaten the survival of the European Union. The development of this historic crisis has reinforced the tendency towards the creation of revolutionary situations and of people's rebellions. As a whole, the so-called capitalist globalization in nothing more than the deformed mirror of the dislocating tendencies of capitalism, characterized by an unstoppable tendency towards the overproduction of commodities and capital and by mass unemployment which finds no comparison in any past epoch.

For the same reason we are witnessing a stage of imperialist wars. The struggle for the conquest of the eastern markets of Europe and Asia has a tendency of transforming itself into an inter-imperialist struggle without parallel in history. This inter-imperialist struggle intensifies the class struggle in all nations, especially in the semi-colonies.

War is the open expression of a more general phenomenon. Capitalism seeks a way out of its ever increasing difficulties in spreading and reproducing itself through the destruction of labor legislation and the regimes of social welfare. The capitalist decomposition undermines the underpinnings of the political regimes of the bourgeoisie; the fragmentation of the latter tends to dominate the world-wide political panorama.

We need a workers International

Workers!

The greatest challenge facing workers all over the world in order to confront the catastrophe of capitalism is their own crisis of leadership. The traditional workers organizations collaborate with the capitalists and form part of the State.

The "anti-globalization" movement, which has been developing since the big protests of Seattle of 1999, has made manifest that the capitalist catastrophe provokes an extraordinary degree of unrest among various social classes, including those wishing to save capitalism from itself. But what is necessary is a workers leadership that struggles to put an end to capitalism and establishes socialism on an international level. The "regulation" of capital and the "pacification" of imperialism provide no solution: they are reactionary utopia.

The capitalist governments of Mandela, in South Africa, and the PT, in Brazil, have demonstrated that, once they form part of the government, center-left leaders who propose "absorbing the shocks" of capitalist "globalization" become agents of the most unbridled capitalism.

The political disintegration of these governments and of "neo-liberalism" could be a factor of political clarification if it serves the comprehension of its insuperable limits and the need for a workers and socialist international political organization. With its integration into the capitalist government of Brazil, under whose mandate is registered the greatest slaughter of landless peasants at the hands of the land-owners, the United Secretariat of the Fourth International has been definitively condemned in the eyes of those immersed in internationalist struggle the world over.

Workers!

The world situation taken as a whole may be summed up as follows: the bourgeoisie cannot continue to govern as it has been doing and the social conditions of the masses have become exceptionally unbearable. The political crises that shake the failed invaders in the Middle East is only one aspect of the question. The crisis of the French and German governments is beyond all doubt. Important mass struggles begin to appear and to sink roots.

On the Latin American continent, to the disintegration of Lula's capitalist government and the braking of the revolutionary process which Evo Morales is committed to imposing in Bolivia, with the help of Kirchner, must be added the collapse of Aristide in Haiti. We are witnessing the huge failure of all the democratizing left grouped in the Forum of São Paulo. In its turn, the oligarchic pro-coup forces acting against the Venezuelan Chavez continue to fan the flames of the crises and the mobilizations of the poorest masses of the country in defense of the nationalist government.

Refound the Fourth International!

Workers!

The Fourth International stands out in international political action by virtue of this characterization of the world situation. The World Congress for the Refoundation of the Fourth International puts forward a program, a strategy and an organization to raise the proletariat to a position of leadership in the struggle against world imperialism.

The Congress for the Refoundation of the Fourth International speaks to the workers of the whole world. From the struggle against unemployment, for the distribution of working hours; against super-exploitation, for the eight hour workday and for a minimum wage equal to the cost of a family's basic needs; for the defense of pensions, the expropriation of the private pension funds and establishing workers control; for the nationalization of war-related industries; for workers control and collective workers administration; for the national independence of the oppressed peoples; for the destruction of the Zionist State and for a secular and single Republic in all the historic territory of Palestine; for a workers and peasants government. On the basis of this struggle we make this call to refound the Fourth International and to build a powerful combat International of the world proletariat.

Struggle, to victory, workers to power!

Buenos Aires, April 21, 2004

Submitted by: Manifesto Commission