draft of programmatic thesis for the congress for the refoundation of the vi international
I.
A new stage in the epoch of the agony of capitalism
1.
The characteristics distinguishing the present historical stage were determined
from the time of the dissolution of the Soviet Union and by the restoration of
capitalism now in course, in varying degrees, in Russia, in China and in all of
the former degenerated worker states. Although they never left the framework of
the world capitalist economy, which they could not have done either, their
disappearance has widened, geographically and socially, the domination of
capital on an unprecedented scale.
The
capitalist restoration has reinforced competition within the world working class
as hundreds of millions of workers reenter the world market. The expropriation
of capital, by limiting that competition through revolutionary means, had
signified progress in the struggle of the working class against the capitalist
class for the allocation of world income.
2.
The restoration of capital in the former worker states put an end to a long
series of attempts by the proletariat to overthrow the bureaucratic regimes
through revolutionary means. The political revolutions against the governing
bureaucracies of all the former worker states, between 1953 and 1989, debuted as
a rebellion of the productive forces that had developed in the framework of the
planned economy against its deforming and strangulation by the
counterrevolutionary bureaucracies. However, following the growing economic,
political and diplomatic alliances of the counterrevolutionary bureaucracy with
imperialism, those revolutions were transformed, objectively, into a rebellion
of the productive forces against world capital. The capitalist restoration
signifies, as a whole, that is, independently of the partial and relative
results it may have had in this or that country, a historic regression of the
productive forces imposed by the socially existing relations.
The
entrance of the bureaucratic regimes into the international system of foreign
debt; the increasingly frequent accords of their governments with the FMI; the
international treaties which committed the bureaucracy to the defense of
property and of the capitalist market (Helsinki, 1975, the ceding of Hong Kong,
1982), were further manifestation of the tendency of the bureaucracy towards
capitalist restoration.
The
disintegration of the state apparatus in China and in Poland, in the framework
of the "cultural revolution," the former, and factory occupation
towards the end of the seventies, the latter, marked the turning points that
left the "transitional" social regimes without a 'third option'
between the restoration of capitalism and the proletarian revolution.
This
revolutionary crisis not only reflected the exhaustion of 'socialism in one
country' but also the overall impasse of world capitalism. They took place when
the so-called international economic 'boom' of the post-war had drawn to a close
and a decade after the international crisis of 1971-75 that initiated a
relatively prolonged and extended economic decline.
3.
The restoration of capitalism, which is in its initial stages, has widened the
radius of exploitation for international capital. The opening up of the former
worker states has offered capital a new possibility for exploitation, involving
hundreds of millions of people (China) or the possibility of appropriating,
moreover, a sophisticated technical park (Russia). But this onset of a solution
for the saturation of the world market has been accompanied by a greater
saturation of that same world market itself.
It
occurs that in close connection to this widening, competition has intensified
between the international capitalist monopolies who have in their sights the
conquest of those new markets and a new division of the world market. The
greater geographic mobility gained by capital has accentuated competition within
the proletariat on an international level. Competition between workers is made
manifest, indirectly, through the exploitation of the productive forces and
cheaper workers, and, directly, by the wave of immigrants towards the metropolis.
In the backward countries relative overpopulation resulting from the collapse of
small production and the agrarian crisis is worsening, while in the metropolis a
marked social degradation is made manifest.
Since
capital faces the capitalist restoration with methods of its own, its
fundamental tendencies have also been reinforced: concentration of wealth at one
pole and social misery at the other; accentuation of economic anarchy and, as a
result, of financial and commercial crises; liquidation of the intermediate
strata and of small production; sharpening of the agrarian crisis and a rise in
peasant uprisings; a greater limit placed on the independent development of the
backward nations. In the end, driving towards new wars and new revolutions.
With
the capitalist restoration, the historical crisis of capitalism has not
attenuated but instead has sharpened. Because the collapse of the degenerated
worker states is processed in the framework of the tendencies of the world
capitalist crisis. From the former East Germany to Russia a true degradation in
the level of civilization is unfolding. In China, the invasion of foreign
capital has burst wide open the breach between the world economy and the
historic backwardness of China, giving way to development as explosive as
unilateral, but which provokes, together with an enormous polarization of wealth,
the demolition of the state economy, still the most prevalent, and a gigantic
agrarian crisis. The most advanced economies, on their side, suffer a series of
financial crises each one wider and more intense than that which preceded it,
drawing monopolies and entire nations into bankruptcy and social and political
upheaval. For the first time the survival of the European Union as a political
entity is threatened. The historical crisis of capital has advanced various
rungs up the ladder, which has reinforced the tendency towards the creation of
revolutionary situations and of social revolutions. The tendency of capital
towards its own dissolution is thereby made clear for all to see.
4.
The stage opened by the collapse of the degenerated worker states has dissolved
the system of international relations established by the accords of the post-war
and, with it, has generated ever deeper international crises. The exhaustion of
'diplomatic architecture' of the so-called 'cold war' is an expression of a new
stage in the overall relations between the social classes.
Those
parties responding to the international apparatus managed by Moscow have failed
in their prolonged attempt to recycle themselves into 'national' reformist
parties and in general are in a state of disintegration. In the same way,
numerous client states of the Russian bureaucracy have fallen, especially in the
Balkans, the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa. The capitalist restoration in
the former USSR has not only provoked a generalized economic disorganization,
but has also sparked the emergence of all the national antagonisms which lay
beneath the surface in its police state. The nations of Central Asia and of the
Caucasus have turned into a gigantic field of dispute for world imperialism. On
the plane of international political relations the new stage is characterized by
generalized state crises and wars on all the continents.
II.
The ideology of imperialism in the current stage
5.
The characterization of the stage in course, effectuated by official and
semi-official academia, as a 'globalization' (referring to capital) adorns the
capitalist restoration of the former worker states with a progressive historical
character. The globalization of capital, however, is a phenomenon which reached
its historic apogee a long time ago with the complete formation of the world
market and the emergence of imperialism. It expresses the decline of capitalism,
not its ascent. The historical regression that has a point of culmination in the
capitalist restoration now in course, had its beginnings in the bureaucratic
counterrevolution, which was nothing more than the expression of the pressure of
the world capitalist economy upon "socialism" isolated in
"one" or various historically backward countries. 'Globalization' as
restoration of capital where it had been expropriated does not constitute an
advance but rather a historical step backwards, and conveys, on the one hand,
the loss of historic and social gains in those countries as well as on an
international level. 'Globalization' is the ideological expression of the
destruction of socialism as a perspective, which was an historic conquest of the
proletariat during two centuries of class struggle.
It
adjudicates the transitory victory of capital over the non-capitalist social
regimes led by a bureaucracy, to a capacity of capital for indefinitely
revolutionizing the productive forces. This hides, on the one hand, the inner
contradictory character of capital and, on the other, its historically
conditioned character; the fact that the advance of science and technology,
driven by capitalism, not as a conscious social aim, but rather due to the
necessity of increasing the exploitation of another's labor, strengthens its
contradictions and makes them ever more explosive.
The
euphemism 'globalizing' makes an attempt to place an equal sign between the
liquidation of the pre-capitalist economic forms carried out by world capital in
the historic epoch of its ascent (liberalism) and the destruction of the
state-owned property and of the planned economy in the stage of monopoly capital
in disintegration.
It
presents the capitalist unification of the world market as a perspective still
to be completed, and not as a reality which has exhausted its historical
possibilities and which breeds explosive economic crises, greater social
catastrophes and even more destructive wars.
'Globalization'
denies that capitalist restoration has a transitory character, whose outcome
will be determined by the unfolding of the present world crisis.
6.
In the same way 'globalization' as an ideological fiction has the aim of
covering up the whole set of dislocating tendencies proper to world capital. For
example, the incredible extension of fictitious capital (indebtedness both
public and private, of investors and consumers, financial and speculative),
which far exceeds capital in its material form and which leads state budgets to
ruin. The development of fictitious capital under the form of an unprecedented
extension of the capital markets constitutes a powerful means of additional
economic confiscation of the workers, of the intermediate social strata, and of
whole states.
The
so-called outsourcing or sub-contracting, another characteristic of the much
touted globalization, does not represent a new historical phase of
industrialization pushed forward by the drive for the international division of
labor, but rather a parasitical development of the big capitalist cartels, which
substitute the industrialization of the backward countries with the implanting
of maquiladoras (giant sweat shops) and assembly plants, in order to exploit
cheap manpower and to loot the resources of the nations involved.
The
end result of these tendencies as a whole is the chronic overproduction of goods
and capital, the tendency towards economic depression, the generalization (this
indeed global) of deflation on an international scale and the highest and most
permanent level of workers unemployment in the history of capitalism. The
so-called globalization 'globs' together all forms of capital as 'global'
capital, but hides, in this way, its specific historical phase, that is the
exceptional level reached by its parasitical and rent-income based development.
7.
Capitalist development in the last few decades has reinforced the contradiction
between the world-wide character of the development of the productive forces and
of the market, on the one hand, and the national character of capital, the
monopolies and the States. That is, that there has been an accentuation of
capitalist anarchy.
The
reinforcement of the nationalization of capital unmasks the non-neutral
character of such apologetic expressions as 'transnational,' 'multinationals,'
or 'globalization.' The nationalization of capital is made manifest in a special
way by the supremacy acquired by US capital, above all in investment banking.
The
European Union has failed in its attempt to create specifically European capital
in opposition to US and Japanese capital and even in reference to the national
capital of the respective European states, that is, the French, the Italian, the
German and even the Greek. The national atomization of monopoly capital in
Europe has not been overcome either by the creation of a Central Bank nor by a
sole currency; the latter has exacerbated the contradictions in its national
economies, as a consequence of its accentuated inequalities of development. The
attempt to establish its own reserve currency, in competition with the dollar,
is a distinguishing manifestation of the national rivalries of capital and
constitutes a constant source of international clashes, diplomatic
confrontations and even wars through interposition (within and without European
frontiers). The coalition formed between various economic cartels of different
nationalities has, almost unanimously, a transitory character. It is the
manifestation of the clash of some national blocs against others, which
disintegrate in turn with each manifestation of the general economic crisis. The
national states are more than ever tools of the monopolies in struggle for
supremacy over the world market. This phenomena has accentuated with the policy
of 'free commerce,' which deprives the weakest nations of the possibility of
protecting themselves through measures of a political nature and leaves them at
the mercy of arbitration among the few more powerful nations, especially the
United States.
8.
The formation of the European Union has not been a lineal historical process. It
has represented, in different stages, the attempts at survival and adaptation of
the European imperialist bourgeoisie to the changing conditions of the world
crisis. Under similar denominations, it has represented different social and
political phenomena.
Whether
to contain social revolution in the post-war; whether as a framework permitting
the reestablishment of the old national states exhausted by two world wars, as
the only concrete forms of the political domination of capital; whether to solve
the crisis of overproduction through the partial elimination of commercial
barriers; whether as a political method to unify the offensive against the
workers after the end of the post-war 'boom' and the start of the present stage
of crisis; whether to organize the struggle with US capital in the context of
this same world crisis; whether as an attempt, finally, of the most powerful
states, especially Germany, to adapt themselves to the collapse of the USSR and
of East Europe and to annex the new markets of the East and Russia. European
imperialism has mounted a series of "corridors" (transport, roadways,
pipelines), with the purpose of connecting western Europe with the Caucasus and
even with central Asia, passing through the countries comprising the peninsula
of the Balkans.
Under
the pressure of the world economic crisis and of the struggles of the workers,
however, the centrifugal tendencies tend to predominate more and more over the
centripetal. The utilization of national rivalries by US finance capital tends
to fracture the European Union. The growth of this inter-imperialist struggle
conditions the world political crisis as a whole. From the Balkans, Russia and
the Caucasus to the Far East, Iraq and Palestine, the crisis, the national
confrontations and the wars express, more and more, the growing opposition
between European capital and states, which are also divided amongst themselves,
and those of the US. The manifestations of a tendency towards the dislocation of
the European Union has been accentuated, sowing confusion among those who
consider it irreversible and augur it infinite progress.
9.
The centrifugal tendencies and the growing clashes with US imperialism has
affected the rhythms of development of the political crises, with a special
impact on the old continent. This overall tendency condemns to ridicule those
who argue in favor of completing the development of imperialist Europe with a
"more democratic construction." The penetration of European monopolies
in the Eastern countries has reinforced the imperialist tendency of the EU,
sharpens competition among the international cartels, and accentuates the
growing social dissolution of the Balkans and the East and strengthens the
offensive of capital and its States against the conditions of the proletariat in
the West.
The
economic crisis that provoked the bursting of the US financial bubble in the
early part of 2002 has manifested itself most acutely in the European Union,
especially in the tendency towards economic depression affecting Germany, France
and Italy. The loss of positions of these countries in the world market, for the
benefit of US capital, has given rise to an acute tension between the
bourgeoisie and the proletariat, because European capital cannot deal with
international competition without severely curtailing the social and labor gains
of the masses. The attack against social security and health has opened up a
stage of violent class conflicts in Europe. The 'space' for a 'democratic
construction,' that is, within the imperialist framework, grows smaller all the
time. Idealized by its apologists as a way of overcoming the limits imposed by
national frontiers on the development of the productive forces, the European
Union has rapidly shown itself to be a brake against that development. In a
certain sense, explodes the attempt to fit in a single institutional mold the
sharp inequalities in capitalist development that characterize the EU. The IV
International denounces the imperialist character of the European Union and of
its purpose of Eastern expansion; emphasizes that imperialism poses a tendency
towards political reaction and not towards democracy; points out that it has
failed in its attempt to overcome the historical stumbling block of national
frontiers in the development of productive forces, and even more so, that it has
created additional stumbling blocks that have to do with its historic
artificiality; and clearly underlines the fact that the imperialist tendency and
the tendency to accentuate its contradictions lead to an intensification of the
class struggle inside Europe. This set of factors reinforces the tendency
towards serious political crises in the European countries and even towards the
posing of the question of power. The IV International inscribes within this
framework the political crisis of April 2001 in France, when a political
liquidation of the traditional parties of the right and left wings took place,
in combination with huge mass mobilizations, especially of the youth. Laid bare,
in this crisis, was the depletion of imperialist democracy. On this basis the IV
International denounces the reactionary character of the slogan for a democratic
and social European Union, and puts forward the total validity of the union of
the European proletariat for the expropriation of capital and the establishment
of the United Socialist States of Europe.
10.
The world economic phase initiated around the time of the seventies is not only
to be distinguished from that which took place in the post-war by an inversion
of the tendency of the general curve of development of production. It is
characterized, above all, by the cyclic recessions of explosive characteristics
which combine with financial crises of unusual amplitude, as a consequence of
the bursting of the speculative 'bubbles,' of the extraordinary indebtedness of
the States, and that of individual capital and consumers, with which the priming
of economic 'recovery' is being attempted. The financial collapses over the
period of 1997 to 2001 bring to a close the extraordinary speculative cycle
initiated with the 'euphoria' sparked by the dissolution of the USSR.
The
world economy, as a whole, is characterized by the tendency towards greater
financial crises and deflation. World politics, in turn, is conditioned by these
tendencies of the economy.
11.
The war of the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq, the Caucasus, Palestine and various
African countries has inaugurated a stage of imperialist wars of international
scope, which completely refutes the universalist pretensions of 'globalization,'
its idyllic character, that is, as purely 'economic' and 'pacific,' or the 'naturalness'
of the supremacy of capitalism in the present historical stage. The 'practical'
and ideological collapse of 'globalization' is expressed in the resurgence of
its formally opposed expressions, such as 'clash of civilizations,' the need for
'national constructions' or the term 'international terrorism' as a world war
which does not present itself as a confrontation between states.
This
new wave of war is but the preliminary stage of a new period of massacres. That
is, apart from anything else, an eminent expression of the quagmire of capital.
It does not involve simply a commercial rivalry over oil and the raw material
markets of Central Asia. It is an irrefutable manifestation of the fact that
capitalist restoration is a process of violence and wars. Its guiding thread is
the struggle for economic and political conquest of the space left by the
dissolution of the Soviet Union and for control over the capitalist restoration
in China. The hegemony over the capitalist restoration by any one of the blocs
in dispute would decisively break the equilibrium of the relationship of forces
among the various imperialist powers. The struggle for the conquest of the
eastern markets of Europe and Asia tends to transform itself, for this reason,
into an inter-imperialist struggle without parallel in history. This
inter-imperialist struggle, the expression of an enormous crisis in the
relations between the classes within each of the states, will come to augment
the crisis and the struggles between the classes in all nations, including the
semi-colonies.
From
an overall historical point of view, the present stage forms part of a whole
epoch, that starts with WWI and the revolutions following it, fundamentally the
revolution of October of 1917. The mortal contradictions of this epoch, between
the imperialist wars and revolution, found no way out in the course of WWII. On
the one hand, the victory of the Red Army over Nazism, the Chinese Revolution,
the extension of the USSR towards the east of Europe and various revolutions in
the colonies placed a limit on the solution based in the restoration of capital
in the Soviet Union. On the other hand, the defeat of the revolution in Europe,
the re-establishment of capitalism hit hard by war and the prolongation of the
domination of the counterrevolutionary bureaucracy in the worker states blocked
the historic way out for the socialist revolution on an international scale.
In
the last phase, the political revolutions, the fall of the bureaucracy and the
world capitalist crisis trashed 'peaceful coexistence' or the 'convergence of
systems.' The current historical period poses the alternative between the
complete restoration of capitalism through the barbarism of wars and social
degradation for the masses, or the definite victory of the socialist revolution,
which is likely to be reinforced by the disasters occasioned by the capitalist
restoration and which, therefore, could find more than ever fertile ground
within the imperialist nations. The reformists and the centrists have been too
quick to judge as cancelled the epoch of wars and revolutions and to pontificate
the aurora of an "infinite peace."
III.
The leadership of the proletariat
12.
The crisis of leadership of the proletariat has been the decisive factor of the
crisis which humanity has entered. In order to overcome this crisis of
leadership, at the present time the question of reconstructing the leadership of
the world working class comes to the forefront. A long period of time and the
experience of several generations have passed since the vanguard of the working
class could still speak in the name of a historical leadership of the
revolutionary proletariat. The defeats suffered by the working class, from those
which destroyed its organizations, to those political, and no less profound, has
made itself manifest in a backward movement in the class consciousness of the
masses; finally the defeat of the political revolutions has been brought about
and, as a consequence of this, the disintegration of the worker states.
In
the popular camp there has been a revival of petite-bourgeois nationalist
tendencies in its most backward and even reactionary forms. The so-called
traditional political organizations of the working class are found, in most
cases, to be overrun by the bourgeoisie, including the imperialist bourgeoisie;
the Stalinist parties have been painfully recycled into pro-imperialist
democratism. There is no manifestation in the heart of the traditional
organization of the irruption of the combative workers movements or of any real
tendency that demands from within a "return to the historical origins."
The organizations claiming to defend, in one way or another, the IV
International, have succumbed to this step backwards in class consciousness and
take on the role in most cases corresponding to the democratizing or nationalist
petite-bourgeoisie. This occurs even where the defense of bourgeois democracy
and of national identity are reactionary, as in the case of the imperialist
powers. The long decades that have passed since the bankruptcy of Second
International placed on the table the crisis of leadership of the international
proletariat and since the founding of the III and IV International, have left a
great temporary vacuum, that is, theoretically and organizationally, for the new
generation of the proletariat. The reiteration, by some groups, to the effect
that they represent revolutionary continuity, is nothing more than a petition of
sectarian faith, which has served to hide diverse kinds of ideological
degeneration. The subjective conditions for the reconstruction of the Workers
International, whose most developed programmatic point is still condensed within
the transitional program of the IV International, has suffered a considerable
setback, which can only be overcome in the framework of the international class
struggle taken as a whole which increasingly characterizes the stage now in
course.
13.
Since the mass demonstration of Seattle, in 1999, a great international movement
of struggle against imperialism has been placed in evidence. This irruption
constitutes one of the most noteworthy expressions of struggle in the present
world crisis. The anti-globalization movement debuted denouncing "the
dictatorship" of the organizations of international finance and commerce,
but right away also motorized huge mass mobilizations against the imperialist
war in the Balkans and in Iraq. Objectively, it has been a factor of popular
intervention in the political crises that have affected the imperialist powers
involved in the war.
Although
the presence of working class youth predominates in the anti-globalization
mobilizations, the proletariat does not intervene in it as a class, with
consciousness as such, that is, with its banners, its demands or even with its
organizations. When on some occasions the trade union bureaucracy appears, the
aim is to drag the movement into the camp of imperialism. There is no doubt,
however, that it constitutes a stage in the maturity of the current generation
of workers.
The
'pluralism' alleged by the movement is no obstacle for the predominance within
it of a perfectly organized political current which puts forward the regulation
of finance capital and pacifism understood as a factor of pressure of 'public
opinion', even pro-UN. Since within this current there participate, however,
diverse tendencies, including the Unified Secretariat, the degree of its
incoherencies is enormous. For example, it opposes agricultural free trade,
alleging defense of the thinly sparsed French peasant, but supports free trade
when it is proposed by the underdeveloped agricultural countries, managed by
Cargill or Dreyfus. It denounces international organizations who are in charge
of the regulation of capital but itself demands that regulation in order to
confront the growing capitalist anarchy and even to put an end to poverty. It
rejects 'globalization' in name of the defense of 'national identities,' but
confronts nationalism, even of the oppressed nations, invoking the need for
"another globalization." It is both "identitory" (tribal) as
well as cosmopolitan and liberal (imperialist). It criticizes FTAA but defends
Mercosur, which, dominated by the big corporations, has no other aims than those
of serving as a bridge towards a trade alliance with the United States or Europe.
Its international forums are more and more turning into podiums for the
representatives of imperialism, especially European, and as a go-between for
"dialog" with the 'forums' also held by the banks and big capital.
14.
The pro-imperialist course of the PT of Brazil has been a huge political blow
that the current defending the so-called capitalist anti-globalization has
preferred to ignore. The prior experience of the African National Congress of
Nelson Mandela, which governs on behalf of the big South African monopolies, is,
however, defended by the leading tendency of the 'anti-global.' Bertinotti,
another of its leading swords, is intent upon reaching an agreement for
government with the imperialist Olivo. This current, which has re-baptized
itself with the name of "another globalization," is internally
incoherent even in its pacifism, since one sector invokes it in Iraq but not in
the Balkans and only up to a certain point in Afghanistan. It proposes to combat
the violence of war with pacific methods, but above all as a 'pluralistic'
movement of opinion incapable of transforming itself at all into a factor of
combat and as an alternative to the imperialist governments that drive the war.
The
'alterglobal' characterizes itself as movementist ('movement of movements'),
that is, as opposing the building of an international party, especially a class
struggle one. That is, it lacks a proposal of power and avoids the means to
struggle for power and combats them fiercely. Functionally it benefits
established capitalist power. It confesses, in this way, to refusing to play an
independent role in the world crisis and that it will not be able to intervene
in it except empirically or circumstantially. The "alterglobal" is
determined in its denial of the possibility of revolutionary situations born of
the decomposition of capital. It denounces the attempts to convert them into
revolutions and into the historical path towards the taking of power by the
working class. Its "Trotskyist" wing (USec) adds, from its own harvest,
that the world revolutionary epoch initiated with the Revolution of October has
concluded. This posing of the question comes from Euro-communism, in 1970, and
before it from the theory of "socialism in one country." However, even
in a period of capitalist restoration, of backward movements in class
consciousness and of the loss of historical gains whose achievement marked a
long epoch of the world proletariat, the insurmountable contradictions of
capital lead to the creation of revolutionary situations, which can only be
resolved in a favorable manner for the working class if they are transformed
into proletarian revolutions and in the context of the taking of power by the
workers and for the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat on the
world plane.
15.
The experience in government of the PT marks the fatal bankruptcy of all the
political currents that continue to defend the Forum of San Pablo. The Forum of
San Pablo has become the principal factor of containment of the struggles of the
workers and of political demoralization of those in struggle. In Brazil, it has
formed the government having the greatest concentration of direct capitalist
representatives in the whole history of the country. In the recent Bolivian
revolutionary crisis it played a decisive role in order to channel the existing
leadership towards accepting a constitutional solution, and has even been
transformed into a direct link between Evo Morales and imperialism. It has not
even taken a position of unconditional defense of the government of Chávez in
Venezuela, on the contrary it has been the vehicle for the 'mediation' of
imperialism in the Venezuelan crisis. Going beyond even the Argentine
government, that of Brazil is to be found in the front lines of the military
occupation of Haiti. What is occurring with the PT repeats what has occurred
with the former guerrilla fronts or former Stalinist parties in Central America,
especially the FSLN, in Nicaragua, and the FMLN, in El Salvador.
The
destiny of the Brazilian PT confirms the pro-imperialist nature of the
professional petite-bourgeoisie that has passed over from foquism to democratism,
on the one hand, and the potentially counterrevolutionary character of the
bureaucracy formed in the trade unions, on the other. From the programmatic
point of view, it places in evidence the pro-imperialist character of the
democratizing proposals, that is, which postulate the possibility of social
progress within the constitutional frameworks of the oppressed countries, that
is, those who through an absence of national independence and of internal
capitalist development have not conquered the historic premises of democracy.
The
PT has transformed itself into a party worthy of the total confidence of the
bourgeoisie and imperialism after a prolonged period of integration of its
cadres and bureaucracy into the State, which was covered cosmetically by the
theory in fashion, as an expression of a "great capacity for political
construction." The political participation of the democratizing left in the
institutions of the capitalist State has once again been revealed as a powerful
factor of political degeneration. The parliamentary and municipal participation
of the Partido Obrero, ever since the Constituent [Assembly] of Santa Cruz in
1995 and the 2001 elections in Salta and in Buenos Aires, has served the
revolutionary utilization of the institutions of the state and the revolutionary
development of consciousness and organization.
The
political bankruptcy of the PT has given rise to a process of differentiation
within the democratizing left, one up till now of reduced scope. It is not a
socialist differentiation, either, because it does not criticize the
democratizing programmatic foundations or the opportunistic political
conditioning with gave birth to the PT (to displace the workers mass struggle to
the electoral arena and to organize the proletariat within the framework of 'institutional
normalization' initiated by the dictatorship of that time). Also absent in this
differentiation is the comprehension of the potentially revolutionary character
of the situation as a whole in Brazil. The leadership of the PT adjudicates as a
fundamental aim of its rise to the government the avoidance of a revolutionary
situation which might bring about a financial bankruptcy. That is, to combat the
'danger' of an 'argentinazo,' which it later saw confirmed in Bolivia.
In
the political crisis provoked in the Latin American left and in the workers
movement by the pro-imperialist government of the PT (and which will have a new
edition in the government of the Frente Amplio in Uruguay) we promote the
construction of revolutionary workers parties, on the one hand through the
implacable criticism of democratism or nationalist anti-imperialism of bourgeois
content, and on the other by developing agitation in the working class and the
masses, especially among the most exploited, such as the unemployed and the
landless peasants, on the basis of a program of immediate fundamental and
transitional demands. In the face of the experience of the PT and the Chavez
bourgeois governments, in Latin America, we demand the expulsion of the
capitalist ministers from the governments headed by the left; the breaking of
all ties with the IMF and the repudiation of the foreign debt; the
nationalization of the bank, of the big monopolies and of the land, under
workers control; the confrontation of capitalist sabotage through the occupation
of plants and factories and workers administration; the replacement of the armed
organizations of the bourgeoisie by the armed organizations of the workers and
peasants; and a continental action of struggle for the Socialist United States
of Latin America.
IV.
A stage of imperialist wars and of international struggle against the war
16.
The imperialist war in the Balkans has initiated a new world-wide period of
international crises, wars and revolutions.
The
IV International places no equal sign, as does pacifism, between the different
classes of wars. It denounces that wars are the product of a given social regime
and express the explosive character of its contradictions, and not at all a
particular tendency of any one government. They are born of the capitalist
regime of production and of the rivalries among the different capitalist groups
and are an instrument of economic domination and national oppression of
imperialism. The IV International combats imperialist war with the method of
social revolution.
The
IV International points out the obligation of characterizing wars according to
the social structure of the nations pitted against each other. It combats wars
among imperialist nations through the organization of civil war of the exploited
against the dominant bourgeoisie of its own country, on the one hand, and
through the revolutionary collaboration with the workers of the 'enemy'
countries, on the other.
It
also combats wars between oppressed nations as reactionary and calls for
fraternization between its workers and for a united front against imperialism.
We denounce the narrow appetite of the local bourgeoisies and their manipulation
by imperialism in order to reinforce the prevailing semi-colonial domination.
The
IV International unconditionally supports wars of the oppressed nation against
imperialism and participates in practical fashion on the side of the oppressed
nation. In the same way it supports the organized and mass struggle against the
military and political efforts of imperialism against the oppressed nations.
Among the latter it supports all political and military collaboration with the
tendencies combating imperialism with popular methods and effectively
collaborates with them without resigning at any time its political independence.
The national situations where the oppression of world-wide imperialism is
combined with a colonial or internal national oppression, by the local
bourgeoisie or even petite-bourgeoisie (such as, for example, in the Balkans, in
Syria and in the countries of the Persian Gulf), are only distinguishable by
differences of degree from the oppressed nations where bloody dictatorships
dominate. In all these cases we support the unity of struggle against
imperialism, including collaboration on a practical level with the local
oppressors against the international oppressors, without resigning at all, or at
any moment, the demand for national liberty and political democracy against the
native oppressors. The defeat of international capitalist imperialism is the
necessary condition for the conquest of national liberty. We defend the unity of
the peoples of the former Yugoslavia against NATO, as well as national liberty
for the Kosovo's, Macedonians, Montenegrins in the framework of a socialist
Federation of the Balkans (with Albania, Rumania, Greece and Bulgaria).
We
promote the unity of all peoples comprising Iraq against the Yankee imperialist
coalition, and the national liberty and self-determination, for example, of the
Turkoman and Kurdish peoples. We denounce the insurmountable limitations of the
Kurdish enclave supported by Yankee imperialism in Iraq and the insurmountable
contradictions, from the point of view of the Kurdish nation, assumed by the
purpose of integrating it within an Iraqi federation under a US protectorate.
The national liberty and unity of the Kurdish people assumes, primarily, the
right to free unity with the Kurds of Turkey (as well as those of Syria, Iran
and Iraq), a right which is incompatible with the domination of Turkish
capitalism, of Yankee imperialism and of NATO. The expulsion of imperialism from
Iraq demands the mobilization of all the exploited of the Middle East for
national independence and liberation, and brings to the forefront the struggle
for a Socialist Federation of the Middle East.
17.
The national self-determination, unity and independence of Palestine constitutes
the historic center of the question of the Middle East. The war of Iraq is
inscribed within the framework of the repeated attempts by imperialism to
liquidate national Palestinian rights. Imperialism has grafted onto the Middle
East a monstrous client state, the Zionist State, which is located on the
antipode of national liberation and development of the peoples of the region.
The national independence of the Middle East is incompatible with the Zionist
State; the defeat of imperialism in the present war would sweep it from the
meso-oriental scene. The struggle of the Palestinian people resumes the
historical determination for national emancipation of the Middle East. It has
won this right in its live struggle against modern imperialist oppression.
Zionism
has no progressive national character; its historic task has been the economic
and territorial confiscation of the native peoples, financed by an international
agency which is the proprietor of 99 per cent of the soil it occupies. Zionism
constitutes a counterrevolutionary obstacle for the free and universal
development of the Jewish people. The social situation of the Jewish masses in
the Zionist state has worsened enormously, on the one hand as a consequence of
the international economic crisis, and on the other as a consequence of economic
competition between immigrant workers, Arabs and Jews. The new mortal impasse
which confronts the Jewish people can only be resolved by means of the union
with the Arab workers in order to destroy politically the Zionist state and
forge a single socialist Republic of Palestine on the whole of its historical
territory, on both sides of the Jordan. The IV International denounces the
position which upholds that the gigantic militarization of Zionism opposes an
insurmountable barrier against Palestinian national struggle and condemns the
Palestinian masses to a long historical compromise with Zionism. On the contrary,
we emphasize the historical artificiality and fragility of Zionism and point out
that its destiny is conditioned by the outcome of the world crisis in course.
The political struggle against Zionism is not restricted to the region of the
Middle East but instead should have an international character, as much among
those faithful to Islam as among the Jews, especially the workers and the youth.
The struggle against racism and anti-Semitism should serve to unify Islamic and
Jewish workers and to advance the cause of the expulsion of world imperialism
and of Zionism from the Middle East.
18.
The IV International denounces the imperialist and oppressor character of
secularism in the States which have left behind them long ago their epoch of
national formation and combat against the clergy, and are, at the present time,
oppressor states of nations and nationalities. Religious neutrality in the
imperialist States, in the same way as that which occurs with democracy, has an
oppressor content. It is an arm of combat, not against the clergy and clerical
obscurantism, but instead against atheism and science. It is also an instrument
of struggle for the confessional faiths of the oppressor nations against the
confessional faiths of the oppressed nations. 'Occidental' secularism also acts
as a cover up of the ties that are reinforced daily between the states and the
official historic church, as is the case with the Vatican. Given the hegemony of
finance capital, these ties are historically closer at present than in the epoch
during which the separation of church and state had not been sanctioned. A whole
spectrum of corporations and foundations, which finance the unstoppable progress
of the clergy in the fields of education, culture and social welfare, assure an
increasingly close relationship between the clergy and the democratic state.
The
offensive of the French imperialist state against the youth and workers who do
not share the established religious beliefs, especially those who are obedient
Muslims, is a tool of capital against the unity of diverse sectors of the
proletariat and reinforces the communitarian tendency of those who are not
followers of the official religion, such as, for all practical purposes,
Catholicism. The secular imperialist states arm themselves with religious
neutrality, not as a means of struggle against obscurantism but instead against
atheism and communism. The circumstance according to which that neutrality may
enter into conflict with extremist confessional tendencies does not attenuate at
all the fact that it is a means of cultural and political domination of the
imperialist bourgeoisie and also of the official religion, through the support
it receives from finance capital. The same aims of dividing the working class
finds expression, especially in the imperialist or developed countries, the
promotion of "multi-culturalism" by the State, alleging the need to
protect ethnic or religious "diversities." The aim is really to
confine the immigrant workers and their descendents into a kind of ghetto,
controlled by a bureaucracy under the tutelage of the state, and to dissimulate
in this way the brutal discrimination of which they are made object both from
the point of view of formal rights as that of social conditions. The IV
International call on the working class of the imperialist countries to
strengthen its ties with the workers faithful to Islam through a common class
struggle against capital and to make use of that struggle and of the
organization it demands in order to emancipate themselves and their class
brothers from all kinds of religious obscurantism, first of all against the
dominant church, and from all communal clerical domination. The IV International
calls on workers of non-Catholic faiths to not be fooled by the demands for
cultural equality and to put into the foreground of their efforts and their
struggles for social demands, against capital, equality of access to the gains
achieved by the workers of the country in the course of a long historic struggle.
The IV International highlights as an example the persistence, the opposition of
the masses of Bolivia to Catholic clerical domination, and calls for it to be
made a banner for the participation of millions of indigenous peoples in the
social revolution and in no way for the defense of ethnic individualism which
has no positive future under capitalism.
19.
The IV International rejects any form of political subordination of the Arab
workers and peasants with respect to their bourgeoisies and feudal classes,
propitiated in the name of unity of the Arab Nation, and emphasizes the
importance of political struggle against the exploiters taking into account the
peculiarities of the different Arab states. It underlines, fundamentally, that
the struggle for national emancipation can only triumph through the taking of
power by the workers, that is, that we place into the foreground the struggle
for the overthrow of the Arab bourgeoisies and feudal classes and their
government.
Palestine
national liberation is confronted by a colossal crisis of leadership; the
totality of its petite-bourgeois leadership has passed over into compromise with
imperialism and with Zionism itself. The so-called Palestinian Authority is a
political barrier for the struggle against Zionism and for the struggle to unite
the workers of the whole region, especially Syria, Lebanon and Jordan, against
imperialist oppression and the semi-feudal, bourgeois or petite-bourgeois
dictatorships. The IV International places all of its energies into the
construction of a revolutionary workers party in Palestine.
20.
In the context of the present international wars, we denounce the collaboration
between imperialism and the pro-restoration bureaucracy of Russia in the war
waged against the Afghan nation, manifest in the leasing or ceding of military
bases to NATO in various Central Asian countries. This collaboration was
purchased by the Russian bureaucracy in exchange for its 'right' to continue one
of the most cruel and heartless wars in course, against the Chechnya nation and
people. We also denounce that this war of oppression is carried out in the
framework of an unfinished negotiation between the Russian bureaucracy and
Yankee imperialism, capable of detonating new regional wars of international
scope, for the economic and political carving up of the region around the
Caspian Sea and the Caucasus, particularly in relation to the exploitation and
transport of oil. The IV International supports the guerrilla struggle of the
Chechnya people against the Russian oppressor, supported by the European Union
and the United States, for its right to national self-determination and
independence. The IV International calls on the peoples of the Caucasus to
struggle in common both against Yankee imperialism, NATO, the European Union and
the Russian bureaucracy, and for the construction of a Socialist Federation of
the Caucasus.
21.
The fundamental field of struggle against the war should take place in the
imperialist metropolis themselves. The struggle against the war has given place
to extraordinary mass mobilizations and to the onset of political crisis of the
imperialist governments. This is already happening in Spain and Italy and to a
somewhat lesser extent in Great Britain. The war has a confiscatory effect upon
the peoples of the nations of Europe, whose states cannot deal with the growing
budgetary deficits (Italy has begun to put on sale its cultural patrimony!). The
booty imperialist war offers does not compensate the cost it occasions for the
hard hit national budgets and the worsening of the bankruptcy of the pension and
health care systems, both public and private, especially, even, that of the
latter.
The
monopolization of the principal business deals of the war by US monopolies and
the wastefulness of the United States in financing the war and priming an
economic recovery through a rise in the public debt, accentuates the
vulnerability of the European states even more. These contradictions are
intensified, in their turn, by the sharpening of rivalries between Yankee
imperialism and, in particular, the French, German, and, in part, English
imperialisms. In this way, there is a mounting accumulation of the action of
those factors precipitating even greater political crises and popular movements
of struggle of even greater importance.
The
IV International underlines the incapacity of pacifism to end wars which are
inevitably born of the regime of exploitation of man by man, and denounces, on
the one hand, its homeopathic character, as well as its anaesthetizing character,
on the other. We revolutionaries fight in favor of converting the crime of the
war into more and more intense political crises in the metropolis, especially by
highlighting before the masses that those growing political crises are the
inevitable consequence of its anti-war and social struggles and that they
represent not only the lesser evil in relation to liberty of action aimed at by
the bourgeoisie to continue their wars, but also the most favorable framework
within which to put an end to war through workers revolutionary action. In the
practical struggle against the war, the IV International puts forward the strike
and the boycott against the sending of military troops from the imperialist
countries, develops agitation against imperialism within the armed forces and
demands the immediate nationalization without compensation of all capital
promoting war, under workers control, starting with the arms industry, but
equally in the oil and pharmaceutical industries, as they have been denounced
internationally. To the extent that there is a growth in consciousness and
organization of the workers, these political crises should be turned into
revolutionary crises. The struggle against the imperialist war puts back into
the foreground the class struggle in the advanced capitalist nations.
22.
Imperialism has carried out the war up till now under the sponsorship, cover and
protection of democracy. It has had no need to recur to fascism. Not only this;
it has acted, moreover, to contain and dissipate pro-fascist or
national-imperialist outbreaks, as has occurred in Germany, Denmark, France and
Austria. It has preferred political rotations from the center-left, to extreme
right-wing coup d'etat. The present day pseudo-fascism, on the old continent,
has a limited field of action because it represents a tendency of nationalist
opposition to the European Union, which continues to be the principal arm of the
bourgeoisie in its struggle for a place in the world market and with which to
dispute the capitalist restoration in the east. The bourgeoisie is not tending,
in Europe, towards a war among its national interests, but rather is oriented
towards the creation of a political directorate of its strongest states.
Imperialism, in its metropolis within and without Europe, considers itself
better served, for now, by democracy. This shows the degree of class
collaboration of Social Democracy, the trade union bureaucracy and the left
leaning petite-bourgeois. Far from being the price of liberty that the workers
bureaucracy might have placed on its imperialist bourgeoisie, it is an extortion
of imperialism to keep it hostage of imperialist politics and war. Democracy is
not at all a synonym of peace when it comes to bourgeois democracy and even less
so in the case of imperialist democracy.
Imperialist
war and democracy are reciprocally conditioned, however, by the capacity to keep
the "social peace" in its metropolis. To the extent that the
capitalist contradictions and those of the war itself undermine that
"social peace," the democratic regime is seen as compromised. The
possibility of regulating or buffering the objective contradictions of capital
is outside the reach of the workers bureaucracy; so, if it still wishes to keep
the "social peace" under less favorable conditions, it must have
recourse to dividing the masses confronting the capitalist offensive, to the
paralysis of the workers organizations and their complete and total capitulation
before the bosses and the State. This is what the trade unions and the left in
Europe and the AFL-CIO in the United States have done. Since the mid-nineties
the leadership of the US trade unions has been in the hands of a reformist and
center-left leadership, which even went so far as to flirt with the mass
demonstrations "against globalization." A left wing of this leadership
attempted to bring to the fore the construction of a Labor Party. This new
leadership has been a strong bastion of Yankee imperialism during the whole
course of the present world crisis.
The
extent to which "social peace" is undermined in the metropolis is
given by the growing impoverishment the masses, on the one hand, and in
particular, following an ascending curve, mass unemployment of a chronic
character, and a strong tendency towards limits placed on democratic liberties,
on the other, with characteristics proper to the police State, advanced in name
of "the struggle against terrorism." From the US Pentagon, especially,
the aim is to turn anti-terrorism into the pretext for the complete
subordination of the armed forces of the other countries. Due to all of this,
while we denounce the complete dependence of bourgeois democracy upon
imperialism, we call to struggle for the defense of formal democratic liberties
and the freedom of organization in the imperialist nations, especially including
the defense of the unrestricted right to resist wars and ethnic or national
oppression by revolutionary means. We denounce the campaign "against
terrorism" as one led against the national independence of the historically
backward nations. We denounce that the political reaction in the metropolis
feeds from national subjugation and we point out that the struggle for the
emancipation of these nations is the highest form of combat in favor of formal
democracy.
V.
The inconclusive character of the capitalist restoration
23.
The enormous advance of the restoration of capital in the former worker states
in no way signifies that it is a historical process that has been concluded. The
theoretical importance of this characterization resides in the fact that it
conditions the characterization of the world capitalist crisis as a whole. It is
necessary to distinguish between the stages that characterize the development of
capital and especially the way the various stages are interwoven. In this
consists, precisely, the concrete historical analysis.
The
unprecedented transfer of state assets to a handful of private hoarders has not
yet taken away from the state bureaucracy born of the old regime (with reference
to the bureaucracies of the capitalist countries, even the most nationalized)
its place of exceptional arbitration. This is very clear both in China and
Russia, but is also valid up to a point for some countries of East Europe. In
Cuba that arbitration is the most autonomous. In Cuba the restoration of capital
has followed the road of limited foreign investment and there has virtually not
been any transfer of state properties, although the public economic assets are
found mainly in the hands of one corporation, the armed forces, which forms part
of the State, but which is not the State itself. In China, an enormous
penetration of foreign capital has taken place and huge private capital has been
amassed, but the economic assets of the State still prevail over private
capital, especially in the banks.
In
the former worker states private capital prospers, but a capitalist class has
not yet been formed. The mediation of private capital is predominantly carried
out through the bureaucracy and is conditioned by the administrative disposition
of this bureaucracy. The parliaments do not constitute, at all, representation,
that is, political mediation, of the capitalists as a class. Neither does there
really exist a comprador capitalist class having the monopoly over relations
between capital and the international markets, on the one hand, and the domestic
market, on the other; in China, Russia and Cuba that mediation is operated, at
least predominantly, by the State bureaucracy.
The
monopolization of state property may be a step in the direction of the forming
of a capitalist class, but is not synonymous with it. Capital continues to be
formed, in the domestic market, through the looting of the assets and resources
of the State. Although with shades of grey that vary considerably, capital is
not yet the dominant social force, that is, capable of effectively subordinating
all forms of social work towards the accumulation of capital. In China, where
this social intensification of capital is greater, this role is played by
foreign and not national capital (the most developed manifestation of Chinese
national capital takes place in Hong Kong and spreads to the coastal regions to
the south).
The
own contradictions inside these linked social formations, "sui-generis,"
of the transitional capitalist regimes, have had an exceptional manifestation in
the semi-confiscation of the Russian oil cartels Yukos and Sibneft, by the
State. The government of the Russian bureaucracy postulates itself as
intermediary between international oil capital and Russian oil resources. It has
been forced to proceed in this manner due to the immanency of a property
transfer of the Russian oligarchy, without capital with which to compete in the
world market, to international oil capital. The international political crisis
has intervened decisively in this partial expropriation of the oligarchy,
whenever the resources, the transport and the methods of distribution of gas and
oil poses international crises in the Far East, regarding the supplying of China
and Japan; in the Arctic, regarding transport to the United States; in Central
Asia and the Caspian Sea, regarding its deposits; in the Caucasus regarding
transport to Europe, which is also determinant with the pipelines that pass
through Byelorussia and the Ukraine. As was the case during all its past, Russia
is once again incapable of relating to the capitalist west through socially
independent capital.
24.
The question of property has not been resolved, at least in Cuba, China and
Russia, the most important nations in revolutionary political history. In Russia
the huge technological industrial complexes, the crown jewels of the former USSR,
continue, partially or totally, in the hands of the State. In the former
Yugoslavia in limbo still are the state sovereignties and the territories, some
of which even appear to be protectorates. Between the process of privatization
that characterizes the capitalist restoration and the present privatizations in
the bourgeois nations there exists much more than a difference of degree, first
of all because of the sheer scale, secondly because of its weight in the world
economy and in the redistribution of power among the international capitalist
monopolies, thirdly because a social catastrophe is implied for tens and
hundreds of millions of people.
In
China the capitalist transformation of property has been facilitated by the
absence of a large modern industrial state, at least in comparison with that of
Russia. But still to be resolved, on the one hand, is the destination of the
financial and credit monopoly still in the hands of the State, and, on the other
hand, that of the agricultural property of hundreds of millions of peasants that
exploit the land in the form of use leases. The state banks are bankrupt, with
heaps of unrecoverable loans equal to the Chinese GNP. The privatization of the
state banks presupposes a statement of partial financial bankruptcy of the
State, but also poses the threat of the collapse of tens of thousands of
industrial companies bankrupt, with the inevitable consequences of tens of
millions of dismissals. A state rescue of these companies would not only pose
the catastrophic perspective of hyperinflation but also an international
financial catastrophe which would result from the withdrawal of capital in
foreign currency that China has invested in the public debt of various
capitalist states. The extraordinary contradictions characterizing the
restoration of capitalism will be exposed under the fire of the imminent
international financial crises now foreseen, as was already made clear, on a
much smaller scale, in 1997-99, when the Asian crisis provoked the Russian
crisis and the downfall, in good time, of Yeltsin's government.
The
perspective of the agricultural privatization is already giving way to the
expulsion of the peasants from the land at the hands of the local bureaucracies
who exploited them up till now mainly through the confiscatory means of taxes,
rates and the levying of tribute. In China the concentration of land property is
already in motion and, parallel to it, the intensification of the rebellions in
agriculture. The granting of the constitutional right to private property is
aimed at consolidating the legal superstructure for the process of financial,
industrial and agrarian privatization, still in the early stages.
The
capitalist restoration could never be, fundamentally, an internal organic
process. Capitalism has reached a historic level of development which puts fixed
limit on that possibility. The capitalist restoration can only unfold as an
international process, subject to the hegemony of finance capital. But
international capital proceeds in its work according to its own nature. It is
obliged to approach and condition the capitalist restoration to the
international struggle for the control and hegemony of the world market and for
the monopoly of the redistribution of influence that the capitalist restoration
provokes in the world market. From here an important contradiction is put into
motion; on the one hand, a tendency to rely on penetration into new markets in
order to intensify competition for the monopoly of the existing world market
and, on the other, a tendency to block the restoration of capital to attenuate
that world competition and brake the entrance of new competitors. The foreign
capitalist penetration in the former worker states has been driven up till now
by the relatively lower price of labor power and of technological and natural
resources, sharpening the competition on the world market among established
capitalist monopolies. The massive economic re-colonization of the domestic
space of the former worker states is in great part conditioned by the outcome of
the commercial, financial and political rivalry that has sharpened, among those
monopolies and among their respective States. In sum, the capitalist restoration
constitutes a concrete historical episode of gigantic crises and revolutions.
25.
The workers of the former worker states have before them a spectrum of political
tasks: 1. The struggle against the bureaucracy, because the looting of the
bureaucracy in order to accumulate privileges has not disappeared but rather has
accentuated as a consequence of the tendency towards the restoration of
capitalism; 2. The struggle against the restoration of capitalism, because, on
the one hand, the privatization of the properties of expropriated capital is
still in its infancy and because, on the other hand, the privatizations
constitute a long process of struggle against the workers by the capitalist that
has taken possession of the state property in order to adapt the exploitation of
labor to the new conditions of production and the new conditions of the market;
3. The struggle against capital.
The
IV International rejects the positions that:
1.
call for the defense and even for the support of the bureaucracy, attributing to
it the character of a partial limit against capitalist restoration and a
moderator of its tendency towards the intensification of exploitation. We
emphasize, on the contrary, the accentuation of the parasitism of the
bureaucracy and of its own exploitative tendencies, as well as a tendency
towards close relations with international capital. This distorting position
concerning the role of the bureaucracy is made manifest mainly in relation to
Cuba, to a lesser extent in China and has reappeared in Russia in the aftermath
of the friction between Putin and the oligarchy that was created in the period
of Yeltsin's government. In conformity with the peculiarities distinguishing the
different countries and even taking into account the characteristics of the
political situations of the moment, the IV International puts forward the
overthrow of the existing bureaucracy and their replacement by workers and
peasants governments that put in place once again the dictatorship of the
proletariat, confiscate the bureaucracy and expropriate capital and establish a
system of government by workers councils.
2.
oppose to the integral privatization of state property the establishment of a
mixed or cooperative social regime, alleging that the association with private
capital is indispensable in order to overcome the historical backwardness that
the bureaucracy was incapable of solving or could have worsened. The perspective
of a brief or relatively prolonged association with international or even
national capital in the economic terrain, at the service of a historic cause of
progress is, however, conditioned by various factors: one, that the negotiations
be carried out by a workers government and not by the bureaucratic dictatorship;
two, not only national but international considerations, first of all the state
and the perspective for victory of world revolution. The social character of a
transition is determined by the character of the State; when the latter has
passed over into the hands of the bureaucracy, the mass privatization becomes a
guarantee, not of the old social conquests, but of capitalist acquisitions.
3.
attribute the destructive results of capitalist restoration, both real and
potential, exclusively to the survival of the bureaucracy and to the fact of
there not having been established an effectively representative democracy.
Actually, however, no representative democracy has ever been able to do without,
historically, a bureaucracy and, moreover, the political history of democracy,
that is the domination of civil society, has been nothing more than the
persistent control over civil relations by the state. The demand for formal
democracy has been, throughout the process leading up to the capitalist
restoration, the ideological mechanism that has hidden the expropriation of the
state assets by the bureaucracy, the private monopolizers and international
capital.
The
pretension of evicting from history the great social revolutions of proletarian
content of the 20th century, especially the revolution of 1917, by means of a
painless process, pacific, or gradual, has already failed. Due to the set of
factors conditioning it, the restoration of capital will have to give way to
gigantic international social and political commotions. In any case, a victory
for capitalism would only have the effect of delaying the march of the timepiece
of history. That victory would restate the struggle between capital and labor in
new historic conditions; that is, the competition, the concentration of wealth
in few hands, the socialization of production, the crises, the unsolvable
contradictions of capital, in sum, a new period of socialist revolutions.
VI.
The social crisis in the developed capitalist countries
26.
The most forceful expression of the world crisis is the incapacity of the
bourgeoisie to sustain labor legislation and the regimes of social protection,
which have been the main popular gains won by the revolutionary struggles of the
pre- and post-war. This incapacity obeys a phenomenal fall in the rate of profit,
historic, of capital. This fall is a reflection of the incapacity of capital to
reproduce itself on its own basis. The overcoming of the crisis of capitalist
accumulation demands a drastic increase in the rate of exploitation of the
proletariat. From here spring the tendencies towards labor flexibilization in
its diverse forms and mass unemployment. From here also springs the tendency
towards the liquidation of social protection (health, pensions), because it
forms part of the price of labor power that it is necessary to reduce
drastically. The crisis of the state budgets are a reflection of this situation.
The state attempts, first of all, to deal with the crisis of capital through the
transfer of the tax burden to the consumers, the privatization of the economic
assets of the State and through public debt; in extreme cases, through inflation
and hyperinflation. Afterwards, the burden of the interests and of the debt and
the limits of a greater tax burden pose crises for state finances and public
services.
Privatization
represents the attempt by the bourgeoisie to associate the financing of social
security to the cycle of capitalist profits and liquidate, in this way, its
character of legal norm which makes the State responsible for the social
protection of the workers. In times of crisis, the 'ideal' of the bourgeoisie is
to associate the price of labor power with the movement of capitalist profit (that
is, losses). From here arises the most extreme proposal for determining wages as
a part of profits. Growing unemployment and the relative fall in wages bring
about a considerable reduction in contributions to the various forms of social
security. Privatization accentuated, in many countries, the crisis since it left
the state with less financing for public security. It constituted a formidable
instrument of confiscation of the workers, because the resulting revenue
financed big capitalist business deals and unprecedented financial speculation.
The stock market crash of 2000 in turn provoked the collapse of the privatized
systems of social protection, especially those covering benefits and pensions.
The current picture is one of simultaneous bankruptcy in social protection, both
state-run and private. Regarding health, costs have gone up enormously due to
the super-profits of the pharmaceutical monopolies and the privatization of
medical attention, which upon adopting a character of capitalist business
signified at the same time an enormous increase in cost. The apologists of
capitalism attributed this crisis to the relative aging of the population, from
which is derived the need to increase the age of retirement. The fallacy of the
thesis is proven in that the simultaneous increase in unemployment and upping of
the retirement age simply meant an increase in mass unemployment. The protection
denied to the one who should be retiring should be destined to the unemployed;
the sums total correctly only by abandoning the unemployed.
The
reciprocal dependency between the collapse of social and labor rights, on the
one hand, and the capitalist crisis, on the other, is made manifest by the fact
that as labor productivity increases, capital demands an increase in the workday
and in its intensity and the reduction of wages. As the capacity for the
creation of social wealth increases, the demand, by capital, for greater social
misery also grows. It becomes clear, however, that the increase in the rate of
relative exploitation of the worker (through best technology) and in the
absolute (greater labor flexibilization) leads to a greater and greater limit
placed upon the possibility of obtaining the higher value produced by capital.
The way out of this contradiction, which will always be transitory, resides, on
the one hand, in the restoration of capital in the former worker states and, on
the other, in the devaluing of capital itself making its productive application
more profitable. The first way out implies wars and international catastrophes,
the second an unprecedented economic crisis, because the devaluing must be
preceded by bankruptcy.
27.
The defense of the social gains implied by the very life of the workers demands
a struggle on a historical scale, which poses once and for all the overthrow of
capitalism. This becomes even clearer after the failure of the failure of the
attempts at compromise of the trade union bureaucracy, such as exchanging the
continuation of social security in exchange for greater contributions of the
workers, decrease in benefits or moving up the retirement age; or allowing
collective bargaining agreements to descend to the level of the small and medium
company.
The
IV International puts forward the defense of all these social gains through a
system of transitional demands. Regarding social security we put forward
nationalization without compensation of all the private retirement systems,
under control of the workers. Retirement, a part of the wages of the worker
throughout his life, should be paid entirely by the capitalists, as occurs with
present wages. The possibility of increasing the retirement age could turn into
a positive factor for human development in a social regime without unemployment,
where the organization of work is under workers control and integrated with
personal vocations, that guarantees education, health, and leisure time, that
is, in the framework of a society open to a free decision-making process.
Regarding public health we propose workers control of the pharmaceutical
monopolies, state medical attention under workers administration and financed
under the direct responsibility of the bosses. The defense of health and the
workers retirement implies the questioning of the monopoly of capital.
Faced
with the scourge of unemployment, we defend, against dismissals, the sliding
scale of wages (distribution of working hours in the company without affecting
wages), but we add in the distribution of all working hours throughout all
society, through a bourse nationale de travail or national labor pool,
constituted by the unemployed according to their skills, specialization,
residence, age and sex. If the sliding scale of hours presents a challenge to
capitalist property in the workplace, the distribution of working hours
throughout society presents it on the level of the whole State.
In
opposition to the tendency of capital to lengthen the workday, intensify its
rhythm, interrupt periods of rest and vacations (annualization of the work
periods), to establish non-union and unofficial labor contracts, reduce the
minimum wage and wage scales, we say: minimum sliding scale of wages equal to
the cost of a family's basic needs; the eight hour workday; collective breaks
and vacations, the prohibition of dismissals; no time limit on labor contracts;
workers control of working conditions through enterprise committees; collective
bargaining agreements through worker representatives chosen and recallable in
assemblies. The IV International denounces the limitations of the 35 hour work
week agreed to in France, in 1995, because it granted as compensation the
freezing of nominal wages, restricted the recognition of overtime and allowed
its annualized calculation, permitting in this way the violation of the eight
hour day and the right to collective vacations and holidays. In France,
unemployment and precarious labor have grown and the general situation of the
working class has worsened. For the reduction of the work week to be a real
instrument of struggle against unemployment, it must be accompanied by the
prohibition against dismissals and against the lengthening of the workday, or
the intensification of its pace, with the sliding scale of wages and with
workers control capable of determining whether the social result of the
reduction of the work week has been a source of progress for the workers.
28.
In the course of the present world crisis enormous social and national struggles
have taken place, but the proletariat in the principal industrial nations have
been relatively absent from them, with the partial exception of South Korea.
Some important clashes are marking, however, a change in tendency, for example
the occupations of Fiat in Italy in 2002, or those in course in the shipyards of
Spain. But the social buffers of the class struggle are tending to dissolve,
especially in Europe, because a more and more intense contradiction with capital
has initiated. The IV International defends the need to occupy a place in the
front ranks in all the struggles sparked by social or national oppression and by
the side of all the classes, groups or nationalities that suffer oppression or
injustice. The struggle against capital involves all the contradictions and
antagonisms created or reinforced by world capitalist domination and among which
a relationship of reciprocal dependency is established. If England had been
defeated in the Malvinas, in 1982, let us say, the Thatcher government would not
have defeated the British miners in 1985. The IV International participates
together with the landless of Brazil, Paraguay or Argentina, the coca-leaf
peasants of Bolivia and Colombia, the women murdered in Mexico or beaten all
over the world, the immigrants without papers, the child slaves, the youth
demanding the full right to education and the movement of workers, especially
peasants, struggling for the defense and improvement of the environment, for the
defense of personal rights of all kinds against the police State which is every
capitalist state. The IV International intervenes in those struggles, not in
defense of any one particular solution (which are not really that), but rather
in order to produce a single international movement for the victory of the
socialist revolution. Only participating in the struggles against all,
absolutely all, forms of oppression may a workers vanguard claim its place in
the combative ranks of the international industrial proletariat.
The
closing down of plants and factories and the tendency towards industrial crisis
has brought to the fore the occupations of plants and factories and will do so
increasingly in the future. The occupations of plants and factories have posed,
historically, a series of questions, which are linked to the overall conditions
of the struggle. When they are connected to economic bankruptcy, they oppose to
the closing or massive dismissals the demand for the expropriation of the
company and its being operated under the responsibility of the workers
themselves. The IV International raises, in these circumstances, the
expropriation without compensation of the capitalists, the confiscation of their
private assets, the company being operated with state funds and workers
administration of production. According to the level of generalization of the
struggle, the formation of a front of occupied and administered plants and
factories becomes the order of the day in order to demand as, alternatively,
interest free bank funds for operating expenses under workers administration,
the intervention of the workers in the administration of the banks and the
nationalization without compensation of the financial system under workers
direction. While it is clear that workers administration of a plant or factory
or group of plants and factories has no future under capitalism, the IV
International warns against the intervention of the state or even the
nationalization of the plants and factories which are occupied or administered,
because they imply a step towards the destruction of workers administration and,
when the more general conditions are revolutionary or pre-revolutionary, an
instrument against proletarian revolution. To the nationalization of
administered plants and factories, on the one hand, and the individual way out
of workers cooperatives or self-administration, the IV International opposes the
alternative of the front of occupied and administered plants and factories;
their intervention in the state and private banks, including the financial
nationalization, in order to make workers administration feasible; its alliance
with the workers movement as a whole around a common set of demands and in the
perspective of a political mass strike. The IV International establishes the
distinction between national bourgeois nationalizations against foreign capital,
that has a relatively progressive character, and those directed towards
substituting workers administration, which go against the possibility of the
independent action of the proletariat.
One
task of exceptional importance in the present crisis is the organization of the
unemployed. This organization not only attenuates the rivalry between the
workers stimulated by capital but also tends to convert itself into a powerful
revolutionary arsenal, given that the unemployed represent the hardest hit and
most desperate sector among the masses and that which concentrates the
dissolution of capital as such. This revolutionary potential explains the
obstinate opposition of the trade union bureaucracy to their organization, which
however is irreplaceable in order to accomplish the most prized union task of
them all, which is the attenuation of competition among the workers. To the
extent that the revolutionary vanguard makes the effort to organize the
unemployed, by applying pressure in the trade unions and outside them, and
converts this organization of the jobless into a movement of solidarity with the
employed workers who struggle against lay-offs and labor flexibilization, that
vanguard achieves an unprecedented closeness to the working class as a whole in
the most advanced terrain possible. The fundamental demand of the unemployed is
the right to life and to work, that is, unemployment insurance, on the one hand,
and access to jobs, on the other. In the face of the attempts by the State to
adulterate insurance for the unemployed in the form of clientele social welfare
the IV International demands workers control, that is of the unemployed, over
unemployment insurance and over any form of remuneration for the jobless workers.
We denounce the World Bank and the NGO's who defend social welfare in order to
control the unemployed workers and turn those social welfare plans into a form
of social exploitation which competes with the employed worker. We denounce,
fundamentally, the campaign of the international center-left, in particular that
of Brazil, Argentina and France, that have made their own the demand of
neo-liberalism for a minimum citizen's wage. This subsistence wage aims to turn
mass unemployment into the 'status-quo' and to establish as a wage floor for
labor power subsistence remuneration granted to the unemployed family. In
opposition to these open or perverse attacks against the living conditions of
the workers, the IV International struggles for an end to unemployment through
the distribution of working hours, the minimum wage equal to the cost of a
family's basic needs, unemployment insurance, the occupation of the plants and
factories that close their doors, the sliding scale of working hours against
dismissals, the adoption of plans of public works under control of the trade
unions and the organizations of the unemployed, the progressive tax on capital
and the centralization of all the resources necessary to confront the great
social crisis in the hands of the organizations controlled or managed by the
workers.
The
IV International calls attention to the exceptional activity of women and youth
in the movements and organizations of the unemployed. This intervention obeys
the fact that they are the hardest hit by unemployment. The action of the woman
not only modifies the picture of the struggle of the unemployed but also the
social atmosphere taken as a whole, that is, which represents a shake-up on a
vaster scale, one which frightens above all the clergy and its followers. The
presence of the unemployed woman in the class struggle tends to exceed the
political limits of the feminist movement, by introducing in them the struggle
against capital. The action of the woman has an influence also in the formation
of the workers vanguard, on the one hand because it incorporates into its files
a protagonist of greater revolutionary potential, and on the other because it
corrects the tendency towards demoralization that unemployment, especially when
permanent, makes manifest in the masculine proletariat. The IV International
includes in its conclusions the enormous significance that the presence of the
woman has in the struggle of the exploited, salutes its contribution and calls
for the consequences it has for the reconstruction of the proletarian vanguard
to be extracted
The
attack against social security, the closing down of plants and factories, the
greater labor flexibilization, the reduction of wages, will give rise to a
period of important struggles for demands. The IV International calls,
especially under these conditions, to participate actively in the trade unions,
even the most reactionary; to form within them class struggle fractions; to
incorporate the non-unionized into the struggle, demanding for them sovereignty
in the making of decisions, by means of the regime of assemblies, the forming of
strike committees, the organization of a coordination between the factories of
the same region, independently of its union affiliation. On the basis of this
method of intervention the expulsion of the bureaucracy from the unions is
necessary together with the forming of class struggle and revolutionary trade
union leaders. The persistence of the bureaucracy in the leadership of the trade
unions in the course of the great workers struggles on the horizon compromises
the possibilities of a victory over the bosses and the State.
VII.
The question of power, the party and the International
29.
Taking the world situation as a whole, it is clear that the bourgeoisie cannot
continue to govern as it has been doing, and that the general social conditions
have become exceptionally hard to bear for the masses. The question of power
arising due to these conditions will vary, even enormously, from one country to
another, but a reciprocal relationship has been established between them.
Imperialism's quagmire in Iraq has already created an important political crisis
within the bourgeoisie of the US State and even within the Bush government. The
same has occurred, even in a more accentuated form, in Spain, in combination
with the biggest mass demonstrations against the imperialist war. The economic
impasse in the European Union has resulted in a fracture of the Italian
bourgeoisie and even a tendency towards the rupture of the pro-Berlusconi
fraction with its own government, at the same time as the trade union
mobilization is growing. The crises of the governments of France and Germany
exist beyond all doubts, while important mass struggles are insinuated and at
times sink roots. On another continent the imperialist pressure on Bolivia has
given rise to, last October, a people's revolution. The disintegration of a
brand-new government, that of Lula, is also made manifest. The collapse of
Aristide has given rise to the military occupation of Haiti. The oligarchy
favoring a coup against the Venezuelan Chávez continues to stir up the crisis
and the mobilizations of the poorest masses in the country in defense of the
nationalist government. Kirchner's grace period has virtually expired, after ten
months characterized by a method of government of permanent crisis. The
accumulation of financial tensions in the cauldron of the Far East has provoked
the transitory destitution of the president of South Korea by the big national
monopolies that feel their existence threatened by the penetration of US finance
capital. The Middle East is a powder keg waiting to go off, especially Saudi
Arabia, Iran and Syria. The IV International differentiates itself from other
revolutionary and workers currents, first of all, in this characterization of
the world situation. Taken as a whole, that is, in the perspective it offers and
in the reciprocal relationships (among the nations and the classes), the world
situation poses, with rhythms, historic characteristics and different
peculiarities, as well as an uneven comprehension of the acting classes, the
question of power.
30.
On the basis of this characterization, the workers or workers and peasants
government becomes fully valid as a transitional demand. This slogan signifies,
first of all, a policy that consists in developing within the traditional
organizations of the masses and in those created by them in the course of their
struggles, the comprehension of the question of power being posed and of the
fact that the real and integral satisfaction of the popular aspirations demand
the taking of power by the workers. When in the course of the struggle itself
and as a consequence of the experience of that struggle, those organizations
conquer a position of overall political authority, the workers government is the
demand we direct to those organizations to prepare the direct struggle for
political power. The possibility, however, of the traditional leaderships taking
up that struggle for power is remote or exceptional, even under the
revolutionary pressure of the masses. The IV International warns against the
danger of putting into the same bag what are the masses, their organizations and
their leaderships, because as the general norm the relations between them are
contradictory. The periods of political or revolutionary crisis accentuates
those contradictions, because these periods are characterized, on the one hand,
by a fundamental change in the consciousness of the masses and, on the other, by
a sharpening of the sense of survival in the leaderships seated upon the old
political relationships. In this sense, the demand for a workers government is
the method the IV International utilizes, not in order to give a new opportunity
for survival to the old leaderships, but rather to conquer the leadership of the
masses and the organizations of its combat for the revolutionary vanguard.
Even
though parliamentarism has been in historic decomposition for a long time and
the real government of the State is to be found in the hands of a handful of
bureaucrats firmly interconnected with the principal capitalist trusts,
parliamentary participation (and, as a result, election campaigns) is
fundamental, including even during periods of a crisis of power or having
pre-revolutionary characteristics. That participation should serve not only to
amplify everyday political agitation but also as propaganda, that is as
political education for the most militant workers. The circumstance of the
parliament having turned into a cover for the conspiracy of the State against
the masses (not at all into its representation), reinforces the need to
participate in it in order to proceed with a methodical job of unmasking it.
Without revolutionary work in the bourgeois parliament it is impossible to carry
out true mass work. In the conditions in which the revolutionary vanguard, where
it exists and acts, is extremely minority and its radius of influence is limited
to a trade union audience, it is necessary to exploit all the opportunities to
intervene in the election campaigns and in parliament. Trade union activism,
even the most consequent, may become a synonym for economicist methodology;
participation in the elections and in the parliament may serve, on the other
hand, in order to unfold a really socialist policy, that is, related to the
problems of capitalism as a whole, of all its social classes and the State. The
historic subordination of parliamentarism with respect to direct action of the
masses should not be confused with the underestimation of parliamentary action;
that subordination simply means that the parliament should be used as a
revolutionary tribune of propaganda, agitation and also of organization.
Experience shows that the presence of the revolutionaries provokes in the masses
an interest for parliamentarism that did not exist theretofore. These
expectations constitute a step towards the exhaustion of illusions in
parliamentarism, that had been under the surface. The presence of revolutionary
legislators incentivates the popular tendency towards putting parliament under
"street pressure," contributing in this way to direct action occupying
the foreground among the people's methods of struggle.
In
numerous countries, the decomposition of parliamentarism, which is nothing more
than that of the bourgeois state and capitalist society, is made manifest as
"a crisis of political representation" or "a crisis of politics."
This means that the exploited do not perceive the class character of
parliamentarism, nor do they characterize the political crises in course as the
result of the irreconcilable character of class antagonisms. This deforming
becomes accentuated when the petite-bourgeoisie plays a political role
disproportionate in relation to its weight in the social productive process. The
crisis of power assumes in these cases a formal characteristic, that hides its
fundamental social content. The experience of the recent crises and struggles
have taught that, in such circumstances, the slogan of the sovereign Constituent
Assembly could be capable of playing a great political role, understood, firstly,
as the overthrow of parliament and the national and municipal executive
institutions questioned by the "representative crisis" and, secondly,
as a link to the workers government and the dictatorship of the proletariat, if
it is driven by means of an overall program of transitional demands. The
political weight of this slogan becomes accentuated in those countries in which
parliamentarism and democracy have not grown roots, solid or otherwise, and
where its long existence has combined with crises, coups and dictatorships, that
is, where feelings in favor of universal suffrage are very much alive. The rapid
decomposition of the State has determined that, in many countries, the need for
a "political revolution" arises before the consciousness of the need
for the social revolution. What is important is that, on the one hand, it serves
to mobilize the masses and, on the other, it serves so as to be able to
intervene in the crisis of power. What is important above all else is that it
serve in order to bring the workers vanguard out of an exclusively
propagandistic position when a political crisis is under development which is
part of a historical crisis but which follows differentiated stages and rhythms,
especially in connection with the comprehension the masses come to acquire from
the events.
The
dissociation between the political crisis of the State and its concrete
historical content of the agony of capitalism has given way to a current which
opposes to parliamentarism "direct democracy." This is another episode
in the saga that denounces bourgeois democracy for its representative character,
that is, that delegates popular sovereignty to independent representation.
"Direct democracy" tends to occupy, in public opinion, the place of
"participative democracy" or "social" democracy of a recent
past. In a regime that is characterized by social despotism (the absolute
dependence of labor power, as a commodity, from capital, and the absolute
dictatorship of capital in the workplace), direct democracy reproduces the
fiction of the autonomous character of the individual which characterizes
constitutionalism. However, in the epoch in which specifically bourgeois
individuality is in ruins, "direct democracy" has less space than ever
and is transmuted into the pretension of skipping over parliamentarism by means
of the plebiscite. "Direct democracy," which is in relative fashion
these days, has points of contact with anarchism linked to the
petite-bourgeoisie, not to anarchism that was linked to the working class, which
subordinated direct democracy to the social revolution, establishing a point of
contact with the dictatorship of the proletariat.
The
workers government that has arrived into power in the struggle for the main
demands of the workers and of the political crisis of the bourgeois State, is
immediately confronted by the opposition of the whole of that State, which
represents the dictatorship of the class of the bourgeoisie. The workers
government can only be represented, then, as a brief interregnum towards the
dictatorship of the proletariat. Its possibility of survival depends on
disarming the bourgeoisie and on arming the working class, and on the
expropriation of the principal capitalist cartels. Those, such as the Unified
Secretariat, who have spoken of "workers power" but are opposed to the
dictatorship of the proletariat, simply do not know what they are talking about.
Actually they are telling a conscious lie. A "workers power" that
refuses to disarm the bourgeoisie and to the arming of the masses, would never
last. Given the circumstances of the crisis that determined its arrival as
government, it would not have the opportunity of even being a executive of the
bourgeois State, that is, a workers government of the bourgeoisie. A workers
government emerging from a mass struggle for transitional demands will be
confronted also by the whole of the State apparatus -its administrative,
judicial, and municipal bureaucracy, and the corresponding legal apparatus. It
must break capitalist power in the workplace, which is the real power base of
capital. Obliged to break the state apparatus integrally, it sees itself equally
obliged to begin to transform the social relations of exploitation upon which it
rests. It structures, in this way, a new state in the form of a collective
workers administration, which comprises the leading of the government in the
charge of workers councils to workers administration in enterprises, health,
administration, culture, and which is made manifest in an overall social plan.
The breakdown of the division of labor between governors and the governed means
the beginning of the dissolution of the state as such. Of all the tendencies
speaking in the name of the working class, the IV International is the only one
that struggles for a workers or workers and peasants government in its complete
historical sense of the destruction of the bourgeois State and the establishment
of the dictatorship of the proletariat. For the IV International, the workers
government is a synonym for the dictatorship of the proletariat, and uses it as
such in the agitation it carries out in the heart of the people.
In
the history of the IV International the demand for a workers government
established in its founding program, became distorted early on. At least since
the decade of the fifties it stopped being considered as a synonym for
dictatorship of the proletariat and the demand for the government of traditional
organizations was converted into the substitute strategy of the IV International.
The next step was to raise the workers government on a parliamentary basis, as
occurred with the Union of the Left, in France, since the end of the seventies
(with the aggravating circumstance of it being a popular front with the radical
party). With the euro-communist conversion of the Stalinist parties, the
dictatorship of the proletariat was replaced on a theoretical plan by the theory
of "socialist democracy," which reconciled the government of the
workers with the parliamentarism and with the bourgeois State in general. "Socialist
democracy" served to beautify the movement of the Moscovite bureaucracy
towards the restoration of capitalism, which it did with the slogans of rule of
law, constitutional regime, electoral freedom. In the rainbow of tendencies
claiming to be Trotskyist there exist a wide range of positions on the State,
but all have abandoned the demand for the dictatorship of the proletariat. The
theoretical degradation has reached the extreme of some of those tendencies
defending their national imperialist states, alleging that they represent
conquest of civilization which must be protected against 'globalization,' on the
one hand, and 'regionalization, on the other. The recent retirement, from the
statutes of the Revolutionary Communist League of France, of the demand for the
dictatorship of the proletariat, is the culmination of a long political
evolution, involving not only the Unified Secretariat, but all the tendencies
born of the split in the IV International starting in the fifties.
The
IV International rejects the identification of the dictatorship of the
proletariat with the dictatorship of the bureaucracy. It is not only about a
difference of methods between the two, but rather of social content, because the
bureaucracy defends the dictatorship of the proletariat within the limits of its
own privileges, which is to say, in defense of its privileges it combats the
social and political supremacy of the working class. In defense of its
privileges, it prepares the restoration of capitalism and is converted, as it
has done, into the principal agent of that restoration. We also reject the
identification, of the apprentices of human rights, of red or revolutionary
terror and State terrorism, which is nothing more than the old vulgarity of
putting on the same place revolutionary violence and violence of the reaction
and of the capitalist State. Also where the proletariat has triumphed, the state
exercising hegemony continues to be the capitalist state, made manifest by the
international system of states and commits aggression against the proletarian
state employing the organized force of the system of states established long
ago. Every civil war obliges the revolution to militarize its institutions and,
within these conditions, limits workers democracy, in the same way as in the
course of any warlike action authority is concentrated in a single chain of
command. The dictatorship of the proletariat suffers, then, the influence of the
medium in which it is obliged to act. The dictatorship of the proletariat, as a
workers democracy, flourishes when international development of the revolution
is most open, the greater the economic and cultural resources inherited by the
triumphant proletariat, the greater the political preparation and the school of
class struggle wielded in the overthrow of the bourgeoisie. Every besieged city
can become Masada. As Lenin said, the proletariat of the most advanced nations
will get things done better.
31.
Political struggle is a struggle between parties, the struggle for power even
more so. Social revolution in general, and even more so the proletarian, is a
historical phenomenon, that is which summarizes and concludes a phase of human
civilization. It cannot be started without a consciousness of that character,
that which becomes program. There may be mutinies and rebellions, and there are
with extraordinary frequency when a given social organization enters its phase
of decadence. But a revolution capable of putting an end to social domination
and exploitation, is impossible without a program and without an organization.
Capitalism does not allow the generalized development of general education or
the political preparation of the proletariat; on the contrary it stimulates
competition and rivalry among the exploited. Only on the basis of a workers
vanguard can the task of forming a revolutionary proletariat be undertaken. Due
to the unrivalled strategic role of the revolutionary party in the proletarian
revolution, the struggle against the idea of constructing a party and against
the party itself, is the ultimate resource of capital, which in this struggle
manifests itself principally through the democratizing, or at most socializing,
petite-bourgeoisie. Just as in the case of class collaboration, in general, and
in the popular front, in particular, movementism is a last recourse of capital
against the revolutionary proletariat.
It
is parties which must be built, not sects; revolutionary organizations, not
parliamentary federations; organizations of combat, not simply of propaganda;
with deep roots in the working class and in its history, as well as in the
history of the masses of the country and of that country itself. National
particularities play an exceptional role in the strategy of revolutionary
parties. Taking into account these demands, the form of development of the
revolutionary party recognizes all kinds of variations. In the current stage,
one of enormous dispersion of the revolutionary vanguard, the IV International
emphasizes the new revolutionary stage that has opened the present world crisis;
underlines the fact that the capitalist restoration accentuates, in the last
instance, this world crisis and develops revolutionary confrontations on a
greater scale than those known beforehand, even in the developed countries; it
underlines the validity of the historic programs of communism, from the
Manifesto of 1848, the first four congresses of the Third International and the
transitional program of the IV International; and calls on revolutionaries and
their organizations to elaborate an international program that realizes the
fundamental changes of the last decades.
The
reconstruction of the workers and revolutionary International is born of a clear
historical affiliation, but it cannot defend organizational continuity. The
Unified Secretariat of the IV International has become, at least as a whole, an
appendix of the democratizing petite-bourgeoisie, even in the imperialist
countries. The next workers International will be designed by historic events of
extraordinary magnitude. It is idle to speculate upon its characteristics.
However, it is not possible to struggle for that future International without a
program and a party. Our call to re-found immediately the IV International
signifies that we reject the policy of passive expectations in the great events
to come. Hence our proposal to regroup the workers vanguard in an international
party that struggles for the next great Revolutionary Workers International. In
opposition to the method of the sects, which consists in conditioning the
immediate re-founding of the IV International to a prior solution, purely
literary at that, of the political differences that may exist, we raise the
organization of an international revolutionary party, the IV, on the basis of an
exact political delimitation regarding all divergences. To build the
international party is the programmatic point that separates revolutionary
Marxists from the sect.
Submitted
by: Partido Obrero (Argentina)
PASSED
BY MAJORITY
Votes
in favor: 78 votes
Votes
against: none
Abstentions:
6 votes
INDICATIVE
VOTE OF OBSERVER DELEGATES
Votes
in favor: 4 votes
Votes
against: none
Abstentions:
2 votes