The League for the Fifth International recently held its Ninth Congress in Colombo, Sri Lanka. At its conclusion, the Congress issued the following declaration.
Historic periods of crisis of the whole capitalist system, such as we have seen since 2007/2008, put all political and social forces to the test. The first five years of this global crisis period confirm that assessment. Despite the short-lived upswing in a number of countries after the global recession, even the most “optimistic” bourgeois commentators, economists and “experts” have to recognise that the crisis is “far from over”.
We are not living through a “normal” cyclical economic crisis. Events confirm that we have entered a longer term period of stagnation and decline. The rulers of this world, the capitalist classes of the large imperialist powers, cannot “rescue” their system without a historic onslaught on workers, youth, women, national and ethnic minorities in their own heartlands. They cannot rescue their system without the wholesale destruction of productive forces, the dismantling of social welfare systems and huge reductions in the jobs and working conditions of the workers and the masses. They cannot rescue their system without sharpening the antagonisms between the rulers and the oppressed.
Globally, they cannot rescue their system without increased imperialist exploitation and plunder of the oppressed nations. Capitalism’s new lease of life after the collapse of the Soviet Bloc only served to deepen its contradictions and capacity for crisis. Above all, the restoration of capitalism in China, and the country’s subsequent growth into a new imperialist power, is confirming once again that the only future that capitalism can offer is one of increasing conflict. The “Great Powers” cannot restructure and rejuvenate their system without a redivision of the world. New alliances and blocks are in formation, threats and militarisation are accompanied by “disarmament talks”. All this echoes the early 20th century and should ring the alarm bells for every worker.
Finally, the measures taken by the ruling classes to “counter” the crisis increase the threat that the capitalist system already poses for the environment, the natural pre-conditions for the survival of human society. Everywhere, the drive for profit and accumulation takes priority over environmental protection and sustainable production. Even the melting of the Arctic ice-cap is seen primarily as an opportunity for increased oil and gas extraction.
The scale and duration of the current crisis demonstrate once again that capitalist property relations are a fetter to the further development of human society. The system of private ownership and control over the social production of the global economy must go if humanity is to be free of the twin yokes of exploitation and oppression, if we want to establish a rational system of democratic planning of production and reproduction, based on human need, not private profit.
If anything is a permanent feature of the current period, it is instability; rapid changes in the political and economic situation, unexpected disruptions in supposedly settled regimes, the most dramatic political mobilisations by the supposedly quiescent, “unpolitical” masses. We have seen millions respond to the attacks of their ruling classes with heroism and determination. The global crisis of capitalism has indeed rallied its gravedigger; the working class and its allies.
The resistance has culminated in revolutionary situations and mass mobilisations of millions in Europe, particularly in Greece. It has led to mass movements like Occupy in the US or the Indignados in Spain. In China, we see tens of thousands mobilised in disputes between the workers and peasants on the one side and the bureaucracy and capitalists on the other.
The youth have been hit particularly hard by the crisis. A whole generation faces its future without any perspective beyond more exploitation, more unemployment, more oppression. No wonder young people are at the forefront of struggles, uprisings and revolutions. They need to be won to a conscious struggle for socialism and the building of an international revolutionary youth movement.
In India, we have seen two general strikes of tens of millions and the emergence of a mass women’s movement. The crisis hits women dramatically, particularly in the semi-colonial world. It enforces the double burden women face at work and in the home. The formation of a working class women’s movement is the key to rallying them for women’s liberation.
And, two years ago, we saw the Arab revolutions, when millions rose and toppled dictators like Ben Ali, Mubarak or Gaddafi who had seemed unmoveable for decades. The international movement that those revolutions unleashed continues today in the heroic struggle of the Syrian masses against Assad.
These truly revolutionary developments, notwithstanding the counter-revolutionary dangers they embody like any revolutionary development, prove that the the masses are not willing to live anymore like they lived before. They prove that the working class, the peasantry, the urban and rural poor are far from “accepting” that they should pay for the global crisis. But, the revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa have now entered a crucial stage in which imperialism, Islamists and liberal bourgeois forces all hope to derail the movement and rob the workers and poor of the fruits of their struggles.
At the same time, the last five years have also been marked by an unevenness in political and social developments. This was itself a result of the methods used by the imperialists to prevent the break-down of the global financial system; massive financial bail-outs to save financial and industrial monopolies from collapse. These measures themselves will deepen the structural causes of the crisis and make future explosions even more severe.
The ruling classes in the US, and many of the other major imperialist countries, like Germany, would have been unable to achieve even a temporary stabilisation of their system after the global recession without the leaders of the trade unions and large social-democratic and Labour parties coming to their aid. At the same time, such leaders’ actions undermine their support and generate opposition and discontent within their memberships. This not only reduces their ability to provide the same service to capital in future crises but leads to workers turning away from “their” traditional organisation or at least to divisions within their ranks – developments revolutionaries need to facilitate with vigour.
Such developments, however, highlight the most important feature of the crisis – the lack of working class leadership and parties capable of leading effective resistance to the capitalists and their states. Decades after the collapse of the Fourth International, the last genuinely revolutionary international party, the crisis of leadership is becoming ever more acute. Revolutionary forces remain marginal. What are known as the “Far Left’ organisations, many of which had their origins in the collapse of the Fourth International, fail to fight for a consistent revolutionary programme and instead waver between revolution and reform, most often expressed in a combination of revolutionary slogans and opportunist adaptation to existing leaderships. Decades of Stalinist, social-democratic, populist, syndicalist and bureaucratic misleadership have left working class organisations all around the world weakened and demoralised. They are handicapped by a legacy of bureaucratic organisation that stifles both militancy and creativity as the workers attempt to grapple with the impact of the crisis.
Solving the crisis of leadership is not just a question of replacing existing leaders. It is about re-shaping the workers’ movement at every level and in all spheres of struggle; in the work places and trade unions, organising the unorganised, the migrants, the racially and nationally oppressed, by fighting all forms of oppression of lesbians, gay and transgender people, by fighting for the creation of a working class women’s movement and a revolutionary youth movement.
To fight for this, revolutionaries need their own, genuine revolutionary organisations, their own revolutionary tendency, based on a common programme, a common understanding of the tasks ahead and a common goal: the creation of new revolutionary working class parties and a new, Fifth International.
This new International, these new parties, will not be created on the drawing boards of sects or self-proclaimed “mini-mass parties”, nor in the libertarian dreamworld in which the workers and oppressed do not need fighting organisations based on a revolutionary programme and democratic centralism.
New revolutionary organisations have to be built in the here and now; in the mass struggles we are witnessing, by engaging with determination in the reshaping of the working class and its movement.
In all major struggles, workers, the youth and the oppressed are pushed not only to fight, but also to create new forms of struggle which promote the self-organisation of the class; mass meetings, committees of action, direct election and recallability of their representatives. If we are to reshape the workers’ movement and the movements of the oppressed, it is essential that in all struggles we fight for this self-organisation of our class, fight to overcome all sectoral, national, gender and other divisions and for organs of struggle based on workers’ democracy. This is how the workers and oppressed will create the fighting organisations necessary not only to overthrow the rule of the capitalist and their states, but also to replace the repressive apparatus with their own organs of working class power.
Nonetheless, organisation by itself is not the whole answer. Within the existing organisations and struggles we have also to fight to win the real leaders of the working class to the strategy of socialist revolution. If we want our struggles to be successful, if we want to win the democratic demands of the Arab revolutions, to repeal the Troika’s and native capitalists’ attacks in Greece, we have to fight the struggles to their end. We need to make the revolutions in the Middle East permanent. We must not stop at one day strikes, but need indefinite general strikes to bring down austerity governments and replace them with workers’ governments based on the organs of struggle, on workers councils.
Even before the onset of crisis in 2008, large sections of the working class vanguard began turning to new “anti-capitalist” parties, or put their hopes in left reformist parties as an alternative to the neo-liberal parties. This shows that the workers and youth are looking for a political alternative, for anti-capitalist parties and organisations.
Revolutionaries have to work alongside these militants. This can mean fighting for the formation of new working class mass parties, or entry into existing mass parties or fighting for unity with anti-capitalist and socialist organisations who aim to build new parties as an alternative to reformism.
But experience shows that such parties will fail the test of the class struggle, will prove unfit for the purpose of giving revolutionary leadership, if they are not based on a genuine revolutionary programme, on revolutionary strategy and tactics. In the current situation, left reformist organisations like SYRIZA or broad realignments like the Left Bloc or the NPA are put to the test of class struggle very rapidly. Indeed, the crisis with its sharp turns in political and economic developments will put all programmes to the test in the short term, exposing not only the bourgeois character of reformism, but also the dead-end of all attempts to compromise between reformist and revolutionary programmes and strategies.
That is why the sections and members of the League for the Fifth International are fighting in the most flexible way to bring such developments about: In Pakistan, by working in the Awami Workers’ Party, in Germany, in the New Anti-capitalist Organisation process, in Britain, by responding positively to the Left Unity appeal of Ken Loach. We propose to the anti-capitalist, socialist, communist and other far left organisations that it is high time to enter into discussion and collaboration to fight together for class struggle methods in the labour movement and for democratic co-ordinations of the resistance to austerity, war, national oppression, to racism and fascism. We propose at the same time, that those organisations who claim they want to fight for an anti-capitalist alternative to reformism should engage in discussions around the programme and organisation the working class needs now to come to the head of the struggle.
There are, and will be, currents of the international left that are willing to engage in a process of fusion with our tendency. We will respond positively and with enthusiasm to any such proposal if it has a principled basis and is conducted with the aim of achieving revolutionary unity on the basis of a common programme, understanding of party building and intervention in the class struggle.
In this, as in all other interventions, we will be guided by Marx’s own dictum – that communists disdain to conceal their convictions. We openly fight for a revolutionary programme of transitional demands. With Trotsky, we recognise that the first duty of the revolutionary is to speak the truth, “To say, what is”, above all, to say what is necessary for the working class to win: A new, Fifth International, a new world party of socialist revolution.
