Capitalism is at present undergoing its grave st crisis since the beginning of the 1930s. The victory of the Indochinese revolution heightened the antiwar attitudes of the toilers in the United States, which have for several years blocked any massive military intervention by Washington against revolutionary upsurges. Thus there has been no international gendarme capable of effectively defending capital around the world. This coincides with and has been reinforced by a long-term crisis which has affected the capitalist economy since the beginning of the 1970s. Flowing from this economic and political situation has been a new deterioration of the relationship of class forces on a world scale against imperialism. This in turn contributed to the fall of the shah of Iran, the main counterrevolutionary bastion in the Middle East, as well as that of Somoza, the main counterrevolutionary bastion in Central America.
Unemployment continues to grow in the imperialist countries. It remains at a high level even during the periods of recovery which occur in the context of this long-term crisis. The different variants of bourgeois policy cannot bring inflation under control. The expansion of credit takes on greater and greater dimensions, and the international financial system is threatened by the bankruptcy that haunts the poorest capitalist countries, who are up to their ears in debt. The horrible spiral of hunger, poverty, sickness, and illiteracy continues to afflict the peoples of the semicolonial countries.
The relative weakening of American imperialism, and the sharpening of interimperialist competition, have given rise to a serious crisis of leadership of the international bourgeoisie. This is intertwined with a crisis of leadership of the bourgeoisie in the majority of the big imperialist countries affected by, among other things, successive scandals (Watergate, the Lockheed scandal, the affair of Giscard's diamonds, etc.). In the last analysis, these crises reflect the fact that the relationship of forces between capital and labor makes it impossible for any present variant of bourgeois policy to decisively reestablish the conditions necessary for relaunching a major long-term accumulation of capital, whatever temporary and limited gains they might be able to accomplish.
The capitalist morass is further deepened by the crisis of all bourgeois social relationships. Millions of women throughout the world are rebel ling against their oppression. The struggle that has broken out in many countries on a mass scale for free abortion on demand is only one of many manifestations of this general revolt. This massive awakening of women is in the final analysis directed against their subordinate status, maintained by the family system, an indispensable institution for the defense and transmission of private property. The anticapitalist potential of this struggle becomes increasingly clear.
The mass struggles against nuclear power stations, and more generally against the growing danger that capitalist anarchy and the frantic search for profits means for the natural environment constitute an implicit challenge to the relations of capitalist production.
The gravity of the overall crisis affecting the capitalist system and the deterioration of the relationship of forces between the classes on a world scale does not mean, however, that imperialism has been forced into a permanent and passive retreat. Not at all. It is feverishly preparing its counteroffensive. It still retains enormous reserves that it can bring to bear. Its military force is greater than ever. Washington is already in the process of reorganizing its forces to intervene in the Caribbean, the Middle East, and the Far East, and has launched a campaign to win American public opinion to support its war threats. A new stage in the drive for nuclear arms has unfolded behind the smokescreen of the SALT II accords.
What is holding back the rapid realization of all the imperialist plans for overcoming the crisis at the expense of the international proletariat, the oppressed peoples, and the workers states, is the fact that the extent of the contradictions rending the system demand "solutions" of the same dimension as the crisis. Only by dealing severe blows to decisive sections of the industrial proletariat and its organizations in the major capitalist countries can there be a significant increase in the rate of profit. Only the reconquest of the major markets lost through the successive victories of the socialist revolution can create the necessary framework for a new long-term capitalist economic revival. As during the 1920s and 1930s, the capitalist "solution" is bloody dictatorship and war. But in order to impose these "solutions" crushing defeats must first be dealt to the toiling masses. These defeats have not taken place. The decisive battles are before us and not behind us. It is these battles that we must prepare for. Their outcome will determine the future of humanity. They can and must end with the victory of the world socialist revolution if humanity is to avoid falling back into barbarism or even suffering annihilation in a nuclear holocaust.
Defend and Develop Iranian Revolution
The fall of the bloody dictatorship of the shah, who tortured and massacred tens of thousands of oppositionists, youth, workers, and militants of the oppressed nationalities, was the product of mass mobilizations unprecedented in recent history. In successive waves, literally millions of men and women poured into the streets of Tehran and other major cities of the country despite savage repression by the army. A revolutionary general strike, spearheaded by the oil workers, paralyzed the entire economy of the country. Finally, the army broke apart under the bat te ring ram of the mass struggle. The urban insurrection triumphed. The Pahlavi dynasty was thrown out of the country.
However, due to the shameful capitulation to the shah's regime by the Stalinist Tudeh Party and the bureaucrats of Moscow and Peking, as well as the collapse of the traditional liberal-bourgeois opposition, the Shi'ite clergy was able to gain the leadership of this huge upsurge of the mass movement thanks to Khomeini's intransigence. A bourgeois state remained; its repressive apparatus and army were disorganized but not destroyed. The economy remains capitalist. The government is bourgeois.
The channelizing of the anti dictatorial and anti-imperialist mass movement by a nationalist populist religious current placed the revolutionary process in Iran in an enormous contradiction. Despite the religious feelings they hold to differing degrees—not so much the proletariat as such, but the semiproletarian and plebeian urban layers—the masses in motion are fundamentally motivated by class aspirations: the elimination of massive unemployment, the struggle against the high cost of living, for workers control over production and employment, for democratic liberties and the free development of the workers movement, for the right of self-determination for oppressed nationalities, and for a decisive break with imperialism.
The Khomeini regime cannot satisfy these aspirations because it cannot break with capitalism and these demands cannot be met in the framework of capitalism. The regime can begin attacks on sectors of the mass movement, as it did during the month of August. It can slow down the development of class consciousness and hold back the achievement of political and organizational independence of the proletariat and the poor peasantry through the reactionary influence of clericalism. But neither can this regime defeat the mass movement, given its particular links with the masses and the apparent absence of an effective instrument of repression, that is, of a bourgeois army firmly reestablished as a striking force. It cannot resolve the fundamental contradictions which rend it. In the long run, it is inevitable that the masses will become disenchanted with the regime. The present anti-imperialist mass mobilizations go beyond the limits desired by the regime, and will only reinforce the struggle against capitalist exploitation and oppression.
Revolutionary Marxists unconditionally defend the Iranian revolution against imperialism, which is stepping up its threats of aggression, and against any attempts to overthrow Khomeini through a reactionary coup d'état. Our fundamental orientation is the intransigent defense of the material interests and democratic liberties of the masses of workers and peasants, the achievement of their political class independence, the defense of the rights of the oppressed nationalities, the encouragement of all forms of organization of the masses, and the building of a revolutionary party—the Iranian section of the Fourth International.
End the blockade of Iran and seizure of Iranian funds by American imperialism!
Halt the economic war against the Iranian revolution!
The American Seventh Fleet should get out of the Arabian Sea!
Give back to the Iranian people the wealth that has been robbed from them by the Pahlavi dynasty and its accomplices and collaborators through transferring this wealth out of the country! Send back the assassin shah to the people of Iran!
Release from prison the worker militants and anti shah, anti-imperialist, and anticapitalist fighters repressed by the Khomeini regime, beginning with our comrades of the HKS and the militants of the Kurdish national movement!
Freedom of organization and full political freedom for the working class, the poor peasantry, and the oppressed nationalities!
Full political and civil equality for Iranian women, and support to their specific demands for liberation after centuries of obscurantist oppression!
The right to unconditional self-determination for the Kurdish people and all the oppressed nationalities in Iran!
For a sovereign constituent assembly! For a workers and peasants republic!
For the Defense and Victory of the Nicaraguan Revolution
As in Iran, the dictatorship in Nicaragua was overthrown by a tumultuous mass mobilization ending in a generalized urban insurrection. But the revolutionary process in Nicaragua differed from that of Iran. On the one hand, there was the total destruction of the bourgeois army and its replacement by the Sandinista People's Army which emerged from the popular insurrection against Somoza, and, on the other hand, the growth and weight of committees of the masses (Sandinista Defense Committees) and the growth of other organizations of the toiling masses (unions and organizations of agricultural workers and poor peasants), which have been pushed forward and led by the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN). The Sandinistas have evolved to the left over the course of the past year, under the impact of the upsurge of the masses. They stimulated and led the insurrection, and have taken a whole series of radical anti-imperialist and anticapitalist measures.
Imperialism is utilizing different tactics to try to prevent the Nicaraguan revolution from taking the road the Cuban revolution took twenty years ago.
It is placing conditions on economic aid, including on food and how such aid is used; it is preparing a military intervention and is supporting the attacks already launched from Honduras, where the National Guard is reorganizing.
To realize its designs, it can count on various initiatives of the Latin American bourgeoisies. American imperialism, as well as the Latin American bourgeoisies, will try in the immediate period to guarantee the stability and extension of the private sector of the economy, to assure a real relaunching of capitalist accumulation which means limiting the demands of the masses, and to maintain the Nicaraguan economy in the framework of the international capitalist economy. Measures further ing these goals would put a break on the mobilization of the masses and on the dynamic of the revolution.
However, nothing is definitively decided yet in Nicaragua. The bourgeoisie retains strong positions of power: in the economy, in the press, among the clerical hierarchy, in the professional associations and the Chambers of Commerce. These positions, in this particular situation of dual power, are reflected inside the government, which remains a government of coalition with the bourgeoisie.*
*A minority of the World Congress holds that the revolutionary process has developed further in Nicaragua, and that a workers and peasants government has come into existence. Another minority holds that the present government is bourgeois.
Revolutionary Marxists resolutely support all the anti-imperialist and anticapitalist measures carried out up to now by the FSLN. The advance of the revolution requires the extension of the agrarian reform, generalization of workers control and the massive unionization of the workers, building the new Sandinista People's Army and the general arming of the workers and peasants through the militias, centralization of the Sandinista Defense Committees in order that they become organs of power of the toiling masses, refusal to be tied to imperialism through conditions imposed by it concerning the foreign debt, the expropriation of the holdings of the remaining big capitalists and imperialists.
The application of such measures can only lead to a rupture with bourgeois forces present in the government and other state institutions.
This road will end in the complete destruction of the bourgeois state and the birth of a workers state. The creation of a mass revolutionary party is an indispensable instrument for carrying through these tasks.
It is excluded that imperialism and the Latin American bourgeoisies will passively watch the birth of a second workers state in the Americas. As the social and political forces assemble for the decisive test of force in Nicaragua, the counterrevolutionary intervention of imperialism will reach a qualitatively higher level, including against Cuba. There is the risk that the Nicaraguan revolution will have to confront this intervention under conditions of isolation, apart from the aid it can receive from the Cuban workers state, whose resources are limited. Symbolically, the Kremlin has recognized the new military junta in El Salvador, while mass struggles and armed confrontations continue. This is a clear signal to Washington that the Soviet bureaucracy is once again ready to sell out the revolution in Central America. The economic aid granted up to now to the Nicaraguan revolution by the bureaucratized workers states is negligible when compared to the aid they have given to bourgeois governments such as India, Egypt, or Indonesia.
The Nicaraguan revolution will not be able to break out of the vise that is closing in around it except by the deepening and regional extension of the revolution and the development of international solidarity. The upsurge of the mass movement and the growth of revolutionary organizations in El Salvador—which the preventive overthrow of the dictatorship by the "liberal" military junta was not able to hold back—the crisis of the dictatorship in Guatemala and Honduras, the difficulty of the Bolivian bourgeoisie to stabilize the situation after the massive resistance to the military coup, and the rise of workers struggles in Brazil and the first mass mobilizations in a long time in Venezuela, all indicate that the Nicaraguan revolution is part of a new revolutionary upsurge in Latin America. The creation of a new workers state in Nicaragua would in turn accelerate and deepen this rise of struggles.
It is the duty of revolutionaries and of the workers and anti-imperialist movements of the entire world to launch a vast campaign of internationalist solidarity with the Nicaraguan revolution, of the same type as the movement against Washington's war in Vietnam.
Immediate, massive, and unconditional aid to Nicaragua, which has been devastated by the Somozaist dictatorship, a dictatorship financed, armed, and aided by the international bourgeoisie! Imperialism has a debt of blood to pay to the people of Nicaragua. It should pay up now!
Immediate cancellation of Nicaragua's foreign debt by the imperialist governments and banks!
Dismantling of the imperialist military bases in Guantánamo, Panama, Puerto Rico, and elsewhere in the Caribbean and Central America!
Direct aid from the big workers organizations of the imperialist countries to the FSLN, trade unions, and mass organizations of Nicaragua!
Massive aid from the USSR, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and the People's Republic of China for the reconstruction of Nicaragua!
An end to the Yankee imperialist blockade and threats against Cuba!
Solidarity and support to the rising revolution in El Salvador!
Defeat the Austerity Policy of the Bourgeoisie!
The bourgeoisie in all capitalist countries has launched an austerity offensive against the working class and all wage earners. The immediate aim of this offensive is to make the workers pay the costs of the crisis and to raise the profit rate through a reduction of real wages, speedup and refusing to cut back the working day in spite of growing unemployment. Sharp cuts in social spending (social security, health, education, subsidies for housing) are counter balanced by enormous subsidies to big capital as well as a constant increase in military expenditures.
The closure of factories and massive unemployment are aimed at "rationalizing" capitalist industry by reducing the number of jobs and increasing productivity. This is accompanied by attacks on particular bastions of the workers movement (British Leyland, coal mining in the United States, Seat in Barcelona, the steel industry in the Lorraine and Liège, the Italian petrochemical industry), and by attempts to deal blows to the fighting vanguard of the workers (dismissal of the sixty-one militants at Fiat in Turin, the firing of a trade-union leader in British Leyland).
In the longer run, the bourgeoisie is hoping to wear down the organized force of the proletariat through the demoralizing consequences of massive and long-term unemployment, and to cut into basic trade-union rights such as the right to strike. The latter is manifested most clearly in the United States, Great Britain, Canada, and Australia. Often so-called "anti-terrorist" laws serve as the juridical base for chipping away trade-union and democratic liberties—as has happened in West Germany, Italy, and Spain. Such attacks can lay the groundwork for a generalized assault on working-class rights at a later stage.
However, while this offensive has scored important advances in some semicolonial countries, where the living standard of the workers has been significantly lowered, especially under conditions of dictatorship (for example, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, and Pakistan) or semi dictatorship (the state of emergency in India under the regime of Indira Gandhi), this is not the case in most of the imperialist countries. In these countries, after an initial disarray provoked by the shameless role of collaboration with, or even initiation of, the austerity policy, played by the leaderships of the CPs, SPs, and the unions, the workers have fought back vigorously. Through broad protest movements and strikes, especially in Great Britain, Italy, Denmark, Canada, and Australia, and through pressure exerted through the trade-union organizations such as in West Germany, Sweden, and Belgium, they have often largely recovered the drop in purchasing power they suffered from the austerity policy, or are in the process of doing so.
This is particularly true for the strongest and best organized bastions of the proletariat. The superexploited layers of the proletariat, the least organized, the most vulnerable, defended badly or not at all by the major trade-union organizations, have suffered the most serious blows: the immigrant workers, a section of women wage earners and the youth, and the victims of structural, long-term unemployment.
The fight back by the workers found its first expression in the revolt inside the trade unions against the policy of collaboration with and support to the austerity policy. This opposition has been accompanied by an attempt of the workers to fight for democracy inside the unions, to challenge the bureaucracy's control over negotiations and over the union structures inside the big plants. This trend has taken on significant dimensions in Italy, Spain, and France. It has begun to appear in the United States and Japan.
However, this response to the austerity offensive of the bourgeoisie is as yet limited. Austerity measures are more and more the axis of governmental policy. They cannot be fought at the union level alone. The working masses sense that the crisis is a crisis of the regime, which requires overall political solutions. Successive union struggles against limitations on wage increases, even if successful, risk in the long run to wear down worker combativity if they do not lead to radical political changes.
This is why the policy of division of the SPs and CPs, the policy of fragmenting strikes, and the absence of any overall alternative solution to the economic policy of the bourgeoisie, holds disastrous consequences for the working class. It is nothing but the other side of the coin of accepting the crisis as inevitable—since the capitalist regime itself, which produced the crisis, is not challenged.
Against this policy of abandoning the defense of the immediate and historic interests of the working class, the Fourth International struggles to organize an effective fight back by the workers to the bourgeois offensive:
Against inflation—a sliding scale of wages and social allocations!
Against unemployment—an immediate and radical reduction of the workweek (thirty-five hours!) to hire new workers, without a decrease in weekly wages, and with workers control over the pace of work!
Against discriminatory and xenophobic laws—for equal social and political rights for immigrant workers. Against the division of the toiling masses—the mass organizations of the workers should champion the demands of the women and youth!
Against the maneuvers and offensive of the "multinationals"—international solidarity and organization of the workers, and preparation of protest campaigns and international coordination during strikes!
Instead of the state giving gifts to the capitalists, there should be nationalization without compensation of subsidized enterprises, to be managed under workers control!
In face of the prolonged stagnation of the economy—nationalization without indemnification of big industry, the banks, insurance companies, holdings, and other financial institutions—and their centralized management under workers control, in order to achieve an economic recovery based on a plan democratically worked out by the organizations of the workers and broad masses.
Against the policy of dividing the workers and class collaborationism! For the workers united front, uniting all organizations of the workers movement, to push forward the construction of factory committees and neighborhood committees! For trade-union unity and democratization of the unions!
For a generalization of struggles to prepare a united movement to install a workers government, a government of the mass organizations of the workers movement, to carry out the demands of the broad masses.
For the Antibureaucratic Political Revolution!
Although the bureaucratically deformed or degenerated workers states have not experienced the crisis of overproduction and massive unemployment that affects all of the industrialized capitalist states—thus confirming the analysis of the Fourth International that these countries are no longer capitalist—these societies have in general experienced a crisis of a different but no less explosive character. In fact, the present worldwide crisis could be characterized as a combined crisis of the imperialist system, of the capitalist mode of production, and of the bureaucratic dictatorship in the workers states.
The latter is revealed above all by a high level of economic waste, a slowdown of the pace of economic growth as the reserves of labor power and raw materials shrink so that more and more rational choices regarding investments must be made—choices that cannot be made without broad workers democracy.
Incapable of taking this road—which would rapidly sweep away its power and privileges—the bureaucracy has no other alternative than to turn more and more to the recourse of the "market mechanism" and to a greater integration in the capitalist world market, administratively imposing priorities that are decided arbitrarily, and disproportionally extending fixed investments (factories, machines) which are increasingly underutilized. The needs of the toiling masses, which increase as their level of skill and culture rises, cannot be satisfied through bureaucratic management, which as the workers are well aware, implies enormous waste. This is the root of the generalized indifference toward maximizing production, which is reinforced by the more and more open growth of social inequality (special stores for the purchase of quality products in exchange for foreign currency, for example.
The ruling bureaucratic caste has no authority or respect. Its corruption, its cynicism, and its repressive policies are universally de tested. As the crisis of the bureaucratic dictatorship sharp ens, as the Stalinist monolith progressively crumbles (Titoism, destalinization. Maoism, "cultural revolution," demaoization, Eurocommunism), the political discussions and the search for "alternative models" are not limited to interbureaucratic conflicts. A slow political awakening is beginning to take place throughout all layers of the population. This awakening affects broad layers in Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, and the People's Republic of China. The examples of the Hungarian revolution of 1956, of the "Prague Spring" of 1968-69 in Czechoslovakia, and of the successive waves of struggles in China since 1966 demonstrate that this phenomenon can take on a massive character in a favorable conjuncture.
There is a beginning of an awakening of advanced layers of the working class on the economic and political level, which is especially marked in Poland and in the People's Republic of China, but which is beginning to come to the surface in the USSR as well. This awakening is enough to refute the myth that the political opposition developing against the bureaucracy would be basically reactionary and procapitalist—a myth that both the bureaucracy and the international bourgeoisie have a common interest in promoting. Quite a different image is presented by the young Chinese dissidents, proudly demanding socialist democracy in front of the court, or by the defendants of the Leningrad trial, speaking in the name of the "new left opposition," or the Polish and Romanian strikers, the leaders of Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia, defying the "normalizers." It is these people—and not those nostalgic for the past, whether they be Stalinists or procapitalist elements—who embody, and open the road to, the future, which is that of the antibureaucratic political revolution.
Obviously fifty years of bureaucratic dictatorship in the USSR, with all its crimes and disgusting lies, and thirty years of the same kind of dictatorship in Eastern Europe and China, have discredited communism and socialism in the eyes of the workers and the youth of these countries. This makes it more difficult for the young generation of rebels to rediscover the true face and history of revolutionary Marxism.
Such things as "socialist" forced labor camps; "socialist" secret police; "socialist" repression of freedom of thought, discussion, and political and social action; and military conflicts between "socialist" countries are all aberrant and absurd concepts from the point of view of Marxism.
In the bureaucratically deformed or degenerated workers states, a ruling bureaucratic caste enjoys enormous material privileges in relation to the toiling masses. It utilizes its monopoly of political, economic, and social power to consolidate its privileges, and for that reason defends its totalitarian rule tooth and nail. These countries can only advance toward socialism by overturning the bureaucratic dictatorship by means of a political revolution that establish es the power of workers and peasants councils, freely and democratically elected, with the legalization of political parties within them and with the workers themselves having the right to choose their own representatives; and the full enjoyment of democratic freedoms by the toiling masses.
One of the most repugnant features of Stalinism and the bureaucratic castes in power is their narrow, reactionary nationalism, an inevitable product of the theory and practice of "socialism in one country,' which means subordination of the development of the world revolution to the interests of the bureaucratic castes. This has not only led to the reappearance of the phenomenon of national oppression, especially in the USSR; it has also increasingly poison ed the relationships between workers states. The exacerbation of the Sino-Soviet conflict, the cynical alliance of the Peking bureaucracy with bourgeois and imperialist forces against the USSR and Vietnam to improve its position, and the breaking out of military conflicts between bureaucratized workers states, are the most disorient ing for the international proletariat.
The Fourth International forcefully affirms that these crimes are the products of the bureaucratic dictatorship and not of socialism. The bureaucratic dictatorship is, in turn, in the last analysis, the product of the defeats and delay of the world revolution and of the survival of capitalism in the industrially advanced countries.
The weight of the proletariat and of its specific classical forms of action and organization are becoming greater in all three sectors of the world revolution. This was revealed in May 1968 in France. It was reflected in the course of the Portuguese revolution of 1975-76. It was revealed in the "Prague Spring" and in the big strikes in Poland. It was revealed in the urban insurrections in Tehran and Managua, and in the great strike waves in Brazil. Sceptics and cynics can expound as much as they want about the supposed "crisis of Marxism." Real socialism, the only possible kind, will be built by the toilers together on an international scale, with the workers of all countries fraternally united because there are no fundamental conflicts of interest opposing one to the other. We will build it on the basis of a World Federation of Soviet Republics of Workers and Toilers, which will banish forever all exploitation, oppression, war, and violence between human beings.
Imperialism remains the enemy number one blocking the road to this World Federation. Against it, the gain represented by the abolition of capitalism must be defended, despite the crimes of the bureaucracy. We defend the USSR, the People's Republic of China, Vietnam, East Germany, and the other deformed workers states, against any imperialist aggression and against any attempt to restore the capitalist mode of production.
Against U.S. imperialist aggression and blockade against the Cuban workers state and all its conquests!
We are for the defense of the Pnompenh government of the Kampuchean workers state against the threats of imperialism, the Thai bourgeoisie, the restorationist Sihanouk forces and the Khmer Serei, together with the remnants of Pol Pot's forces with the criminal support of the Peking bureaucracy.
Hands off the Kampuchean workers state!
Stop the criminal imperialist blockade that is starving the Khmer people!
Stop the blockade and the threats against the Indochinese revolution!
For a united front of all the workers states against imperialism!
For dissolution of NATO and all the imperialist pacts!
No new Chinese military aggression against Vietnam!
Withdrawal of Soviet troops from the Chinese border!
For an end to the racist and chauvinist propaganda in the Sino-Soviet, Sino-Vietnamese, and Khmer-Vietnamese conflicts!
The antibureaucratic political revolution is an indispensable link in the process leading to authentic socialism. This is why the international workers movement must fight to defend the victims of bureaucratic repression and for the liberties and rights of workers in the bureaucratized workers states.
Immediate freedom for Petr Uhl. Vaclav Havel, and the other leaders of Charter 77 convicted in Czechoslovakia!
Immediate freedom for Klebanov and all members of independent workers groups in the USSR!
Freedom for all the political prisoners in the USSR, in the People's Republic of China, and in all the bureaucratized workers states! Abolish the infamous institution of forced labor camps and imprisonment of oppositionists in psychiatric hospitals!
Immediate restoration of the right to strike, of the right of trade-union organization, of democratic election of factory trade-union committees, and of political liberties of the workers in all of these countries!
Management of the factories by the workers themselves and democratically centralized planning through a congress of workers councils!
Restore strict respect for Leninist principles in regard to self-administration and the right to self-determination of national minorities!
Forward to World Socialist Revolution!
The present world crisis reveals in a concentrated way all the fundamental contradictions of capitalism and the dramatic consequences of a system which has survived for more than half a century and which threatens to drag humanity down into frightening catastrophes. Various conferences, speeches, and publications speak of the so-called threat of overpopulation. But at the same time, every three or four years the production of cereals is drastically reduced in the major exporting countries in order to increase their price on the world market. There is endless talk about the so-called energy crisis. But the capitalist system systematically wa st es natural resources. Twenty million workers are condemned to unemployment in the imperialist countries, while underdeveloped peoples are desperately in need of tractors, fertilizers, schools, hospitals, and factories that could easily be produced by those unemployed workers. While imperialism is choked with overproduction and excess productive capacity, hundreds of millions of people are dramatically in need of food. Millions of children die of hunger every years. Big speeches on human rights are in style today, but torture has become an institutionalized practice in more than sixty countries of the world.
The Fourth International does not stand aside from any struggle for any immediate demand, however modest it might be, economic or democratic. The toiling masses can gain confidence in themselves, increase their level of organization, and develop their class consciousness only by defending all their interests and all their rights. The militants of the Fourth International take part in these day-to-day struggles. They attempt to win the confidence of their co-workers and comrades in struggle and gain authority in their eyes in order to be able to build real revolutionary workers parties that can bring together the majority of the vanguard workers who are recognized as such by the class.
But at the same time the Fourth International warns the workers that the capitalist system has become too sick, and that its contradictions are too explosive to be able to hope to escape a catastrophe through the road of reforms alone and a gradual transformation of the system. Two world wars, fascism, Auschwitz, Hiroshima, innumerable colonial wars, and famine in the "third world"—this is the price paid up to now for these kinds of illusions that decisively contributed to the survival of the system at times of great revolutionary crises, when the overthrow of capitalism was possible. Tomorrow, the price could be even greater.
This is why the Fourth International calls on the workers, the exploited and oppressed of all countries, to unite for the worldwide overthrow of capitalism, for the establishment of a worldwide socialist order, which is the only real "new economic order" that is not a trick or an empty illusion. By abolishing the economic system based on private property, competition, and profit, and the crises and terrific waste that they produce; by eliminating the arms race, which in and of itself absorbs more resources than what would be necessary to close the gap in a relatively short time between the standard of living of workers in the imperialist countries and those of the semicolonial countries; by liberating enormous creative energies—intellectual and manual—to invent new technologies subordinated to the needs for human development, technology capable of reestablishing and safeguarding the ecological balance—in this way the socialist revolution can resolve the present international crisis and assure the future for humanity.
For socialism to be victorious, it is necessary to develop simultaneously the organization of the proletariat and its allies in all forms—since the emancipation of the workers can only be the work of the workers themselves—and build powerful proletarian vanguard parties and a powerful proletarian international, which will fight for the common interests of the workers before all special interests, the acquisitions of class consciousness as opposed to any temporary relapse into passivity and demoralization, and the concentration of forces and the necessary audacious initiatives against an enemy that is much more experienced and hardened. The Fourth International and its sections and sympathizing organizations are only the initial nucleii of this organized working-class vanguard that is required for victory. But after having successfully resisted in periods of reaction and retreat, it is integrated in the new worldwide revolutionary upsurge taking place on all continents.
This is why, with unshakeable confidence in the leading role of the proletariat in the three sectors of the world revolution, the Fourth International is continuing and deepening its proletarian orientation, through a radical turn to implant the majority of its cadres in industry.
It calls on vanguard trade-union militants to join it, militants who are in the front lines of the struggle against austerity, who are indignant at the compromises and betrayals of the trade-union bureaucracies.
It calls on militants of the CPs and SPs to join it, militants who are disgusted by the policy of division and capitulation of their leaders, a policy which will allow the bourgeois system to emerge from the crisis on the backs of the toiling masses.
It calls on organizations adhering to Trotskyism, those who have hesitated up to now, to join with the Fourth International in building a single world party of the world revolution founded on democratic centralism.
The Fourth International calls on:
Women who are fighting for their liberation and militants of the oppressed nationalities who are demanding the right of self-determination;
All revolutionary militants who today find themselves in an impasse after the experience of the failures of the centrists and Maoists;
Militant Palestinians, South Africans, Algerians, Kurds, Zimbabweans, the guerrilla fighters of Thailand, fighters against the dictatorships in Argentina and Uruguay—militants who have been disoriented by the impotence if not betrayal of their traditional leaderships;
Militant communist oppositionists and the youth of the new left opposition in the workers states—militants who are trying to take the banner of communism out of the hands of the bureaucrats who have dragged it through the mud and st ai ned it with blood;
To join its struggle to forge the mass revolutionary international, the instrument to achieve victory of the world revolution!
Together we will lead toiling humanity to a socialist world!