Issuing body: Third World Congress of the Fourth International
---
For action against war preparations! Let us prepare the victory of the world revolution!
MANIFESTO OF THE THIRD CONGRESS TO THE WORKERS OF ALL COUNTRIES
A third of a century after the end of the First World War, and less than a decade after the Second, imperialist war is once again casting its sinister shadow over the world. In every country all social activity is being placed under the sign of rearmament. The failures of the international conferences announce that conflicts will be decided on the battlefield. The "localized" wars that are successively breaking out at many points on the globe are so many stages on the road to the general conflagration, and give a foretaste of the horrors and barbarism to come.
Imperialism on the March toward War
It is not the struggle for world domination between two "power blocs"; it is not the "thirst for profit" of a small handful of arms merchants that constitutes the fundamental cause of the march toward the third world war — it is the internal and implacable logic of the capitalist regime. From the standpoint of the general interests of humanity, this march appears as an outbreak of collective madness. Statesmen, generals, scientists are all intimately convinced that the whole of human civilization risks perishing in this conflict, that tens of millions of human lives will be destroyed, that cities and countries will be completely razed. If they nevertheless make their own personal contribution to the preparation of this war, it is because this preparation depends neither on their understanding nor on their will. It is the whole of bourgeois society, with its immense apparatus of production, that is dragging humanity into this cataclysm. Without the destruction of this society, the outbreak of war is inevitable.
Capitalism cannot live — that is, cannot secure a "reasonable" profit for the ruling class — except by constantly extending its base. This expansion was accomplished over two centuries at the expense of the "backward" peoples of Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, and Latin America. The entire world was divided up among the great imperialist powers. From the moment this division of the world was completed, the expansion of capitalism was no longer possible except through self-laceration. After two world wars fought for a new division of the world, the balance of power has been radically overturned. With the exception of American imperialism, all the old major powers have themselves become objects of imperialist expansion and centralization. This new situation, far from resolving the fundamental contradiction of contemporary capitalism, has further sharpened it. The formidable productive apparatus of Yankee imperialism is suffocating within the limits of the international market still open to it. It would need the whole world as a market to attempt to balance its economic system. But this world is not open to it.
The socialist revolution of October, the collapse of capitalism in Eastern Europe, the revolutionary movements in the colonies, the great Chinese revolution, have reduced the international capitalist market by eight hundred million customers. Scarcely had the first phase of postwar economic reconstruction been completed when American imperialism, no longer able to extend its economic sphere, found itself threatened with a crisis of major proportions. Its only way out was rearmament, which constitutes an artificial market, absorbing goods whose use should in principle permit the conquest of new, real markets.
The World Inter-Imperialist Alliance
Like the German-Japanese imperialist bloc that preceded it as a candidate for world domination, Yankee imperialism has arrived too late to be able to accomplish its "historic mission." At the very moment when it is launching itself into preparations for the third world war, new revolutionary movements are breaking out over the whole periphery of the Asian continent, from the Far East to the Near East. The colonial peoples will no longer allow themselves to be treated as mere objects of the imperialist powers. The wars their masters have waged among themselves, the factories these masters have been led to build on their soil, have made them conscious of their own strength. Hundreds of millions of colonial slaves are rising to throw off the yoke of hunger, forced labour, and organized degradation, to throw off the knout of the master race of whites. The part of the world still open to imperialist exploitation risks constantly shrinking under this advance of the colonial revolution. That is why imperialist rearmament answers not only to economic motives but also to a quite precise political objective: to crush, under the weight of military interventions, the insurrectionary movements of the masses wherever they break out. That is why the third world war will not merely be a war for the destruction of the USSR, the people's democracies, and the People's Republic of China, but also a war against the revolutionary labour movement of the entire world. It will be a counter-revolutionary war in the most exact sense of the word.
The minor imperialist powers have formed a united front under the aegis of American imperialism in the face of the mortal danger that threatens them. But the more American productive forces suffocate within the part of the world still open to them, the greater becomes the share of this market monopolized exclusively by American imperialism, and the more suffocating becomes the narrowness of the living space at the disposal of these minor powers. The permanent social crisis unleashed in these countries by the disappearance of the foundations of their economic equilibrium makes the power of their bourgeoisies extremely unstable. They are led to live off the good graces of Uncle America, who at the same time serves as super-policeman against their own workers. Without the support that Yankee imperialism has constantly offered it since the end of the Second World War, the capitalist regime would long since have disappeared throughout Europe and Asia.
Among these minor powers, those which are entirely without preserves of plunder of their own, and whose reconstruction is due to the economic and strategic needs peculiar to American imperialism, are the ones that support Washington most resolutely and with the fewest reservations (Germany, Japan, Italy).
The establishment of a united inter-imperialist front means, for the British, French, Dutch, and Belgian imperialists, an ever more complete Wall Street stranglehold on their own colonial domain. They are obliged to rally to this solution, whether reluctantly or not, because any other choice would mean immediate suicide for them.
The immensity of the imperialist armaments programme has already created an irreversible march toward war. Even a partial halt to rearmament would risk plunging the capitalist economy into a crisis even graver than the one avoided by this rearmament. The enormous stockpiles of strategic raw materials that have been accumulated would bring about a rapid collapse of prices. Even today, every threat of peace provokes an immediate fall in stock-market values.
The imperialists claim, of course, that they are arming only in order to re-establish the balance of power. But the whole of history is there, and the common sense of peoples confirms it, to prove that one never arms to preserve peace, but to wage war. The further the bourgeoisie's war preparations advance, the more it will be tempted to alter the course of international discussions by throwing into the balance the weighty argument represented by its armaments.
No collection of signatures, no congress of "partisans of peace" will in the end be able to paralyze the murderous arm of imperialism, determined to settle its accounts with the anti-imperialist forces of the world. This war, which the workers, the colonial peoples, and the revolutionaries hate, can be avoided or shortened, if it breaks out despite everything, only by the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist regime. It is only by wresting from the capitalists the factories that manufacture the engines of destruction, and by overthrowing the states that mobilize soldiers for the bourgeois army, that the labouring peoples will be able to prevent imperialism, at bay, from attempting to drown in blood the emancipatory will of the toiling masses.
The Bourgeoisie and the Proletariat in the Twentieth Century
For half a century capitalism has been drawn into an irrevocable agony. The bourgeoisie is defending itself desperately against its certain fall, mobilizing for this defence the immense means still at its disposal. Mass murder, white terror on the vastest scale, the militarization of entire peoples and continents, the bloodiest fascist or military dictatorships, the periodic unleashing of world wars — all this represents, in the last analysis, only successive stages in this self-preservation struggle of a class that knows itself condemned by history. The bourgeoisie is leaving the world as it entered it, "dripping blood and mire from every pore."
The cataclysms unleashed by decadent capitalism would risk plunging the world into barbarism, were humanity to accept them passively. But contemporary society possesses a class capable of deciding the fate of the world, a class that has already shown in practice with what heroism and what devotion it is ready to fight for a new society: the working class. The revolutionary efforts of the proletariat to take its fate into its own hands were formerly spaced a quarter of a century apart and isolated within a single country or even a single city (1848, 1871, 1905). In the aftermath of the First World War, these efforts extended to the empire of the tsars and to Central Europe, but everywhere they were defeated except in Russia. The international bourgeoisie thereby received, for the last time, an appearance of omnipotence when it unleashed the Second World War. Today the struggles and uprisings of the workers to overthrow imperialism and lead the world to socialism extend on an infinitely vaster scale than ever before in the past. The whole of Asia, the whole of Europe, Great Britain, several countries of Latin America and even of Africa, are evolving under the sign of these tumultuous or organized, instinctive or conscious struggles. They are the product of the unbearable burden that imperialism finds itself obliged to impose on the peoples, of its incapacity to satisfy the elementary aspirations of the masses, of its powerlessness to break the fighting élan of the toiling peoples now spanning the five continents. It is from these struggles that the revolutionary power sufficient to destroy the capitalism that breeds barbarism will emerge. In the face of the immense destruction that the imperialists' war threatens to bring upon humanity, there is no question of lamenting or of despairing of the world's fate. On the contrary, we must work so that the proletarian struggles lead as swiftly as possible to the triumph of socialism, in order to shorten the trials that capital is preparing for humanity.
The Third World War Will Turn into an International Civil War
The imperialists are preparing war in the hope of breaking by force the power of their adversaries. But this war, breaking out while the popular forces are pressing hard on the heels of the bourgeoisie on every side, will begin by shaking the already highly unstable equilibrium of the capitalist countries. Everywhere the struggle already under way against rearmament, against inflation, against the destruction of workers' liberties, will be prolonged and will extend once general hostilities break out. Everywhere proletarians and the exploited will openly defy the exploiting capitalists. The Chinese people, the colonial peoples on the road to emancipation, and even — despite the hatred inspired in them by the abhorred Stalinist regime — the peoples of the USSR and of the people's democracies, will defend with tenacity their conquests against the restorationist attempts of international capital. In Latin America and in the Near East, the masses will take advantage of every weakening of their imperialist masters to rise up in their turn and throw off their chains. The American proletariat, confronted with the historic crisis of its own country, will awaken to political action under the blows of war and will engage in the decisive struggle for the overthrow of the bourgeoisie in its last stronghold.
Thus the third world war will become, by its own inner logic, an international civil war. The revolutionary upsurge in Asia, against which Wall Street will unleash war, will spread in the course of that very war to the five continents. Imperialism is preparing the crushing of the insurgent peoples, but it will reap world revolution as the punishment for its crimes.
To struggle for the defeat of imperialism is not to struggle for some hypothetical "victory of the Kremlin," or for an alleged "expansion of Stalinism" with its police regime and its destruction of all proletarian democracy. The Soviet bureaucracy is the product of the victory of the counter-revolution in the world — outside the USSR — after 1923. The development of the world revolution will mean its certain end, on the same footing as that of imperialism. The victorious proletarian revolution in one small country, Yugoslavia, has proved incompatible with the control of the Stalinist bureaucracy. Can one imagine that hundreds of millions of proletarians, having triumphed over their own bourgeoisie, would allow themselves to be subjected to the orders of the Kremlin? The faster the proletariat of the key countries of the world rises against the capitalists and rids itself of its exploiters, the faster the imperialist threat against the USSR will diminish, and the faster the Soviet workers themselves will settle their accounts with the parasitic bureaucracy which, for twenty-five years, has despoiled them of the fruits of their conquests and of their immense efforts at reconstruction.
Comisco, the Cominform, the Fourth International
Humanity stands before its decisive trial. The capitalist enemies of the workers are feverishly preparing the weapons to crush beneath their iron heel the peoples thirsting for liberty. Upon the workers of every country there descends an ever heavier burden of privation, restriction, and lowering of their standard of living. Millions of young people are being torn from their hopes to serve as cannon fodder for capital. What, in these conditions, do the organizations that claim to speak in the name of the proletariat — which is rising to defend its bread and its liberties — actually propose?
The social democrats and the reformist trade-union bureaucracies have reconstructed international centres: the so-called Frankfurt International, and the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions. These two bodies are cynically and openly bound to the war chariot of Yankee imperialism. They call upon the peoples to accept the whole weight of rearmament, and beg for nothing more than an "equitable" distribution of this weight among the different classes of society.
They take a leading part in the propaganda directed not against Stalin's crimes but against the whole of the USSR, against every so-called "political" strike by Communist workers, against every uprising of colonial slaves labelled "expansion of Russian imperialism," against the magnificent emancipatory struggle of the Korean, Chinese, and Vietnamese masses.
The declaration of the Frankfurt International lists the contradictions of capitalism only to conclude with the necessity of a reformed, controlled, and directed capitalism. The leadership of the British Labour Party, which came to power with an absolute majority in Parliament, did not use this exceptionally favourable opportunity to transform industrial England into a bastion of world socialism. On the contrary, it has striven to put capitalism back on a sound footing, to avert the collapse of the Empire, and, prostrating itself before imperialism, actively participates in the race toward war against the anti-imperialist forces of the world. Wherever the social democrats take part in government, they direct, as in Great Britain, the bourgeoisie's policy of plunder against the labouring masses, or the massacre of insurgent colonial peoples.
The Stalinist parties, which, after the ignominious dissolution of the Third International by Stalin, regrouped themselves in the Cominform, appear to stand in the vanguard of the struggle against the preparations for imperialist war. Forgetting the certificates of progressivism and democracy which they awarded to American imperialism during the Second World War, they denounce it furiously today as the chief instigator of war. But the solution they propose is not the overthrow of this imperialism, it is the conclusion of a new pact of alliance with it! The "government of peace," whose formation they are propagating in many countries, is not the workers' and peasants' government, but a coalition government with a "pacifist" wing of the bourgeoisie. This is because the Kremlin, which orchestrates this campaign, aims not at all at the victory of the world revolution, but only at a favourable modus vivendi with imperialism. That is why the Stalinist parties are led again and again to reaffirm "the possibility of peaceful coexistence between socialism and capitalism," while this "coexistence" represents slavery for hundreds of millions of the exploited who burn with the desire to have done with all exploitation.
Nevertheless, the Stalinist parties, which still retain a broad mass base in many countries, cannot in all circumstances confine their political activity to the servile execution of the Kremlin's orders. Confronted with powerful insurrectionary mass movements, as was the case in China and Yugoslavia, they might in their turn be overtaken by their own base and find themselves obliged to sketch out a struggle for power. In acting thus, they would be preparing the ground for an inevitable future break with the Soviet bureaucracy. The transformation they might undergo in the course of revolutionary crises brought to a supreme pitch might oblige the Leninist vanguard to carry out a tactical reorganization toward them. But none of this in any way exempts the proletariat from the task of building a new revolutionary leadership.
What is on the agenda today is not the sketching-out of a struggle for power under exceptional conditions in this or that isolated country, but the effective and swiftest possible overthrow of imperialism in every country. To carry through this task, Stalinism remains obstacle number one within the international labour movement.
The Noskes and the Scheidemanns betrayed the proletarian revolution in Central Europe after the First World War in the name of rebuilding the bourgeois fatherland; the Thorezes and the Togliattis carried out the same betrayal in Western Europe after the Second World War. But the objective possibility of these betrayals was given by the limited character of the revolutionary movements, by their isolation within a few countries, by the lack of genuinely revolutionary experience among the masses who had risen. That is why the building of a new revolutionary leadership has proved to be so long and so arduous a task to accomplish under these conditions. The revolutionary struggles now developing will constantly widen from continent to continent. The masses who take part in them will have fresh experiences vividly in their memory. This will reduce, especially in the advanced countries, the possibilities of manoeuvre and betrayal open to the old bankrupt leaderships, and will create extremely favourable conditions for the formation of a new revolutionary leadership. The epoch of permanent revolution will be the epoch of the flowering of the Fourth International.
Alongside social democracy and Stalinism, all the intermediate centrist formations have definitively proved incapable of raising up an international tendency within the labour movement, of even sketching out a programme, of training cadres, and of maintaining serious organizations. The Fourth International alone follows, in thirty-five countries of the world, a firm course toward the overthrow of the capitalist regime through the class action of the proletariat and the poor masses. It calls upon the workers to use every major crisis through which the bourgeoisie of their countries passes in order to establish the direct power of the proletariat in its democratically elected committees and councils. It calls upon the oppressed peoples to win their national and social liberation. It calls upon revolutionary militants to integrate themselves everywhere into the real movements of the masses, to take part in their daily struggles and to live at their side through their practical experiences, showing themselves to be the most courageous fighters, the best organizers of the combats, the most conscious guides and the most patient educators for the revolution.
Communism is not an ideal to which reality should adapt itself. It is the real movement that overcomes the repugnant reality of capitalism in its death agony. Revolutionaries have no particular interests distinct from those of the real movement of their class. They represent only, beyond every corporative or national narrowness, the universal interests of the proletariat and the clear consciousness of the road that leads to socialism.
The Real March toward World Revolution
More than seventy delegates, coming from twenty-six different countries and representing decades of experience of workers' struggles in every form and on every continent, assembled in the Congress of the Fourth International, world party of the socialist revolution, salute the workers of the whole world who are fighting for their class interests and who, despite all differences of ideology and consciousness, constitute a single, unique anti-imperialist front that will overthrow the rule of capital and create the world federation of socialist republics.
They salute with emotion the revolutionary militants who fill the gaols of imperialism and of Stalin, and also all the workers who are victims of repression. The victorious proletariat will soon open their cells and punish their executioners as they deserve.
The world congress of the Fourth International salutes the Chinese proletariat, its brothers the poor peasants of the countryside, and its valiant sons who are fighting imperialism in Korea. The first resounding victories of the Chinese revolution represent the most important event in world history since October 1917. The Fourth International calls upon the workers of all countries to defend by every means the Chinese revolution, threatened by imperialist intervention. It calls upon the Chinese workers to pursue their struggle to the complete destruction of bourgeois power and to the establishment of a genuine dictatorship of the proletariat, resting on the democratically elected committees of workers and poor peasants.
The world congress of the Fourth International sends its greetings to the heroic proletarians of Korea, who, beneath the avalanche of iron and fire under which imperialism seeks to bury them, abandon nothing of their tenacious will to unify and liberate their country. It calls upon the workers of all countries to grant the maximum material and political aid to the Korean proletarians, until the last imperialist soldier has left this martyred country.
The world congress of the Fourth International salutes the fighters of the colonial revolution in Vietnam, Burma, and Indonesia, who today are fighting in the vanguard of the world anti-imperialist struggle. It is above all for the proletariat of Great Britain, France, the USA, and the Netherlands to aid and support the struggle of these class brothers, a struggle that deals a very heavy blow to bourgeois domination in the metropolitan countries.
The world congress of the Fourth International sends its greetings to the industrial and agricultural workers of India, Japan, and Ceylon, who have built powerful trade-union and political class organizations and are seeking to wrest the leadership of their nation from the bourgeoisie. Only workers' and peasants' governments will cut the last ties with imperialism, carry out a genuine agrarian reform, expropriate the landowners and the big bourgeoisie, and create the conditions necessary for a real economic upsurge in these countries. The congress particularly salutes the Lanka Sama Samaja Party, the Ceylonese section of the Fourth International, which, at the head of the masses of its country, will fight to overthrow the power of the corrupt bourgeoisie.
The world congress of the Fourth International salutes the workers and poor peasants of Iran who, through their powerful revolutionary mobilization, have forced the native bourgeoisie to take a few steps in the direction of the anti-imperialist struggle.
Unconditional support for the struggle of the Iranian, Egyptian, Iraqi, and North African masses against foreign imperialism and its oil and mining companies! Complete independence for Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia, outside any "French Union"! Complete independence for the Sudan! Full and entire sovereignty for Egypt over the Suez Canal! Withdrawal of all imperialist troops! For a socialist federation of the Middle Eastern countries!
The world congress of the Fourth International salutes the workers and poor peasants of Black Africa, who over recent months have awakened to the anti-imperialist struggle. It calls upon them to build their trade unions and class parties everywhere, to fight all imperialism's efforts to transform their continent into a stronghold of the war it is preparing. Down with the colour bar and all racial discrimination! Long live the unity of the peoples of Africa in winning political democracy and freeing themselves from foreign imperialist exploitation!
The world congress of the Fourth International salutes the Bolivian proletariat and its courageous vanguard, the Revolutionary Workers Party, Bolivian section of the Fourth International. For years the Bolivian miners have been striving to overthrow the bloody tyranny of the mining companies over their country. Gaining, at their side, the experience of a great united anti-imperialist front, the POR will know how to bring them to the understanding that only the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, resting on the poor peasants, will achieve this emancipation.
The world congress of the Fourth International salutes the proletariat and all the poor masses of Latin America who want to cease being the playthings of the bourgeois and military cliques, instruments of Yankee imperialism. Building their class organizations in every country and integrating themselves into the real mass movements developing in all these countries, the Latin American workers' vanguard will know how to combine in its programme the anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, democratic, and national demands, and will raise the banner of the Soviet Socialist United States of Latin America.
The world congress of the Fourth International salutes the Yugoslav proletariat, which by its heroic struggle during the war and by its courageous resistance to the Kremlin has found itself at the head of the march of the European socialist revolution. Today the opportunist leaders of the Yugoslav Communist Party are capitulating to imperialist pressure and are jeopardizing everything the Yugoslav workers have won at the cost of so many sacrifices. The world congress calls upon all Yugoslav Communists to form a Leninist opposition within their party, to replace its present opportunist leadership, to link themselves to the revolutionary forces developing throughout the world, and to base their strategy of resistance to the Kremlin and to Wall Street on close fusion with these forces, which will defend proletarian Yugoslavia against all its enemies.
The world congress of the Fourth International salutes the workers of Western Europe who, in the face of the bourgeoisie's attacks, have held all their class positions and have themselves begun to pass over to the counter-offensive. Against the lowering of their standard of living, against the attacks on workers' liberties, against war preparations, a united front from the base to the top must be built among all the workers' organizations, taking every wave of struggle over demands as a starting point for posing the question of power, of the workers' and peasants' government. The congress addresses itself in particular to the Communist workers of France, Italy, and Greece, fighting at the head of their class, and salutes their fierce resistance to the bourgeoisie's anti-communist campaign. At their side, the militants of the Fourth International will fight against the Atlantic Pact, against the imperialists' war, for the defence of the USSR, of the "people's democracies," and of China. In this way the calumnious character of their leaderships' accusations against Trotskyism will burst into the open before everyone's eyes, and the Communist workers will understand from their own experience that only the programme of the Fourth International makes it possible to wage the struggle against the common enemy effectively.
The world congress of the Fourth International salutes the workers of Germany, who are in the process of overcoming the effects of the terrible ordeals imposed on them by the defeat of 1933, the Nazi dictatorship, the war, and the consequent prostration of the economy. Today, regrouped in powerful trade-union organizations that, on the bourgeoisie's own admission, could take the Bonn state by the throat, the German proletariat, faced with the obstacle of foreign occupation and the country's dismemberment, is prudently taking its first steps on the road to independent class action. The whole future of Europe may depend on the development of these actions. By struggling against the rearmament of their bourgeoisie, for the departure of all occupation troops, for the constitution of a united, free, and democratic socialist republic of councils, the German proletarians can contribute powerfully to the formation of the Socialist United States of Europe, the only means of halting the disintegration and decadence of the Old Continent and thereby assuring it a new upsurge.
The world congress of the Fourth International salutes the Spanish workers who, by the magnificent wave of strikes this spring, have shown that they are beginning to overcome the effects of the defeats of the civil war. Complete solidarity with the Spanish proletariat! Down with the hangman Franco! Workers of all countries, prevent your governments from prolonging the martyrdom of the Spanish people under the Francoist dictatorship! Long live the worker-peasant alliance that will overthrow Franco and set out resolutely on the road of the workers' and peasants' government of the new Spanish revolution.
The world congress of the Fourth International salutes the workers of Great Britain who, organized in the most powerful class organizations of the whole of Europe, are today preparing for a new stage of the struggle for socialism: the struggle for workers' control over production and against imperialist rearmament. Become conscious of your immense possibilities, workers of Great Britain! Place yourselves at the head of the struggle for a Europe wrested from the capitalists! Transform the powerful industrial potential of your country into the base of a freely consented alliance with the colonial peoples freeing themselves from imperialism! Show the world proletariat how a genuine proletarian power can be built, without bureaucratic control or privilege!
The world congress of the Fourth International salutes the workers of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand who, in their mass organizations, are resisting fiercely the capitalist pressure and defending their standard of living and their trade-union liberties against the attacks and anti-communist hysteria of the bourgeoisie.
The world congress of the Fourth International salutes the workers, peasants, and soldiers of the USSR and of the "people's democracies." It assures them of the complete and unconditional support of the whole world revolutionary movement in the coming war, against the restorationist efforts of the international bourgeoisie. To defend collectivized property, the planned economy, the workers' states, even deformed or degenerated ones, is an imperative duty for the world proletariat. At the same time, the Fourth International resolutely supports all the proletarian opposition movements against the police dictatorship of the Soviet bureaucracy, and struggles for the constitution of new Bolshevik-Leninist parties in these countries, parties which will find themselves at the head of the political revolution necessary to free socialist development from its bureaucratic shell. Long live the defence of the USSR and of the "people's democracies" against imperialism! Long live the independent Soviet socialist republics of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Ukraine! Down with the Stalinist dictatorship! Long live soviet democracy!
The world congress of the Fourth International salutes the sixteen million organized workers of the United States, the marching wing of the most numerous and powerful proletariat in the world. It salutes the Socialist Workers Party, which, in the very citadel of world capitalism, has maintained the Leninist programme and organization against every pressure. The upheavals throughout the world provoked by the march of American imperialism toward world domination will soon begin to overturn the domination of the Yankee bourgeoisie in its own country. Then will sound the hour of the American revolution which, through the immense creative forces it will liberate, will play the decisive role in the socialist transformation of the whole world.
The world congress of the Fourth International proclaims itself an integral part of this whole diverse and varied movement of the world proletariat toward socialism. It struggles within that movement for its revolutionary programme. It will win its leadership through the tumultuous experiences of the years to come. It will direct the efforts of labouring humanity to build a classless society, free of exploitation or oppression of any kind, a society that will know universal peace and will assure abundance for all through an economy based on needs, a society in which civilization will flourish as a common possession of all mankind. For this grandiose goal, it calls the proletarians of all countries to struggle and to unity. Down with imperialism and the murderous war it is preparing! Long live the world socialist revolution, whose triumph we shall together assure!
The Third World Congress of the Fourth International September 1951
Quatrième Internationale, n° 8 and n° 10, August and September 1951.