File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/marxism-international.9705, message 119


Date: Thu, 29 May 1997 08:31:56 +0200
From: Hugh Rodwell <m-14970-AT-mailbox.swipnet.se>
Subject: M-I: Building an International Party


This spring, important moves got under way in our continuing efforts to
build an international party capable of coordinating the efforts of
revolutionaries in many countries around the world. This latest step brings
groups working in Poland and Russia, and possibly others depending on
response to the call, into a wider framework of political and
organizational international cooperation.

The call is also available in Spanish (which I will be posting) and
Portuguese (which I will forward to anyone who requests it).

Cheers,

Hugh

===============================================================


		        Call for an
		International Meeting


Workers International Party (WIP) - ex-USSR
Initiative Group of the Workers Party (GIRP) - Poland
International Secretariat of the International Workers League (IWL) -
Fourth International


Presentation

This call for an international meeting is directed to all marxists
revolutionary organizations that understand that recent world  events have
made it more urgent than ever to work for  the building of a world
revolutionary party, democratically centralized on the basis of a
revolutionary programme, that follows the lessons of the four
internationals which the workers moviment was able to build.



Call for an International Meeting


1- On 26-27 January 1997 there was a meeting in Moscow between
representatives of the local committees of the International Worker Party
(POI) of Ukraine and Russia, a representative of the Group of Initiative
for a Workers' Party (GIPR) of Poland, and a representative of the
International Workers League - IV International (IWL-FI).  The central
issue discussed was the imperative necessity of taking concrete steps
towards the construction of the World  Revolutionary Workers' Party.

2- We consider that the objective and subjective processes in the world
workers' movement demonstrate the necessity of continuing, extending and
deepening the process begun by the Liaison Committee between the
International Workers League - Fourth International (IWL-FI) and the
Workers International for the Reconstruction of the IV International
(WI-RFI). The current stage of the class struggle and the emergence of new
revolutionary organisations in various countries create favourable
conditions for this.

3- We consider the Statement of the Liaison Committee, agreed in Paris on
2-3 June 1995 (21 points), is an important and great step forward on the
road to building the world revolutionary workers' party, generalizing the
experience of a century and a half  of revolutionary struggle of the
working class against capitalists and bureaucrats;  collecting the
experience of revolutionary Marxism in the organizational frameworks of the
First, Second, Third and Fourth Internationals.

4- Discussions began between the organisations signing this Statement
around a series of points in the Paris Statement. Additional proposals,
alterations and changes were also received from members and organisations
in South Africa, Brazil, Great Britain, Poland and other countries. In the
framework of the above, we also state that, despite the existing general
agreement on the necessity of building a world revolutionary workers'
party, there will be an open discussion on whether  the Reconstruction of
the IV International is the guide to the completion of this task, as the
Paris Statement specifically states.

5- With the objective of deepening this discussion, and the discussions on
program and problems of the revolutionary workers' movement, we invite all
those who basically agree with the Statement to participate in them soon
through the International Bulletin (programmatic)  that will be published
especially for this discussion, initially in English, Spanish, Polish,
Portuguese and Russian.

6- We propose to hold an International Meeting this year, with the
participation of all organisations which consider the Paris Statement a
starting point, with the aim of examining programmatic and practical
problems. It would also consider the possibility of forming an
international organizational framework which could unite, with equal rights
and obligations, all the forces who agree to work for the construction of a
workers' International based on the principle of democratic centralism and
on the basis of a revolutionary program.

7- We propose to all the organisations to make their proposals on the date
and place for the international meeting to be agreed in the future between
all the participants.

Organizing Committee of the International Workers' Party (POI) - Ukraine
and Russia
Group of Initiative for a Workers' Party (GIPR - Poland)
SI of the International Workers League - Fourth International (IWL-FI)
21 February 1997


__________________________________

21 Points

Declaration of the Liasion Committee  agreed at a meeting in Paris on 2-3
June 1995 between Workers International League-Fourth International
(LIT-CI) and the Workers International-to Rebuild the Fourth International
(WI-RFI)

Introduction:

Today, after the collapse of Stalinism in the Soviet Union and eastern
Europe, the ruling class and its servants in every country proclaim:
'Socialism has failed'. 'Marxism is dead', 'The working class is finished'.
This is a lie. What collapsed in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe was
not socialism, but Stalinism.

In the conditions of the isolation of the young Soviet state, the rule of
the Stalinist bureaucracy led to the degeneration of the workers' state
which the working class had won in the October Revolution of 1917, and
finally to the disintegration of the Soviet Union. This destructive work of
the Stalinist bureaucracy was carried out on a world scale through the
politics of the Communist Party. In the name of 'socialism in one country'
and then 'peaceful coexistence between the capitalist and socialist
systems' international Stalinism betrayed the revolutionary struggles of
the working class, and this is what allowed capitalism to continue for so
long.

This work of Stalinism was very destructive to the working class and the
labour movement. But the fall of Stalinism is not a victory for capitalism.
The attempted restoration of capitalism in Russia and eastern Europe does
not offer world capitalism a way to overcome its contradictions. On the
contrary it brings enormous new problems. In the great struggles provoked
by its historical crisis, the capitalist class no longer has the help of
its main instrument within the workers' movement - Stalinism.

The work of combatting Stalinism and building the world party of socialist
revolution was begun by Trotsky and his comrades, who founded the Fourth
International in 1938. the Fourth International has undergone a prolonged
crisis, following the assasination of Trotsky by a Stalinist agent in 1940
and the physical liquidation of many others.

In today's new situation following the fall of Stalinism the LIT-CI and the
WI(RFI) declare that it is necessary and  possible to take definite and
positive steps towards the reconstruction of the Fourth International, to
overcome past differences, and to renew at a higher level the political
collaboration which we attempted in 1987.

We present this declaration to explain the agreements on questions of
programme and perspectives which already exist between the LIT-CI and the
WI(RFI) and which are the foundation of the Liaison Committee of our two
organisations to plan a common discussion, elaborate strategy and engage in
common activity on all the main questions confronting the working class.
We are confident that this basic agreement on the necessity of
reconstructing the Fourth International can be important not only for those
in the ranks of our two organisations; it forms the basis for initiating a
process of discussion and common action by many organisations and militants
who are finding in struggle that it is necessary to build on the work of
Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky in constructing the world party of
socialist revolution.  As part of this process of reconstrution of the
working-class movement and of the Fourth International, we will actively
explore the possibility of uniting the LIT-CI and the WI(RFI) in a single
organisation for the reconstruction of the Fourth International.
This is based on the following Constitutive Points of Declaration:

A.	We stand on the basis of  the past conquests of the building of an
international,  Marxist working-class leadership.

1. We support the Resolutions and Theses of the first four Congresses of
the Third (Communist) International, all its main and essential strategies
in relation to imperialism, the capitalist state, democracy and reformism;
the problems of taking power and of the dictatorship of the proletariat in
relation to the peasantry and the struggle of the oppressed masses; the
soviets; work in the unions; parliamentarism; and the tactic of the United
Front.

2. We support the founding and the programme of the Fourth International in
1938, continuing the traditions of Bolshevik organisation and programme.
This was made necessary by the definitive moving over of Stalinism to the
bourgeois order. On this basis we reaffirm the need to build the Fourth
International, in opposition to those who say the Fourth International is
dead and proclaim the need to create a Fifth International.
The reconstruction of the Fourth International is a task of the very first
order in the period which has opened up after the collapse of Stalinism,
which affords very favourable conditions for this task to be carried out.

3. The continuity of the Fourth International has been a contradictory
process, consisting in the struggle for the continuity of Bolshevism
against revisionist leaders who have acted as a transmission belt for
Stalinism inside the Trotskyist movement.
It was also necessary to wage a hard struggle against those tendencies
which wanted to dissolve the Trotskyist parties into the bourgeois
nationalist or petty-bourgeois movements or Social Democracy. The latter
has been able to maintain its present strength inside the workers' movement
because Stalinism destroyed the Communist International; however, it is
impossible for Social Democracy at the present time to fulfil the function
of Stalinism in controlling the workers' movement.

B.	The historical crisis of capitalism.

4. The work of reconstructing the Fourth International, the fight to
resolve the crisis of working-class revolutionary leadership, means that
Marxists trust develop the capacity to win  the vanguard of the working
class. For this we must base ourselves on a fundamental conclusion of
Marxist analysis: in its period of decay, capitalism is a fetter on the
productive forces of humanity.
The developments of recent decades in technique and science .  (which are
extremely important in relation to the development of the productive
forces), because they take place within the putrefying capitalist system,
have unleashed a massive destruction against the most important element of
the productive forces, the working class, and now against nature itself.
The massive problems of danger to the survival of the planet's natural
resources, of the expansion of deserts and famine, are not in themselves by
any means ecological problems. They are the reality of the death agony of
the capitalist system: production and investment only for the purpose of
profit and capital accumulation are the opposite of the conscious and
creative planned control and restraint which the future of humanity and its
productive forces now demand. The longer this contradiction lasts, the more
acute it becomes; the alternative of 'socialism or barbarism' is a daily
threat to the lives of millions of people.

5. Capitalism in its highest and last stage - the imperialism of the 20th
century - was able to survive the revolutionary struggles at the end of the
second imperialist world war only because the Stalinist bureaucracy and its
parties maintained political control over the working class. This permitted
a relatively long period of world capitalist expansion, within which, under
the surface, the historical contradiction between the productive forces and
capitalist social relations, including the contradiction between world
economy and the nation-state, accumulated and intensified.
So the world capitalist crisis today is not a cyclical capitalist crisis
from which there will be a 'recovery' and boom, but a new stage in the
structural, historical crisis of the capitalist system. That is why, for
example, today's mass unemployment is structural and permanent and not just
an increase in the reserve army of labour. And that is why for capitalism
the peoples of a whole continent, such as Africa, can be virtually written
off.
In this situation, even in the advanced capitalist countries, not only can
capitalism no longer respond to the struggles of the working class through
reforms and concessions, but it finds it absolutely necessary to attack, to
take back the past gains, reforms and democratic rights won in past
struggles. Against these attacks we support unconditionally all the
struggles of the workers who confront them. At the same time we declare
that we can only advance in the construction of Bolshevik parties of the
Fourth International if we are able to take our part in these struggles,
big and small, confronting the enemies of the working class and fighting
for the leadership of the masses.
The traditional bureaucratic and parliamentary (reformist and ex-Stalinist)
leaderships in the working class join with the capitalist class and its
state in conducting this attack on the working class in accordance with
their nature as the instruments of capitalism within the working-class
movement. As the needs of capitalism change, so these leaderships change,
now more and more openly abandoning any claim to be socialist or even
working-class.

C.	The fall of Stalinism.

6.	We state that since the fall of the Berlin Wall there has been,
inside both the WI(RFI) and the LIT-Cl, a fertile debate about the nature
of those states which Trotskyism has historically defined as degenerated
bureaucratic workers' states (ex-USSR) or bureaucratically deformed
workers' states (Hungary, China, Vietnam, Cuba etc.).
The discussion is more about what these states are today, after the events
of 1989-91, than about what they were in the past.  This discussion
involves the emphasis put on certain tasks (anti-bureaucratic,
anti-imperialist, socialist) in the development of the revolution in these
states. We believe that we are faced with a far-reaching theoretical,
historical, programmatic and political debate and the Liaison Committee
should initiate this.
This discussion will take a long time but we know that both organization
have agreements in programatic and political points like:
- The downfall of the bureaucracies through the revolutionary action of the
masses was a highly positive development because it destroyed the world
Stalinist apparatus, although the process of total destruction of the
bureaucracy has not been completed through the control of the working class
over its organisations.
- What has happened in the former USSR and those countries where the
bourgeoisie has been expropriated is the destruction of the reactionary
Stalinist utopia of 'socialism in one country'.
At the same time the theoretical programme of the Permanent Revolution is
confirmed in relation to the world nature of the socialist revolution and
of the role of the working class.
- We categorically reject any position that substitutes other agencies for
the working class as the historic subject of the revolution.  The working
class is the only class capable of building a Bolshevik party at the
national and international levels and successfully achieving the world
socialist revolution, while  fulfilling a number of democratic, national,
anti-imperialist and socialist tasks.
- In the revolutions of 1989 and the collapse of the Stalinist bureaucracy,
history has pronounced its final verdict on the revisionist idea that the
Stalinist bureaucracy, or any section of it, could have a revolutionary
nature. The break-up of the bureaucracy and its parties, and the struggle
of the working class in every country to recover its class conscicousness
and rebuild its independent class movement, constitute an unprecedented and
complex process, which can be understood only through continuous political
intervention and analysis.
This is the joint work which must be co-ordinated by the Liaison Committee.
At the centre of this work must be the struggle for the development of
Marxist theory and of the international strategy of the working class; and
this means the fight to build independent revolutionary parties of the
working class, a task which cannot be achieved except in the framework of
the rebuilding of the Fourth International.
- We defend the revolutionary process which brought about the expropriation
of the bourgeoisie and the break from imperialism as in China, Vietnam,
Cuba and elsewhere. Above all we defend and support the October Revolution
in which the working class in its workers' councils (soviets), led by the
Bolshevik Party, smashed the capitalist state and established the workers'
state.
- We emphasise the central importance of the fight against privatisation
and the general process of capitalist restoration which have been
instigated by imperialism and the bureaucracy in these states.
Today it is absolutely necessary to wage a powerfuI campaign in defence of
socialism, against the ideological offensive of imperialism and its
agencies which claim that socialism is dead with the collapse of the
Stalinist regimes. This campaign is decisive because the ideological
offensive of imperialism relies, on the one hand, on the Stalinist
dictatorships whose crimes have sullied the name of socialism; on the other
hand, on the fact that the revolutionary process in eastern Europe has not
yet given rise to revolutionary socialist alternatives.
This requires a struggle to face the new theoretical tasks posed by these
new historical developments and, in facing these tasks, to develop Marxist
theory as the guide to our own action and that of the working class.

7. Defending the conquests of the October Revolution and other revolutions
which expropriated the burgeoisie has nothing to do with defending the
grave-diggers of these revolutions - the Stalinist regimes. We denounce in
particular as a capitulation to Stalinism those positions wich seek to
identify the defense of the gains of the Cuban Revolution with the defnce
of the Castro regime, as does the leadership of the United Secretariat
(Usec).
Castroism in collaboration with imperialism is restoring capitalism in
Cuba. We believe that the struggle to defend the two principal gains of the
Cuban Reolution, independece from imperialism and the expropriation of the
bourgeoisie (now heavily compromised by the process of restoration), means
the fight for a political revolution in Cuba. Such a revolution would bring
down the bureaucratic regime led by Fidel Castro and put the working class
and the Cuban people in power, to rule on the basis of working-class
democracy, revoking the agreements made by Fidel Castro with imperialism.
It would replace the present economic planning in the service of the
bureaucracy with a plan controlled by the working class and directed to
servicing the needs of producers and consumers.

D. 	With the oppressed peoples, against imperialism

8. We distinguish between the nationalism of the oppressed and the
nationalism of the oppressor. We are unconditionally on the side of the
oppressed nations when they are attacked, and above all we defend
unconditionally the struggle of opressed nations for self-determination.
We are unconditionally on the side of the Kurdish People, the Palestinians,
the Bosnian nation, the Irish, the Basques, the Catalans, the Chechnyans
and all those peoples who are fighting to assert the right to
self-determination or who are asserting it.
In the former Yugoslavia, in April 1992, the majority ot the Bosnian
population voted for independence. Faced with this the Greater-Serbian
nationalist government of Milosevic launched a ferocious war of occupation
and 'ethnic cleansing'. Our political, strategic objective is a Socialist
Federation of the Balkans. But in order to achieve this we have to defend
the right of the Bosnian people to their independence and territorial
integrity. Without the free decision of peoples, any Federation will be
nothing more nor less than an annexation.

9. In spite of the basic political differences that exist between
Trotskyism and the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois nationalist movements, we
defend from attack by imperialism and the bureaucracy all liberation
movements and all those states that have achieved their political
independence from imperialism. We take up especially the unconditional
defence of those who find themselves under direct military attack or the
threat of military intervention from the imperialist powers, and we defend
unconditionally the right of national independence and self-determination.
Only the free association of free peoples can achieve the final aim of the
abolition of frontiers.
On no account does this defence mean that we give political support to the
national bourgeois governments of such countries.
We defend the national liberation movements unconditionally at the same
time fighting for the working class and the oppressed masses to develop
their own, independent methods of struggle. We reject the line which
appears to put these class forces on an equal footing with the proletariat
(the Stalinist 'bloc of four classes') but is in fact the subordination of
the working class to the national bourgeoisie.
The democratic tasks, including national liberation, cannot be achieved
except through the leading role of the proletariat and then its
revolutionary dictatorship. We reject any alliance, permanent or strategic,
with bourgeois or petty-bourgeois forces.  This does not mean that we would
exclude anti-imperialist actions. We consider these essential.

10. We denounce the use of the institutions of bourgeois democracy by
imperialism, the bourgeois nationalists and the bureaucracy, to deflect the
revolutionary processes into the blind alley of elections. We denounce the
present-day reformists who act as agents of the reactionary politics of
imperialism in defending the supposed 'universal values' of bourgeois
democracy.
We make use of democratic liberties that are the gains of the masses. We
defend these liberties when they are attacked and we struggle for their
extension. In relation to the bourgeois electoral process, when we
participate we do this in such a way as to publicise our programme widely
and to denounce this  bourgeois institution.

11. We denounce especially the politics of imperialism which are carried
out through its instrument, the United Nations. In Bosnia, the UN's
imperialist forces are used to destroy Bosnia's national independence, to
impose a settlement, which breaks up the working class and rewards the
fascist Greater-Serbian nationalist aggression. The imperialists hoped this
would be the first of a series of advances by fascism and the extreme right
in Europe.
Yeltsin's return to the most bloody and brutal Stalinist methods of
extermination in Chechnya is the natural consequence of the fact that he is
the representative of imperialism's interests in restoring capitalism in
the former USSR. That is why the UN stands aside from the crushing of
Chechnya, and US imperialism continues to provide billions to Yeltsin.
Their embargo on Serbia is a fraud; at the same time they provide support
to Yeltsin, who suppresses Chechnya and is Milosevic's firmest supporter.
In Haiti, on the pretext of restoring democracy; in Somalia on the pretence
of dealing with famine and civil war: everywhere imperialist military
intervention to prevent the possibility of revolution, in reality to ensure
the continuation of the unbridled imperialist exploitation which is the
cause of the chaos and destruction now inflicted on hundreds of millions of
people.
The imposition of military intervention and dictatorship for the
preservation of this chaos, destruction and disorder is called ... a new
world order!

12. We denounce the peace agreemente in the Middle East, those of Mandela
in South Africa and those which try to bring to an end the struggle for the
unity of Ireland. All these have a counter-revolutionary character because
they signify a betrayal of the historic claims of the masses in these
countries and regions.  They all seek the same objectives as the Contadora
and Esquipulas agreements in Central America: to demobilise the masses,
betraying their historic claims. The Sandinistas, acting as officials of
the government of Violeta Chamorro, the police of the Mandela government
repressing black strikers, and the police of the PLO repressing the
Palestinian mobilisations, leave no doubt about the character of these
agreements and who are the beneficiaries.

E.	The workers' struggle and its methods.

13. We are convinced that the demand supported by the Founding
Conference of the Fourth International - for a workers' and peasants'
government - is a correct demand for the working class. It must be an
integral part of a programme of transitional demands, i.e. a programme
through which the working class, in the course of struggle, preparing and
building for the struggle for power, will break with its treacherous
traditional leaderships.
To demand a workers' and peasants' government is not to place any
confidence whatever in these traditional leaderships and parties.  Only by
posing the demand - break with the bourgeoisie and form a government based
on the workers' and people's organisations with an anti-capitalist
programme - can the demand for a workers' and peasants' government have a
revolutionary content.

14. We affirm that Popular Front governments of collaboration between the
leadership of the working class and bourgeois parties (similar to that
which Lula tried to construct in Brazil) are bourgeois governments and as
such are counter-revolutionary. The existence of a Popular Front governnent
confronts the revolutionary party with an exceptional challenge and
opportunity. This is not because such a government may be progressive but
because the treacherous leadership, by placing themselves openly in the
bourgeois governments, makes it easier to expose them in front of the
masses for what they really are: agents of counter-revolution inside the
workers' and people's movement.

15. We are in favour of all the methods of political struggle that the
workers' movement has adopted through its experience, and we are against
those petty-bourgeois groups which try to substitute for these struggles
isolated actions of the masses or individual terrorism or elitist guerrilla
war. We defend those who struggle with these methods when they are
suppresped by the bourgeoisie and the bureaucracy, but we reject their
methods.

16. We are with Marx when he says that 'the emancipation of the working
class is the task of the working class itself', but for this the working
class needs to have the power to decide its destiny. Against the
bureaucratic apparatuses and against the leaders who speak in the name of
the workers and the masses, we say: it is the workers who must decide;
fight for the widest democracy at all levels, in the struggles in the
unions, in the struggles for the land.

17. The parties we fight to build are revolutionary workers' parties,
sections of the reconstructed Fourth International, organised on the
principles of democratic centralism in all countries. Democratic centralism
is the very opposite of the bueaucratic centralism typified by Stalinism,
it which the central apparatus dictates to the rank and file.
We are against all those false theories which say that the responsibility
for revolutionary leadership can be left in the hands of the traditional
reformist and ex-Stalinist parties or by petty-bourgeois 'left'
leaderships.

18. We condemn the method of slander, violence and fraudulent accusations
designed to silence and expel political opposition.  In particular we
condemn the lies used against M. Varga (Balazs Nagy), J. Hansen, G. Novack,
T. Wohlforth, N. Fields, R. Napuri, Juan Pablo Bacherer, Pedro Carrasquedo
and now against Cliff Slaughter by David North's party.
We condemn the method of 'vale todo' (physical aggression, robbery, the
taking-over of premises etc.) to settle internal debates in revolutionlary
organisations. We condemn all these methods that are inherited from
Stalinism, and affirm that the Fourth International will only be able to
rebuild itself if it is capable of constructing and reconstructing not only
a programme, an organisation based upon authentic Marxist revolutionary
politics, but also a proletarian morality.

F.	Our objectives.

19. The Liaison Committee has as its objective the reconstruction of the
Fourth International in and through the reconstruction of the working-class
movement as a whole.
Both our organisations reiterate that we shall deal with each other with
total mutual loyalty and will ask the same from any other organisation with
which we may in future collaborate to advance towards the rebuilding of the
Fourth International.
We reject the methods of sects which seek to approach other revolutionary
organisations only as a means of developing fractional work or as a means
of constructing a permanent forum of discussion.

20. In line with this objective, the common elaboration of a programme,
based on developing the Transitional Programme for the working class's
present needs, is a key task. It is a difficult task, but one we must
tackle fearlessly. The party is the programme, as Trotsky emphasised.

21. The common activity, in the class struggle of our two organisations is
a priority task of the Liaison Committee, in order to develop closer
political relations and to elaborate the programme.





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