League for the Fifth International
The year 2024 saw an intensification of what is often referred to as a “multiple crisis” – economic, environmental, political and military. It was a year of devastating wars on three continents – the Ukraine in Europe, in Western Asia, the Israeli genocide in Gaza and bombardment of neighbouring countries, in Africa, the horrific civil war in Sudan and, in South Asia, the escalating conflict in Myanmar. It was a year with a record number of elections, many of which saw victories for right wing demagogues and racist parties.
Accelerating climate change in the hottest year ever recorded, produced storms like Hurricane Helene and Typhoon Gaemi. Floods, such as in Valencia, killed thousands and forced millions from their homes. At the root of these multiple crises is the increasing rivalry between the old and the new imperialist powers as they struggle for the re-division of the world
Economic roots of Crisis
Driving this rivalry since the Financial Crash of 2008-9 is the crisis of capitalist profitability, which afflicts both the imperialist metropoles (old and new) and the majority of countries they exploit in the semi-colonial world. Russia, though it has survived the US-initiated sanctions which some hoped would bring it to its knees, will inherit serious damage from Putin’s adventure in Ukraine. In China, the collapse of hugely indebted construction firms has not only left tens of millions of uncompleted buildings but also removed a major source of government funding. In addition, the annual GDP growth rate is down to 4.8 percent but government “initiatives” have been limited to quite minor fiscal relaxations, suggesting internal disagreements within the Chinese Communist Party itself.
Despite a series of countervailing measures by governments, most notably Biden’s American Rescue Plan, a $1.9 trillion economic stimulus, no major global expansionary phase has resulted. True, the USA witnessed a recovery phase from the severe 2020-2022 covid recession, and even something of a stock exchange bubble, but the defeat of Kamala Harris in November confirms that many US citizens were still reeling from the cost of living crisis and blamed the incumbents for it. Meanwhile, major European economies like Germany, France, Britain and Italy, oscillate between stagnation and recession.
In most semi-colonial countries, the crisis is ongoing and even more severe. Almost a billion people are facing hunger and malnutrition on a daily basis. This, and the environmental crisis and wars, have driven millions to flee their homes and to seek refuge in neighbouring countries. Those who try to reach North America or Europe, face death at the borders of fortress Europe or the US behind which, rising racist and far right parties demand ever more barbaric measures, blaming economic woes on immigrants.
The over-accumulation of capital and the decline of the rate of profit in all major countries, drives the rivalry between the new and old imperialist powers for domination of the world economy and its human and natural resources. This is why the new American President threatens to unleash an unprecedented tariff war not just against economic enemies like China but against allies like Canada, Germany and Mexico. His aim is to use the US dominance of global finance and trade and the new technologies to counter the decade of declining US hegemony. Whilst Trump may succeed in forcing rivals to make concessions in the short term, this will sharpen global tensions, capitalist competition, geostrategic conflicts and an unprecedented wave of militarisation.
His economic blackmail is aimed not only at crippling a looming rival, China, but at making long standing “partners” in Europe and North America shoulder the costs of Making America Great Again. The European Union is already in major crisis, speeded up by the Ukraine War and the division it has opened up amongst member states. If Trump can strike a deal with Putin, forcing Kyiv to surrender territory, this will increase its inner contradictions and the geo-strategic differences between the European bourgeoisies. If Trump launches a trade war, that, and the inevitable retaliations, will further disrupt the world economy, bringing on a serious and prolonged global recession and increasing the dangers of yet more destructive wars.
At the same time, even an imperialist peace in Ukraine will not end the global rivalries which are one of the causes of the war in the first place. At most, it will merely give them a different form. In all imperialist centres and all the bigger semi-colonial countries, we will witness a massive rise in military spending, a new arms race and increased militarisation.
The climate crisis, too, is reaching a series of tipping points. The 1.5C target for the whole century has already been reached. Just to restrict global warming to this level for the rest of the century, would require a reduction in carbon dioxide emissions of 45% by 2030! COP 24 saw yet another failure to meet the targets of the 2015 Paris agreement. Given the increased global competition, even the greenwashing climate policies have fallen victim to the imperialist aims of all the global powers.
To assume that the destruction of greenhouse gas emitting capital can take place in a “planned” or „controlled“ way and be replaced by sustainable power generation, industry and transport, under the continued rule of ever more desperately competing capitalist states, is a total illusion. This illustrates the inadequacies of the strategies of the green protest movements, be they of a petit bourgeois or left-reformist or neo-Keynesian nature. On climate change, as on all major questions, reformism cannot even approach the challenge. Only revolution against the exploiting classes can put the levers of the economy and the state in the hands of a working class democracy at the service of humanity’s survival. Here, too, it is matter of socialism or barbarism.
War and Genocide
The Hamas-led October 7 2023 breakout from Gaza, justified as it was to break the siege and obstruct the sidelining of the Palestinians in a US, Israeli, Saudi regional deal, gave Netanyahu and his fascistic coalition partners allies, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar ben Gvir, the pretext to launch an unprecedented onslaught and turn it into outright genocide. In Gaza, more than 40,000 have been killed by the IDF and the entire infrastructure of energy supply, water, health services, education and homes reduced to piles of rubble. In the West Bank, ethnic cleansing has continued. Israel extended its war into Lebanon, inflicting a devastating defeat on Hezbollah, destroying its historic leadership, and also launched attacks on Iran and Yemen to neutralise the Islamic republic’s “axis of resistance”. The overthrow of the Assad regime also gave Israel the pretext to smash Syrian military and naval forces and occupy more territory on the Golan Heights. Throughout, Netanyahu contemptuously ignored verbal criticism from Biden, while receiving continued, indeed increased, weapon supplies while the US vetoed all UN resolutions calling for a ceasefire.
Huge demonstrations around the world, demanding an immediate ceasefire and an end to the Israeli genocide, have shown the scale of support for the Palestinian cause but their limitation to protests has been insufficient to bring an end to, or even to modify, the atrocities. The guarantee of unconditional US support has emboldened Netanyahu and his allies to pursue a re-ordering of the entire region in their own interests and those of the US.
The Saudi and Gulf monarchies, and the Egyptian military dictatorship, supposed supporters of Palestinian rights, have taken no action, such as the oil embargo they enforced in the 1970s, to force an end to the genocide – no doubt still intending to implement the deal with Israel that was being planned before hostilities began. Meanwhile, in North America and Western Europe, governments have persecuted pro-Palestinian activists using the antiterrorism laws, smearing them as antisemites whilst their media repeat that the devastation of Gaza is justified by the monstrous aggressor’s “right to self-defence”.
The rapid overthrow of Assad expressed the massive hatred of the masses, but also the lack of any significant social support for his regime. It revealed how much the dictatorship was dependent on Russia, Iran and Hezbollah, who were unable or unwilling to invest huge resources to rescue the regime. Putin was hobbled by his embroilment in the occupation war in Ukraine, Hezbollah has been nearly destroyed by Israeli assassinations and bombings and Iran has effectively been cowed by the Zionist state and the US.
The speed of the HTS military offensive and the complete disintegration of the Ba’athist regime’s military-police apparatus, plus risings in the south and in Damascus, which fell even before HTS forces arrived, have opened the space for a revival of the democratic and popular forces that initiated the Syrian “Spring” of 2011. Nonetheless, there are serious obstacles to the revival of the Syrian revolution; the horrific destruction of the war waged by Assad and Putin; the actions of ISIS as well as the Islamist politics of the HTS; the reactionary war waged by the Turkish sponsored SNA against the Autonomous Administration of North-East Syria (Rojava); and intervention by the Western powers and Turkey.
Obviously, it is the duty of revolutionaries worldwide, and those in the Syrian diaspora, to help both in political clarification and material resourcing for the mustering of genuine working class forces and a revolutionary alternative in Syria. This will be impeded, however, by those “campists” on the left who see events in Syria as simply a conspiracy by Israel and NATO to destroy the “axis of resistance” based on Assad, Hezbollah, Hamas and Iran. Like those who view Ukraine’s resistance to the Russian invasion and the dismemberment of their country as simply and only a proxy war by the West, they allow the undoubted fact that the Western imperialists have their own objectives to outweigh the democratic rights of oppressed nations to self-determination.
In fact, the events in Syria, Lebanon and Palestine, as well as in Ukraine, are all a product of the increasing rivalry between the old imperialist powers centred on the USA and the EU and the new, emergent imperialists, China and Russia, who challenge the hegemony of the US both economically and strategically.
The Rise of the Right
Trump’s triumph in November, and the advance of right wing populist forces internationally, have been key features of the global situation in 2024. The governments led by Milei in Argentina, Meloni in Italy, the re-election of Modi in India, the rise of Marine Le Pen’s RN in France, all testify to this. They are likely to continue. In Germany, the AfD will probably double its share of the votes in February 2025. In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders’ Partij voor de Vrijheid is leading the government and Britain’s Nigel Farage and Reform UK are likely to strengthen with funding from Elon Musk and promotion by X.
They all combine their reactionary policies with massive verbal attacks on the “establishment”, presenting themselves as those who will make their countries “great again”. They often attack the old bourgeois democratic parties and liberal media as corrupt and also the bureaucratised leaderships of trade unions and reformist parties. The records of the parties of the “centre” or centre-left provide an easy target for reactionary demagogy and irrationalism (anti-vax, climate change denial) while minimal concessions and reforms to the anti-racist, feminist, trans and pro-immigrant movements are targeted with “anti-wokeism”.
Clearly, these reactionary onslaughts will lead to resistance and mass counter mobilisations as we could see in the protests against male violence against women in the USA, Europe and the Indian sub-continent. Huge demonstrations took place in Rome, Paris and Madrid this November and the case of Gisele Pelicot, in France, galvanised public opinion and could lead to legislative change over the question of consent. Nevertheless, Trump’s own record as a serial abuser has landed him not in jail but in the White House, from where the MAGA movement will doubtless step up the campaign to ban abortion.
The advance of reactionary policies has actually been pioneered in the EU, UK and the USA by anti-migrant and anti-refugee laws and denial or restriction of democratic rights in the name of anti-terrorism, implemented by “centrist” or even centre-left governments. In Germany and other European countries, the expansion of NATO and the increase in arms spending has been imposed by a broad coalition of Conservative, Liberal, Social-Democratic and Green parties, sometimes even with the support of the so-called Left Party.
Tax cuts for the rich or subsidies to banking and industrial capital, combined with attacks on wages, social provisions, and privatisation have been implemented with the consent, or purely verbal opposition, of the leaders of the reformist parties and the big trade unions. In Britain, the new Labour Government, since it came into office in July, has boasted of deporting 13,500, “illegal” immigrants, beating the record of the Conservatives. It will preside over a new wave of cuts in local government services in 2025. These actions by the traditional reformist parties contribute to a crisis of leadership in the bureaucratised workers’ movements and open sections of the working class to the right wing populists.
Addressing the Crisis of Leadership
The developing aspects of crisis, and the weakness of the responses of the official labour movements, place an enormous responsibility on the shoulders of the relatively small and divided forces of revolutionaries around the world. Since wars, climate change and attacks on workers’ democratic rights and those of the socially oppressed can only be addressed, let alone solved, on a global scale, it becomes ever clearer that revolutionaries must seek to organise themselves internationally. They must develop and campaign for a programme that can unite and arm the rank and file leaders who will emerge from mass struggles against their exploiters and oppressors. A central goal is to raise once again, as Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky did, the need for a new, revolutionary International.
This is why the League for the Fifth International, the International Trotskyist Opposition (ITO) and the International Socialist League (ISL) have engaged in discussions on the burning global issues we all face, starting with the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, and adopted joint declarations on these.
We can foresee further wars, further gains by the right, but also further class struggles, including by the workers of Argentina faced with Javier Milei’s ultra-neoliberal “reforms”, and that is why we will pursue these discussions even more energetically in 2025. We hope to reach a firm programmatic agreement upon which to unify our organisations on a democratic centralist basis. We appeal to others who share our approach, and agree with the statements we have published thus far, to contact us for discussions, too.
It is clear that a new International is a necessary weapon for fighting on all fronts of the multiple crisis. We believe it will be the fifth and will be based on the historic achievements of the previous four. The severity of the developing crisis of world capitalism makes this a vital task which must, in the coming years, give organised expression to the historic slogan “Workers of all countries, Unite!