Facing the crises: A manifesto for socialist revolution

Adopted by the XIIth Congress, June 2023

Introduction

The world is facing a deeper and more far reaching crisis than the Great Recession of 2008–10. A decade of near-stagnation followed the feeble recovery which was sustained by historically low interest rates. This has given way to a global surge in inflation, the consequences of which are a cost of living crisis that threatens dramatic reduction in the living standards of the working class, and destitution, hunger and outright famine for tens of millions of the world’s poor.

The economic dislocation of global chains of production and trade caused by the pandemic, the unprecedented costs of sanctions and rearmament programmes triggered by the war in Ukraine, and the accelerating and multiplying consequences of climate change—these interlinked crises confront humanity with a perfect storm with one cause: capitalist production and the imperialist world order that maintains it.

Repeated economic crises, intensifying great power competition, floods, fires, droughts and famines, are reflected in the political arena. This is expressed in the multiplication of populist and far right street movements, the flourishing of reactionary, irrationalist ideologies and conspiracy theories on social media. Military coups exploit the inability of weak ‘democratic’ governments in the semi-colonies to address the deepening social crisis; the election of reactionary demagogues waging so-called ‘culture wars’ serves to undermine the social progress and rights of working class people and the oppressed.

In the face of these multiplying crises, the traditional reformist parties of the working class, whether Socialist or Stalinist, have withered in the face of their inability to defend their mass base. The ‘new’ model of left-populist, neo-reformist or centrist parties touted to replace them have either capitulated or disintegrated. In their place have emerged ever more extreme far right and even outright fascist parties exploiting religious, racial and national prejudices.

Spontaneous resistance to these crises continues to flare across the globe, all posing the need for working class leadership that can forge a path to victory. Now erupting, now subdued, the chain of popular uprisings from the Arab Spring, through the anti-austerity movements of the EU debt crisis, to the women on the frontline of the Iranian and Sudanese revolutions: all these opportunities that contained the potential for a decisive rupture with the prevailing system were allowed to slip away, where the price of defeat was not the descent into brutal counter-revolution.

In each case it is precisely the absence of a tempered and rooted organisation, armed with the strategy and tactics—the programme—able to lead the working class and its allies to the seizure of power, that is the elementary subjective factor at the root of defeat. The failures of revolutionary outbreaks in the semi colonies is only the local expression of the crisis of leadership, a crisis which is manifested throughout the trade unions, the parties, and the revolutionary organisations of the working class as a whole.

This dilemma is not merely a question of each separate national situation. It is posed worldwide in the need for a new revolutionary International, a successor to the previous four, learning from their failures and their successes. The people who can lay the foundations of a new International can already be found among the vanguard fighters of mass struggles around the world. As a matter of the greatest urgency, they need to be brought together both internationally and within every country. Above all, they must be won to a revolutionary action programme, worldwide in its scope and posing the necessary answer to the question of power, which is the strategic solution to the generalised crisis of the capitalist system.

The League for a Fifth International publishes this programme as a contribution to a discussion and rapprochement of revolutionary forces in the coming years, linked to proposals for common united actions and campaigning, alongside a serious discussion of the programme that a new, revolutionary International needs to develop. What we propose is neither complete nor comprehensive, but it is presented as our proposal for common action and serious discussion with those who accept the imperative need for a new International whose organisation and leadership is the precondition for breaking the cycle of spontaneous resistance and defeat.

The new world disorder

The root of the crisis

The causes of capitalism’s systemic crises do not lie in shortages or an inability to produce what humanity needs. The factories, their workforces, the means of production, logistics and communications, new and old, exist in abundance, as do the scientific and technological means to address pandemics and climate change. The social means for global planning already exist within the multinational corporations and the giant banks but are divided by private ownership and internecine competition. This contradiction was witnessed in the response to the pandemic: on the one hand the rapid development of vaccines, on the other the failure to distribute them equally to the populations of our planet. As of June 2023, 29.9% of them have yet to receive a single jab.

The fundamental cause of the system’s crisis lies in the massive overaccumulation of capital, unable to realise sufficient profits from production at the same or greater rate than in the boom phase of globalisation. Hence the fact that the ‘recovery’ after the last recession rapidly ran out of steam and gave way to stagnation in large parts of the world economy. The failure to solve this problem after the Great Recession, in the only way it is ever solved by capitalists, by wholesale destruction of capital, now threatens the mass bankruptcy of so-called zombie companies, estimated to account for as many as 16% to 20% of all firms in the US.

Because this would mean the destruction of large sectors of industry or commerce, this is a last resort and risky option for capital. In 2008 it would have hit the commanding heights of financial capital, the banks, the home mortgage companies, and multinational automotive manufacturers, like GM and Chrysler, that were judged ‘too big to fail’. Many were saved at the expense of the working and middle class taxpayers. The Federal Reserve also led the world into an enormous increase in the money supply (Quantitative Easing) allowing companies, states, and individuals to pile up even more debt and laying the basis for a future collapse.

The solution dictated by neoliberal and monetarist theory, the gigantic destruction of capital to restore profit rates, can only come at enormous cost to the workers of the world. Of course, the answer is to fight back, to resist closures and mass unemployment, but major concessions from the employers would not mark a return to the status quo ante, but rather deepen the chaos. This, in turn, poses the need to take control of production into the hands of those who do the work, and state power into the hands of the working many, not the exploiting few. This can only be done on the road of revolution—destroying the state power of the capitalist class—not on the road of reform.

Globalisation proved to be temporary fix for capitalism. It certainly saw a huge increase in the degree of international integration between the major centres of capital accumulation, under the hegemony of the United States and its international financial institutions, the IMF, World Bank, World Trade Organisation. It was based in important measure on a benevolent symbiosis of the US and the EU with China both as market for advanced technology and the new manufacturing workshop of the world. Yet, in the epoch of capitalism’s full maturity, indeed its over-maturity, the epoch of imperialism, a rapidly growing new capitalist power like China had either to be subordinated to the existing hegemonic world power, becoming what Marxists call a semi-colony, or itself become an imperialist ‘great power’.

China’s readiness for elevation into the exclusive club of the imperialist powers could be seen after 2008 when it played a major role in dragging the world economy out of the Great Recession. But then it began to expand globally as an investor in regions hitherto dominated by the old imperialisms of North America, Western Europe and East Asia. Inevitably, this led to sharpened rivalry and conflict between the old and the new powers. The Chinese Communist Party’s ability to threaten Tiananmen-style repression and Xi Jinping’s introduction of a mass surveillance state is rooted in the Chinese population’s rise out of poverty, and the country’s role as the second most powerful economy in the world. Any serious or prolonged retreat from this prosperity, caused by economic downturn or military adventures, will undermine it and bring with it the spectre of revolution.

By contrast, Russia’s ability to escape the fate of subordination to the US superpower was based on rent from its abundant natural resources, rather than industrial growth. During its ‘shock therapy’ introduction to capitalism, its economy contracted by 40 per cent as inflation skyrocketed. Shortages of the most basic food items became the norm, and a third of the population fell into poverty. The Soviet era social protections were decimated. When Yeltsin took Russia into the IMF in 1992, a series of loans with harsh conditions (cuts in welfare, education, etc.) accelerated the downward lurch.

Putin’s popularity was not, at least initially, the product of brutally suppressing opposition. After 2000, he was able to curb the oligarchs’ shameless plundering of the economy and siphoning of wealth into Western banks and tax havens. By taking control of the oil and gas corporations Lukoil, Rosneft, etc. he halted the economic decline and modestly restored living standards. But he was repeatedly rebuffed in his attempts to get the West to recognise a sphere of influence for Russia in the states of the former USSR and those in Africa and the Middle East that had formerly enjoyed close relations with the USSR. In 2005 he denounced the collapse of the Soviet Union (in which he played a junior role) as ‘the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century’ and a ‘genuine tragedy’ for the Russian people as ‘tens of millions’ of them found themselves outside of Russian territory.

Today, Russia is economically no equal to China. It is not even among the ten largest economies; its GDP of $1.4 trillion is dwarfed by that of the United States ($20 trillion) and China ($14 trillion). It is roughly equal to that of Brazil but below India’s and even South Korea’s. Its technological strengths lie in space research, nuclear energy, and military hardware. But, though an economic dwarf, it remains a military giant, second to the US in global firepower and, prior to the Ukraine war at least, in military capability. This has been the basis of Putin’s ability to act as disturber of the peace in the Middle East and Africa and in Russia’s near abroad.

Europe

The European Union’s two dominant economies, Germany and France, have long sought to increase the bloc’s independence relative to the USA and to establish Europe as a world competitor to Chinese and US capital. A series of shifts in the international dynamic, beginning with Barack Obama’s pivot to Asia, the exit of the US’s closest ally from the bloc, the fostering of closer links with Eurasia through oil and gas trade and China’s belt and road initiative, seemed to favour an increasingly independent role for a European imperialism. But at a stroke, the Ukraine war has restored US dominance of the continent and scuppered the plans of Paris and Berlin.

Despite the departure of the UK, the EU remains one of the three great blocs of capital. While the productive forces of European capitalism have long outgrown the state borders of its nations, the prolonged crisis that has afflicted the union since 2008 shows that the capitalist classes of Europe are unable to perform the historically progressive task of unifying the continent.

The European Union, with its Treaties, its Commission, its European Central Bank and its currency, is a coercive apparatus of exploitation of the periphery by the imperialist core. It bludgeoned the southern European states into savage austerity to protect the imperialist financiers, provides a reservoir of material and diplomatic aid for the adventures of US imperialism, and conducts its affairs behind the ramparts of Nato and Fortress Europe. This imperialist architecture cannot be refashioned to serve social ends: it must be abolished through a socialist revolution culminating in a socialist united states of Europe.

However, revolutionary communists have always rejected the illusion that the road to unification on a higher, democratic, socialist basis, necessarily lies through the dismantling of large-scale political or economic units into their constituent parts. Rather, we seek to socialise and plan them in a way that takes humanity forward. Socialism requires a continental, indeed a global, scale of integrated production. The perspective of socialism in one country is even more reactionary now than it was when Stalin proclaimed it a century ago.

Cramping the productive forces back into 28 national states, re-imposing border controls and customs barriers, severing ties of economic and cultural exchange, impeding the development of the productive forces, increasing interstate rivalries, dividing yet further the working classes of these states in the name of a bogus economic sovereignty, can only foster national antagonism, economic decline, and, ultimately, the resort to imperialist war.

The task of unifying Europe, recognised as necessary by communists over a century ago before the carnage of two world wars, falls to the working class if it to avoid a third. The means by which it can achieve this is the Europe-wide revolution. Starting from today’s struggles against austerity, privatisation, war, inequality, racism and environmental destruction, Europe’s workers have to unite their struggles and give them a common objective—socialism on a continental scale.

The semi-colonies

In the Global South, the illusion that the advanced semi-colonial countries were treading the Chinese path to development has been dealt a death blow. In the high period of globalisation, many were touted ‘emerging economies’ destined for sustained development—the Asian tigers, the BRICS, and Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria and Turkey. The G20 group was founded out of this optimism in 2003. But over the next two decades, with the exception of Russia and China, none of these countries escaped imperialist domination.

The situation of the weaker semi-colonies was cruelly exposed in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis. The dollar flight exposed high debt levels; cuts to food and fuel subsidies imposed by creditors sparked the chain of events culminating in the Arab Spring.

The aftermath of imperialist misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan (and subsequently in Syria and Ukraine) has added to the peoples’ impoverishment and lack of security. Resistance to the re-imposition of even harsher authoritarian regimes, in Algeria, Sudan and Rojava, has often seen the working class take a prominent, but not decisive role; nowhere have they toppled the regimes.

Across sub-Saharan Africa, the UK and France maintain their spheres of influence over their former colonial possessions, with a greater or lesser degree of overtness. While France still exercises control over the monetary policies of CFA countries, its ability to prop up or replace regimes is increasingly challenged by the resort to protection from Russian proxies. The flood of heavily armed Islamist “terrorists” across the Sahel region was in large measure the result of the US intervention in Libya, though it is also linked to the region’s advancing desertification, a product of climate change, which set pastoralist against farming communities.

In Latin America, economies wracked by inflation, unemployment and debt bondage have prompted reformist challenges to some of the right wing governments, but everywhere the challengers have proved unwilling to lead the workers and the rural and urban poor against the elite. Coups and counter-revolutionary movements have been the price.

The European Union absorbed 13 countries, including most of the former Eastern Bloc, during the 2000s. In all cases, these countries have been tied to the imperialist needs of Germany and to a lesser extent France and Italy as a source of cheap labour and site for super-profits reaped by outsourcing. Authoritarian governments tend to sit on this powder keg with a mixture of right wing nationalism and neoliberal ‘growth’.

The semi-colonial chafing at the western-dominated imperialist order has been adroitly exploited by China through so-called ‘debt diplomacy’ offering loans without the strings of human rights conditions. But as Sri Lanka shows, exchanging one imperialist loan shark for another has neither shielded them from the ravages of the international markets, nor prevented their new creditor asserting its property rights over its investments.

From rivalry to war

Over the last decade a new period of rivalry has opened between old imperialist powers of Europe, North America, and Japan, and new arrivals, China and Russia, demanding their place in the sun. Sooner or later, this was bound to turn into open conflict. The era of benevolent synergy between the US and China in the 1990s and early 2000s that underpinned Washington’s claim to have created a new world order, is long gone. Russia, whose capitalist restoration had finally recovered from the after-effects of ‘shock therapy’, felt that this ‘order’ had diminished its sphere of influence and set about restoring it by military and political intervention—in the Caucasus, the Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa and Eastern Europe.

Now we see not only cutthroat competition, but trade wars, a new cold war, and proxy hot wars. Libya, Syria, Yemen, Ethiopia, Sudan, Myanmar, Mali and others are the victims of a new period of great power rivalry, with regional and imperialist powers stoking civil war and wrecking aspirations for development and tackling climate change.

Beyond these looms the prospect of war between the great powers, with powder kegs located in Eastern Europe, the Middle and Far East. New alliances are being launched (Aukus) and old ones refurbished (Nato, the Quad). This includes sabre rattling in the south China sea, and the attempt by the Western imperialist powers, by means of huge weapons supplies to Ukraine, and unprecedented economic sanctions, to humiliate Putin, and bring about his downfall.

The US and UK-led sanctions regime, and the suspension of Russia’s oil and gas supplies to Europe, represents a major setback for the Franco-German project of turning the EU into an independent imperialist bloc. The contradictions within Europe are mounting the longer the war goes on. Europe is the weakest link in the imperialist chain and, for all the defeats its workers have suffered during the last decade, it remains the continent with the most politically experienced workers’ movements, albeit with the leaderships most experienced in betraying them.

But the rulers in Washington, Berlin, Paris and London, in Beijing and Moscow too, are playing with fire. The legacy of Donald Trump’s presidency, and his transformation of the Republicans into a right wing populist party that scorns democratic conventions like recognising election results, is a major destabilising factor, even if Biden’s foreign policy differs only in emphasis from that of his predecessor and potential successor. Already, Trump’s Supreme Court is carrying out a reactionary agenda against women (repealing Roe v Wade) and is looking to rob people of colour of their hard won civil rights. The toxic differences between liberal and reactionary US states and voting blocs threatens the world’s superpower with paralysing internal conflicts. The United States’ role as policeman of a ‘world order’ is turning into its opposite, a fire raiser.

In Russia’s would-be sphere of influence, fighting flared in the Caucasus between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh and in Central Asia between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan over the province of Bakten. The existence of multiple intermixed ethnicities is an invitation to the despotic rulers of these territories to solve internal pressures by wars and ethnic cleansing such as tore apart Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

In the Middle East, Syria, with Russian forces still present and with US forces still in Rojava, and Turkey threatening the Kurdish forces on either side of its border, a dormant volcano exists that could erupt at any moment; notwithstanding Chinese mediation, the civil war in Yemen will likely prove an intractable expression of Saudi-Iranian regional competition fuelled by the great powers. Meanwhile Israel takes advantage of the war in Europe to step up its settlement of the West Bank and east Jerusalem. Its western backers, whether social democratic, liberal, or conservative, work tirelessly to silence the Palestine solidarity movement with accusations of antisemitism.

Trump, Biden and Putin, who all claimed that their states are ‘back’ are finding their imitators in Delhi, Ankara, Brasilia, Jerusalem, and Riyadh. Now, such ‘disturbers of the peace’ are appearing in Europe too—in Hungary, Poland and potentially in Sweden, Italy, or Spain.

Behind these authoritarian leaders, the last decade has seen the growth of reactionary, often racist, mass movements, targeting minorities and capable of developing into full blown fascist movements in conditions of a deep and prolonged social crisis. All these developments represent a major swing back to the right after the developments of the previous years; they pose a serious challenge to the working class and oppressed of the world to rebuild their fighting forces in defence of past gains. But success demands preparing the means to pass onto the offensive, to permanently rid society of these forces that threaten to lead the world to catastrophe.

Internationalists worldwide must resist being drawn into any of the warring imperialist camps either by their claims to represent democracy or anti-imperialism. The USA and its Nato allies are no longer the only imperialist camp and China and Russia are not anti-imperialists. In the old ‘democratic’ imperialist countries of North America and Europe the ruling classes play on the masses’ justified indignation against Russia’s atrocities in Ukraine, or China’s oppression of the Uighurs, the Tibetans, or the crushing of democratic rights in Hong Kong, to justify their cold wars, rearmament and use of wars like Ukraine’s as proxies to weaken Russia. Their claims to be defending democracy against autocracy is merely a weapon to delude and recruit progressive people.

On the other hand, Moscow and Beijing court the governments of the semi-colonial countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America by condemning the hypocrisy of the West, naming and shaming its economic exploitation and coercion by the IMF, imposing savage austerity, its brutal invasions fully equivalent to Russia’s and occupations, its economic blockades (Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, North Korea). Both camps can score heavy ideological hits on one another because both sets of accusations are largely true. But the truths about the crimes of one side do not blind us as to the equally appalling crimes of the other. Nevertheless, revolutionaries must objectively assess and recognise the justice of those engaged in legitimate resistance to the depredations of any of the imperialist powers, while exposing the true reason its rivals have for taking up the cause of their victims, and in so doing defending the imperative of working class independence from and opposition to imperialism East and West.

Thus we can support Ukraine’s struggle for self-defence, or the peoples threatened or oppressed by Beijing, without giving any support to the war preparations and arms race unleashed by the Nato powers, let alone direct military intervention. Towards all the imperialist powers we maintain the strictest revolutionary defeatism: using class struggle methods to frustrate and defeat their war plans we prepare the revolutionary forces and objective basis for the social revolution and overthrow of our own rulers. In the countries politically and economically subordinated to imperialism (semi-colonies), however, we are defencist, while maintaining strict political opposition to and independence of, their bourgeois leaderships. In these countries our perspective is that of the permanent revolution: through the struggle to bring the working class to the leadership of a legitimate war, to open the road to a social revolution led by the working class.

Climate catastrophe

The untrammelled degrading of the natural environment, depletion of natural resources, and emission of planet warming greenhouse gases has reached the threshold of a decisive tipping point that represents a mortal threat to the basis of natural life and human civilisation.

The increase in extreme weather events, the floods, fires, famines and droughts of unprecedented intensity, and the accelerating melting of polar and glacial ice with the attendant existential threat posed to low lying nations, are all indications of climate change entering a deadly and unpredictable new phase.

The warming climate represents the most immediate threat, but it is by no means the only one. Acidification and pollution of the oceans, the overloading and disruption of nutrient cycles, depletion of the water tables, the decimation of biodiversity and accumulation of toxic chemicals in the environment and food chains—singly and severally pose threats to the existence of humanity itself.

Confronted with the real-world impacts, the apocalyptic modelling of likely developments, the proposals to slow and reverse impending disaster are clear, but the world’s great powers refuse to take real action. The re-entry of the USA into the Paris Accords limiting emissions, should not obscure the fact that every climate agreement merely underscores the refusal of the main emitters and their emerging rivals to endanger the profits of their corporations by imposing real emission reductions.

Capitalism not only destroys the natural basis of life but has developed into a global system of environmental imperialism, characterised by uninhibited world markets in which trade is organised in favour of the rich imperialist countries. The basis for this is the ever-increasing concentration of capital and the oppression of semicolonial countries through control over critical technologies and capital exports.

The exploitation of the semicolonial countries by the imperialist core is intensified without regard to the ecological and social consequences; the socio-ecological costs of capitalist production are systematically transferred onto the semi-colonies. In most cases, the monopoly agribusiness, mining, and energy corporations can depend on local governments to act as willing enforcers against the protests of local people. Meanwhile, in the imperialist centres, the rapacious and untenable exploitation of the global south is obscured behind the cynical marketing of ‘sustainable’ production and ‘fair’ trade—simple but effective propaganda in the service of business as usual for Monsanto, Glencore and Unilever.

While the use and modification of the environment to meet human need is necessary and will continue under socialism, it is capitalism that is impelled by its limitless urge for accumulation to destroy the environment. It is the insatiable drive for profit, the exploitation of people and planet, that renders capitalist ‘development’ incompatible with the needs of the environment and progress of humanity. That capitalism inexorably undermines the natural basis of its own existence testifies to the fact that it is a dying system. The question is—will it be ended with the socialist transformation of the economic and social order, or will humanity toboggan down the path towards barbarism?

Recession

A new recession is being induced by the efforts of the central banks of the great powers to combat inflation by raising interest rates after a decade of historic near-zero lows. The inevitable consequence is a slump in demand, a rise in bankruptcies, and a rise in unemployment. State budgets are already overburdened by huge debts inherited from the banking bailouts of 2008-10, propping up zombie companies, and sustaining the unprecedented state expenditure through the pandemic. On top of all this comes a huge surge in unproductive expenditure on rearmament programmes.

Inflation is slashing the real value of wages and spending on health, social care and education programmes – not to mention the already inadequate pledges of Earth Summits to meet the challenge of climate change. In the face of this, the calls for austerity, pay restraint, and fiscal retrenchment are growing louder.

In the USA, the richest country in the world, the official poverty rate in 2021 was 11.6 per cent, representing 37.9 million people. Globally, nearly half of the world’s population live on or below $5.50 a day. Some 2.6 billion people lack basic sanitation and 1.6 billion live without electricity. More than 80 percent of the world’s population lives in countries where inequality is increasing.

Multinational corporations use millions upon millions of precarious workers as a reserve army to be exploited when profits are at their peak and cast off to fend for themselves in times of recession or stagnation. Driven by the remorseless logic of competition, they offshore and outsource their factories, banks and offices to wherever they can extract the maximum profit. Thus, a huge increase in unemployment, already underway thanks to covid and made worse by the sanctions war, is about to hit the world like a tsunami. Workers are thrown back on the meagre resources of the family home – onto food banks in the ‘first world’ and into refugee camps in the ‘third’.

In addition, another technological revolution, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robotics, threatens a massive replacement of living labour to increase productivity, though in reality its long term effect will be to actually reduce the rate of profit and increase the depth of the crisis of the system as a whole. Employers dream only of reducing labour costs, slashing the size of their workforces, not the hours they labour. This time round, AI threatens the jobs of white collar, office and service workers on an enormous scale.

The working class learned two centuries ago (machine breaking or Luddism) that opposing the introduction and application of new technologies is futile. The workers’ answer is to employ the new technologies to reduce hours and to eliminate forms of labour injurious to mind and body. The technology itself can enormously aid humanity’s control over production and interaction with our natural environment. For this to become a social objective, we will need to impose workers’ inspection and control, the legal reduction of hours of labour, and the raising of wages, pensions and social welfare to a decent living level, keeping up with price rises. Under a planned and socially owned economy, AI and robotics could provide a powerful impulse to the emancipation of labour, allowing it to become more creative and generally magnifying the spheres that human intelligence can address.

Struggle and leadership

Fronts of resistance

The Great Recession of 2008 triggered a wave of democratic revolutions in the Middle East, in which workers’ strikes, as in Egypt and Tunisia, played a decisive role in ousting the old dictators but failed to become ‘permanent’ in the sense of achieving working class political leadership and culminating in workers’ governments. Thus, even as democratic revolutions, they failed, with Islamist and military forces coming to power.

In the same period, the mass protests and square occupations and strikes against austerity in Europe, particularly in Spain and France, gave the opening years of the decade an explosive character. In 2010, the French government announced savage pension cuts and an increase of the retirement age, provoking a three-week general strike which recalled mobilisations like those of 1995 and 2006 which forced major government retreats. This time round, despite the rare unity between the trade union federations, strong public support, and vigorous participation from many sections of workers, the struggle was ultimately unsuccessful. In other countries, ‘social movements’ like that of the British pension strike and student revolt of 2010–11, governments were able to ride out the unrest without concessions.

But nowhere was the struggle so prolonged and intense as in Greece. From 2009, it underwent a financial and industrial crisis that wiped out a quarter of the country’s economy. In response to a series of savage cuts programmes dictated—at the behest of the German government—by the ECB, EU Commission and IMF ‘Troika’, Greek trade unions launched a series of 28 separate general strikes (20 of 24 hours and four of 48 hours) between 2010 and 2015. The Syriza government, elected on a programme of defying the Troika’s demands, and backed by the overwhelming mandate of the ‘Oxi’ referendum, soon collapsed and imposed the required austerity.

After the defeats of the social movements, the disappointments, defeats, and betrayals at the hands of a variety of social democratic or left populist parties, and the crushing of the Arab Spring under the winter of counter-revolutionary dictatorships, there was a general downturn in the level of class struggle, culminating in the Covid-19 lockdowns and recession.

Now signs of the recovery of industrial resistance and the development of new revolutionary opportunities are manifesting across the world.

The most explosive situation of the post-pandemic period began with the uprising against the Iranian clerical dictatorship sparked by the murder of Jina Mahsa Amini at the hands of the so-called morality police. For two months, mass protests filled the streets under the slogans ‘Women, Life, Freedom’ and ‘Down with the Mullahs’. Protests, including strikes, and the symbolic removal of the headscarf by women, abounded in one of the most serious challenges to the regime in years. But the failure of the movement to generalise from protest into insurrection, in the form of a general strike and the creation of shoras (councils), allowed the regime time to stabilise its position, and ultimately enable their weapons of mass arrest, torture and murder to subdue the uprising. While the absence of a revolutionary political leadership allowed the regime to regain the initiative this time, an enormous part of the Iranian masses are now definitively alienated from the regime: the next explosion will be even bigger.

The USA has seen a wave of strikes in factories, schools and logistics and union drives in the new online service sector corporations such as Amazon and the gig economy. Important victories and concessions for workers include the month-long action by 10,000 UAW members at John Deere and the celebrated teachers’ strikes.

In Britain, the surge in inflation prompted a series of one-day strikes by transport, health and education workers, with total days lost to strike action at levels not seen for decades. While the refusal of union leaders to escalate and coordinate action ended in a series of below-inflation settlements, resistance to these sellouts has coalesced into the first attempts in many years to develop rank and file organisation.

French president Emmanuel Macron’s determined assault on the pension system provoked a series of one-day strikes and mobilisations. For once, all the main trade union federations acted together—but instead of escalation, there was de-escalation as the unions waited to see whether parliament, which lacked a pro-Macron majority, would block the law. Macron avoided this scenario by recourse to the powers of decree granted to presidents under the Fifth Republic’s Bonapartist constitution. Again, the French workers, the most combative in Europe, provided an object lesson in the price paid by every movement, no matter how militant, that lacks a revolutionary leadership capable of conducting a struggle to victory.

In August 2022, with inflation running above 70 percent, mass actions organised by Argentine trade unions forced the government and employers to raise wages and unemployment benefits. The same month, 600,000 South African workers took to the streets in all nine provinces to demand a basic income, a living minimum wage and a cap on fuel prices and interest rates. In India, the 2016 one-day strike of 150 million public sector workers was followed in November 2020 by another 24 hour strike which brought out 250 million workers. In China, there are up to 10,000 labour disputes each year in the huge industrial zone of the Pearl River Delta.

Can this new wave spread to the huge numbers of presently unorganised workers? Can rank and file militants ensure that these newly militant workers can make their voices heard, indeed, make them decisive? As all the upsurges of class struggle show, unless an alternative leadership to reformist, centrist parties and union bureaucracies, or libertarian ‘spontaneous’ confusion exists, these opportunities will be missed, and counter-reform or counter-revolution will win the day. The question is, how can a revolutionary leadership, a party, emerge from the confusion that exists today?

This is where political intervention into trade union struggles to fight for the creation of an alternative political leadership, armed with an alternative strategy, based on the class struggle directed at the overthrow of capitalism, rather than negotiation and compromise within its confines, becomes paramount. The developments within the Power Loom Workers’ Union in Faisalabad, Pakistan, where there are efforts to turn the mass of workers towards such ‘class struggle trade unionism’ is but one example. The goal of this approach is the creation of mass workers’ parties, independent of all bourgeois forces, whose organisation and leadership can qualitatively transform the fighting capacity of the whole workers’ front and the allied struggles of the nationally, racially and socially oppressed.

Class independence, militant action and rank and file democracy are crucial questions in the coming period. They can help enormously the development of revolutionary parties internationally and a Fifth International. It is therefore the duty of vanguard elements in the unions and revolutionary organisations to step up the struggle to break the trade union alliance with bourgeois parties—as for example between the Democrats and the AFL-CIO in the USA, or the union’s subordination to the Peronists in Argentina—with the goal of founding genuinely independent workers’ parties.

Crisis of leadership

Social democratic, Labour and Communist parties have long served the capitalists as alternative parties of government in the European imperialist states. In India, the Left Front (CPI, CPI(M) and others) has done likewise at regional level; so too the South African Communist party within the ANC since the end of Apartheid; a path trodden in turn by the Brazilian Workers’ Party (PT) during the 21^st century.

What such parties have in common is a privileged layer of professional bureaucrats and parliamentarians who, in practice, regard capitalism as a permanent system and serve the bosses whether in government or opposition. They frustrate their working class memberships’ attempts to use these parties as effective weapons of struggle. In Europe and Asia, though they once traded their services for limited social reforms, over the last twenty years these parties have adopted the neoliberal, pro-market policies demanded by the capitalist class and, in the post-2008 era, their ‘reforms’ became austerity, privatisation and attacks on wages.

With the restoration of capitalism in the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and China, the Stalinist Communist parties of the world have also moved far to the right. In Western and Central Europe, they have occupied part of the political space vacated by neoliberal social democracy. In words, they have criticised neoliberalism but, in practice, even the smallest share of government was sufficient price to purchase the capitulation and implementation of cuts and privatisation by parties like Rifondazione Comunista, the French Communist party and Die Linke.

Ruling for capitalism led the CPI-CPI(M) government in West Bengal to act as enforcer for foreign and domestic capital against the villagers and tribal peoples whose land they wish to expropriate. The repression wreaked on the villagers of Nandigram in West Bengal became infamous worldwide. Their reward was to be swept away by a landslide in 2011 by the Trinamool Congress-Indian National Congress alliance and, in the May 2019 election, nearly their entire social base moved to the BJP, a Hindu nationalist party.

In the 2010s, there were new reformist formations, Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain, the Bloco de Esquerda in Portugal and the Corbyn movement. In the USA, Bernie Sanders’ 2016 and 2019 Democratic primary campaigns prompted the emergence of the Democratic Socialists of America as a party semi-detached from the second party of US imperialism.

Maoist parties, specifically those in Nepal and India, have also played a more radical role. The Nepal Communist Party, NCP, is a 2018 fusion of the CPN (Unified Marxist Leninist) and the CPN (Maoist Centre) whose two components won a landslide victory in the 2017 elections. Their commitment to the Stalinist-Maoist strategy of ‘revolution by stages’, which rejects outright socialist measures and workers’ power, makes it certain they will repeat the errors and betrayals of their sister parties elsewhere.

The Communist Party of India (Maoist) grew as a guerrilla force based among the landless and poor peasantry and Adivasis (tribal peoples) fighting to prevent their lands being taken over by multinationals or Indian billionaires. They pursue the old Maoist strategy of ‘surrounding the cities’ but, in a country with a huge and growing working class, where the limitations of the stages theory and the guerrilla strategy are increasingly evident, they cannot provide a strategy for socialist revolution.

Many on the left, led by the Fourth International (United Secretariat), saw Syriza’s rapid rise as confirmation of their rejection of the Leninist model of the party in favour of ‘broad’ alliances that encompassed both revolutionary and reformist currents. While it is correct to relate to, or even join, such formations as Syriza wherever they represent a move by serious numbers of workers and youth away from liberalism, right wing social democracy or populism, to suppress criticism of the fundamental weaknesses of the Syriza project was to abandon revolutionary politics. Equally, so-called revolutionaries who stood aside, anticipating its failure, contributed nothing to the preparation of the working class for the battles that lay ahead.

In Latin America, the regimes and movements that espoused the ‘socialism of the twenty first century’ proclaimed by Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, Bolivia’s Evo Morales, Rafael Correa of Ecuador and Brazil’s Lula, suffered many defeats or moved to the right. Nowhere was this more shocking than in the case of Chávez’s successor, Nicolás Maduro, notwithstanding that this degeneration into repressive Bonapartism was aided by the US blockade, the Venezuelan bourgeoise’s economic sabotage and attempted coups. The peak of the brown tide of reactionary victories was the 2018 election of Jair Bolsonaro.

Nevertheless, a counter-tide of moderate left populism has developed with the election of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (Mexico, 2018), Alberto Fernandez (Argentina, 2019), Luis Arce (Bolivia, 2020), Pedro Castillo (Peru, 2021), Gustavo Petro (Colombia, 2022), and Gabriel Boric (Chile, 2022). However all these represents of the new ‘pink tide’ face a harsher context than their early-millennium predecessors during the period of high globalisation. The world economic crisis and the rise of far right opposition forces means that the leeway for fulfilling their supporters’ urgent needs is extremely restricted. The same applies to the recently elected Lula coalition in Brazil, which acts as a left cover for the reactionary policies of a section of the Brazilian capitalist class. This coalition faces a challenge from Bolsonaro’s supporters, who are even more openly fascist, and better armed, than Trump’s. Indeed, the recent attempted putsch in response to the election of the Lula coalition had strong echoes of the storming of the US Capitol by Trump supporters in 2021.

Although some ‘socialist’ leaders of the 2000s carried out significant social and democratic reforms, most of these fell victim to the 2008 crisis and, in any case, they never expropriated the decisive sectors of the bourgeoisie or multinational corporations. When confronted with strikes and occupations, they usually resorted to repression and arrests. In Brazil, neither Lula nor Dima took any significant measures against Brazilian capitalism, nor did they break conclusively with imperialism or its agencies like the IMF. This coexistence was hardly surprising since the PT always governed in coalition with open bourgeois parties and it was these forces that turned against the PT in the 2015 ‘coup’ which saw Dilma ousted and replaced by her deputy, Michel Temer from the bourgeois Brazilian Democratic Movement party.

Their compromise between social reforms and defending capitalism was not sustainable then and will not be in the future. In any case, measures like nationalisations only become ‘socialist’ when a workers’ state coordinates and defends them arms in hand. Only with workers’ control in the workplace, and workers’ power in the state, can it become possible to plan an economy that eliminates the waste and chaos of the market. Only when armed power is in the hands of the workers and the military-bureaucratic apparatus of the bourgeois state is smashed, can the road to socialism be opened nationally and internationally.

Older Latin American regimes led by left-reformist or Stalinist forces, such as Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela have responded to US blockades by increasingly repressive regimes rather than permitting the flourishing of workers’ and peasants’ democracy, let alone any idea of genuine anti-imperialism which would mean spreading a continental (permanent) revolution.

In Africa, military coups, Bonapartist presidencies, Islamist insurgencies and terrorism have added to the miseries of imperialist exploitation and environmental degradation. The dream of ‘African Socialism’, which arose in the era of de-colonialisation, has long gone, crushed under the exploitation of multinational corporations and Western banks, closely linked to the enormous debt burden and related ‘reforms’ imposed by the imperialist-controlled IMF and World Bank.

Liberation movements in Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Angola and Mozambique rapidly descended into the corruption of the new elites and repression of the opposition. Hopes for social and economic liberation when Apartheid ended in South Africa have been cruelly dashed, while the old white business and landowning elites have been protected.

The inability of radical petty bourgeois guerilla movements and a ‘black bourgeoisie’ to break decisively with capitalism and imperialism condemned these countries to continued subordination to global imperialism. Now a new scramble for Africa is underway between the old colonial powers, principally France and Britain backed by the US, and China and Russia; the former offering new sources of investment in industries and infrastructure, and the latter arms supplies and the cynical ‘aid’ of the Wagner mercenaries who prop up military regimes.

A program of transitional demands

For too long, the programmes of working class parties have been divided between a minimum programme of piecemeal reforms, each of which can be clawed back by the capitalists if they retain state power, and – if it appears at all — a maximum programme which sets out the goal of socialism but presents it as a distant utopia dislocated from the demands of the present struggles.

The programme of a new International needs to break with this failed model. It must advance a series of integrated transitional demands, connecting the slogans and forms of struggle needed to repel the capitalist offensive with the methods we need to overthrow bourgeois rule, establish workers’ power and institute a socialist plan of production.

The transitional programme addresses the vital social, economic and political questions of the day, including those immediate and democratic demands which can be granted before overthrowing capitalist ownership, such as a guaranteed living wage, real equality of pay for men and women, heavy taxation of the rich and the big corporations. At the same time, it warns that capitalism in its historic crisis will grant such reforms only when faced with a real threat to its power and property. Even then, the capitalists will try to reverse their concessions as soon as the immediate danger is past or the pressure of class struggle is relaxed.

Today, the idea that we can reach socialism along a gradual and peaceful road of social reform and trade union bargaining is more utopian than ever. A programme for socialism must challenge the fundamental ‘rights’ of the capitalists: the right to exploit, the right to put profit before people, the right to grow rich at the expense of the poor, the right to destroy the environment and deny our children a future.

To win today’s battles means fighting with our eyes on the future. A Fifth International, therefore, will need to raise demands and propose forms of organisation that not only answer today’s vital needs but organise the workers so that they can seize and exercise power. Combining these elements is no artificial exercise; they are bound together by the real conditions of class struggle in this period of capitalist decline.

To open the road to the future society, our programme demands the imposition of workers’ control of production and its extension into ever wider spheres, from the factories, offices, transportation systems and retail chains to the banks and finance houses. This means the abolition of business secrecy, a workers’ veto over the bosses’ right to fire workers, workers’ inspection and control over production, an automatic rise in wages for every rise in prices to combat inflation, and the nationalisation without compensation (expropriation) of the decisive sectors of the economy.

Moreover, the struggle to win these demands, to impose them on the bosses, will require new forms of organisation that go beyond the limits of trade unionism or parliamentary elections. At every level of struggle, decision-making by democratic assemblies of all those involved must become the norm. Delegates, elected and recallable by such assemblies, should be charged with the implementation of decisions and leadership of the struggle. From strike committees elected by the whole workforce to price-watch committees that include all the workers, male and female, in the communities, from workers’ inspection teams that audit company accounts to picket-defence squads that protect strikers, such organisations are necessary not only to win today’s battles but to form the basis of tomorrow’s fighting organisations in the battle for state power and then the future organs of the workers’ state.

Workers engaged in struggle against austerity today can raise these demands individually and jointly against specific attacks, but the programme’s socialist goal will only be achieved when they are taken up and fought for as an interrelated system of demands for the transformation of society. The full transitional programme is a strategy for working class power. For this reason, our demands are not passive appeals to governments or employers but rallying slogans for the working class to overthrow and expropriate the capitalists.

Against the capitalist offensive

Against every attack mounted by the employers on our standard of living, our policy is the workers’ united front: the common action of all the working class forces within every country and across borders and oceans.

A living income, work for all, and workers’ control

• In the fight against inflation devaluing working class incomes, we campaign for a sliding scale of wages – a rise of one percent for every one percent increase in the cost of living. A workers’ cost of living index should be maintained by price-watch committees composed of delegates elected from the workplaces, workers’ organisations, shantytowns, and organisations of women, consumers and small producers and traders.
• In countries faced with hyperinflation, a sliding scale of income and price-watch committees will not be sufficient. The distribution of vital goods and access to food requires direct intervention: workers’ committees must assume control over food supply in direct coordination with agrarian producers.
• For a national minimum wage with rates determined by committees of the workers to ensure a decent living for all. Pensions must be indexed to inflation and guaranteed by the state, not left to the mercy of the stock markets.
• Against all closures and redundancies, we fight for strikes and occupations under the slogan: Cut the hours, not the jobs! We stand for a sliding scale of working hours to reduce the working day and share out the available work with no reduction of pay or conditions.
• Around the world, government and private employers cite bankruptcy, efficiency and productivity to justify job cuts. Our reply: open the books! All accounts, databases, financial, tax and management data must be opened to inspection by elected workers’ delegates.
• Every enterprise imposing redundancies, offshoring production, breaking minimum wage, health and safety, or environmental regulations, or dodging taxes, to be nationalised without compensation. Production to be continued under workers’ control and management!
• For a programme of socially useful work to improve social services, healthcare, housing, transport and the environment, under the control of workers’ and their communities.
• No to outsourcing and offshoring. Instead of competition between workers of different nations for the same jobs, build international combines of workers in the same enterprises and branches of production to fight to level up pay rates. Collective agreements and legal rights to apply equally to employees of subcontracting companies.
• For secure employment: opposition to all forms of insecure, informal, precarious and zero-hours working. All workers to be employed on permanent contracts with guaranteed hours. Wages and conditions to be governed by collective agreements controlled by trade unions and workplace representatives.
• Fight the intensification of work, through speed-ups and ‘efficiency drives’ which are simply measures to intensify exploitation and boost profits, endangering our health, safety and lives.
• Against ‘co-determination’, ‘social partnership’, or other forms of class collaboration in which trade unions administer the employers’ policy, we fight for workers’ control. This means the right to veto management decisions on employment, production, the introduction and application of technology.

For universal public services and social security

The remorseless series of cynically named ‘reforms’ of public services are no more than austerity programmes designed to offload the cost of declining public services from the rich onto the working class. Vital services and resources, from water and energy to health and education, paid for by generations of tax and labour from the working and middle classes have been handed over at knock down prices for capitalists to exploit for private gain, not public need. The billionaires, who profit once over from our labour, want to profit twice over from our childhood, old age, and health. At the same time, they have the nerve to demand that welfare and pensions be reduced to ‘encourage self-reliance’ and ‘reduce the culture of dependence’!

In response to the brazen plundering of public assets by private speculators, we demand:

• Not one more cut, not one more privatisation! Essential infrastructure – water, energy, transport and communications – to be nationalised without compensation. Termination of all public-private partnerships and PFI schemes.
• Nationalisation and extension of the best education, health, welfare, and social care systems to the billions who lack any coverage at all. Education, health and social care to be run under the control of workers and users and provided free at the point of delivery to all.
• The retirement age should be progressively reduced, not increased. Pensions to be increased to a living minimum and extended to universal coverage. Private pension schemes to be nationalised and combined into a single state-guaranteed pension.
• Public services, free at the point of delivery and paid for from progressive taxation or insurance, are vital means ensuring a minimum standard and equality of access to healthcare, education and social security for workers and the poor. But public ownership is not socialism. Nationalised companies and services buy inputs from capitalists, compensate former owners, compete with privately owned rivals, employ capitalist management techniques, and operate under the permanent threat of cuts and privatisation. They can never escape the straitjacket of the profit system. Workers must learn to distinguish capitalist nationalisation from working class socialisation and expropriation, used to dispossess the bosses for good. Only thus can highest quality services, from the cradle to the grave, be planned and delivered to abolish need and establish equality.
• In every case, workers’ and users’ organisations must advance the interests of the working class against the owners, by opposing bailouts, which rescue bankrupt capitalists at the taxpayers’ expense. We say: socialise the assets, not the losses. Nationalisation under workers’ and users’ control is necessary to prevent governments absorbing the losses and re-privatising the profitable assets.

Expropriate the fortunes of the rich

Between 2016 and 2022, the number of billionaires increased from 1810 to 2668. In order for a tiny minority to live in unimaginable luxury, billions must exist in indescribable poverty. The investment decisions of these financiers and industrialists can bring entire countries to their knees. Beneath the billionaires, hundreds of thousands of multi–millionaires live in shameless luxury at our expense while 852 million people go hungry and more than 1000 children die from hunger-related causes every day.

The parasite class ferociously denounces any attempt to tax and redistribute their wealth. They stash their money in tax havens and manipulate their citizenship and residence status to avoid paying tax altogether. They wage a ceaseless campaign for the working class to pay the bulk of the tax burden, by hiking indirect taxes on basic commodities like fuel and food, by cutting taxes on business and wealth.

The wealth of the capitalists, the financiers and industrialists, derives ultimately from the labour of the workers, farmers and the poor. We say:

• Finance a massive expansion of public services and poverty abolition programmes by expropriating the private fortunes of the rich. Abolition of all indirect taxes and the suppression of the tax avoidance industry by closing tax havens, nationalisation of big four accountancy firms.

For a workers’ plan of international production and development

In place of a patchwork of state and private ownership linked only by the anarchy of the market, the satisfaction of the needs of humanity and nature demands a democratic plan of production, in which the world’s resources, including human labour, are allocated rationally, according to the will of the people who work to produce, distribute and service everything. Only by replacing the anarchy of the market with the conscious planning of a world economy under common ownership will we be able to make the basis of production collective well-being instead of private accumulation. In every case, revolutionary communists link the fight for the expropriation of this or that industry, with the need to expropriate the capitalist class as a whole. This is because, as Leon Trotsky put it, state ownership will produce favourable results ‘only if the state power itself passes completely from the hands of the exploiters into the hands of the toilers’.

Just as the world’s great monopolies have to plan their systems of production and distribution internationally, so too must a socialised economy. Socialist planning, however, means running and developing the economy according to a plan under the democratic control of the producers and consumers; it is not the rule of a privileged bureaucracy such as developed with the degeneration of the world’s first workers’ state, and was subsequently replicated in other states after 1945. The existence of a world economy presupposes international planning; the ‘theory’ of socialism in one country is an illusion. Socialist planning must spread worldwide, replacing capitalist trade with international exchange of products, resources and labour, in the service of raising all countries and peoples to the optimum level of social development. An internationally planned economy is the central instrument not only for abolishing poverty and inequality, but preventing and reversing the climate catastrophe.

The only international system of planning which capitalism has achieved is that of the imperialist-dominated financial institutions—the IMF, WTO, and World Bank. The fraudulent claim that they were alleviating third world debt and pursuing genuine development goals was exposed by the mass mobilisations of the anti-capitalist movement from Seattle in 1999 to Genoa in 2001. The subsequent world and continental social forums of 2002–2006 left an important legacy of global awareness of the common interests and struggles of the workers, youth, peasants and indigenous peoples of the global north and south.

The empty promises of the institutions of globalisation to create a ‘new paradigm’ for a crisis-free world were finally exploded in the 2008 crash. The abandonment of development goals and the slashing of aid budgets hastened the exit from the political scene of those NGOs who had peddled illusions in the idea that these instruments of exploitation would somehow reform themselves or fade away. As the pretence of counter-crisis measures gave way to austerity programmes, the IMF and its auxiliaries returned to the attack. Now we face the task of building new movements, rooted in the working class and peasantry, without illusions in either the institutions of the ‘liberal world order’ or NGOs, state ‘aid’ programmes, or billionaire charities. Instead it must advance a programme based on the smashing of the imperialist institutions, the expropriation under workers’ control of the banks and corporations, and redistribution of the land to those who work it.

• Immediately, this means the unconditional and total cancellation of the debt of all semi-colonial countries, allied to measures to force the imperialist powers to compensate the semi-colonial world for the plunder of its natural and human resources. Ownership and control of the operations of the multinationals must pass to the workers who produce their wealth.
• End protectionism against the products of the global south. Abolish NAFTA, the Common Agricultural Policy and other protectionist weapons of imperialist states. However, we support the right of Third World countries to defend their markets from cheap imports from imperialist countries.
• Abolition of the IMF, WTO, World Bank, all special economic zones.
• Nationalisation of the stock markets. Expropriation of the major industries, without compensation, under workers’ control. Nationalisation and merger of the banks into single national banks under workers control.

Against militarism and war

The major change in the conditions facing the working class since the 2008 period is the emergence of two new major imperialist powers, potentially forming a strategic military bloc with one another, to challenge the dominance of the USA and its subordinated allies in Europe and Asia. This presents a serious challenge to the old world views of the workers’ parties and the left populist movements of the global North and South, inherited from the forty years of the first cold war.

Social Democracy and Labourism largely supported the “democratic” imperialisms against “authoritarian” regimes (Russia, China, etc) regarding the “West” as a progressive force that they should support, either in government or in opposition, regardless of their social character. The left wing of these parties, however, opposed the colonial and semi-colonial wars and repressions, supported the non-aligned countries in the cold war and also participated in peace and anti-imperialist movements.

The Stalinist Communist parties, on the other hand, not only supported the degenerate workers’ states against the imperialist powers but excused and apologised for their dictatorship over the working class and in many cases their brutal repressions (Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Tiananmen.) They also supported anti-imperialist movements and wars of liberation such as Vietnam and Cuba. Although the very clear and almost undeniable restoration of capitalism in Russia has meant that few CPs support Putin, this is not the case with regard to China. Most who still look to Stalinism as the mainstream of socialism and communism thus regard US/Nato as “the” imperialist force par excellence and anyone opposed to it as a lesser evil.

In a period where conflict is developing between Russia and China on the one hand and the West on the other, the Stalinist and left Socialist Left tends to support the former, or at least not oppose them, while the mainstream social democratic and Labour traditions support the latter. However, a truly revolutionary position, independent of both rival imperialist camps, will take the stance to all imperialist countries adopted by Lenin in the First World War and repeated by Trotsky in the Second World War. For them, the difference of political regime (democracy/autocracy) was not decisive. What mattered was their common character as plunderers and oppressors of smaller, weaker nations that either were, or were to become, their colonies or semi-colonies.

It was and remains only these oppressed nations that the working class should defend, no matter what the character of their political regimes. The aim is not only to weaken the imperialist rulers at home and abroad, but to aid the working class of the countries blockaded, attacked or oppressed by imperialist powers to come to the head of the national liberation struggle and take power (the strategy of permanent revolution)

In wars between the imperialist powers, on the other hand, the position of revolutionaries was, and remains today, that “the main enemy is at home” and that, in all reactionary wars, revolutionaries must wish the defeat of those waging them, a defeat achieved by turning their war into a civil war, i.e. a revolution.

In today’s conditions of intense inter-imperialist conflict it is likely that any semi-colonial resistance to one imperialist oppressor will be taken advantage of by its imperialist rivals. As long as such an intervention is a subordinate factor, it will not alter the character of the war and the working class internationally needs to support the oppressed nation, irrespective of the character it its leadership or the regime under attack.

But, as we can see in the case of the war over the Ukraine, such a war can become centre stage of the current struggle for the re-division of the world. Despite the fact that NATO is not officially engaged in the war, the inter-imperialist conflict between Russia and the Western powers has become a determining factor in this war, with the Western imperialists imposing economic sanctions of historic dimensions on Russia and arming and training the Ukraine as a proxy.

The war over the Ukraine has therefore assumed a combined character. On the one side there is the new cold war between the Western imperialist powers and, on the other, Russia (and its backer China) being fought on the terrain of the Ukraine. But this does not mean that the self-defence of the Ukrainian people, even if led by a reactionary bourgeois and pro-western government, has become a subordinated factor thus far. Therefore, the working class globally must recognise the right of Ukrainians to resist the Russian invasion and acquire the means necessary to do so. At the same time, no political support must be given to the nationalist, pro-Western Zelensky government. Its espousal of the ambition to join NATO or subordinate its economy to the EU as well to impose a regime on Crimea whose population clearly has no desire to be part of Ukraine, must be condemned.

In Russia, revolutionaries must pursue a policy of revolutionary defeatism, fighting to turn Putin’s reactionary war into a class war to overthrow his regime. In the NATO-countries, they must oppose any Western intervention, they must oppose NATO’s war aims, its sanctions methods, its major rearmament and its expansion to hitherto neutral states. It is necessary to oppose all these measures as part of the Western imperialist bloc’s policy of confrontation with Russian (and Chinese) imperialism. This start of a new Cold War brings humanity closer to a Third World War, which could easily be its last. The same principles would apply if China were to invade Taiwan. Xi Jinping and the bipartisan forces in the US Congress are heading in this direction. It is vital to fight to prevent the labour movements, and anti-imperialist forces around the globe from joining any imperialist camp.

The arms race and increased deployments of strike forces, military bases and flotillas around the world and the suborning of antagonisms into a series of proxy wars can be combatted, providing there is a movement of millions like that which challenged the disastrous Iraq War, but with greater staying power, greater willingness to go all the way and drive the warmongers from power. Above all, a movement with a qualitatively better, that is, a revolutionary, leadership. Such a movement must be international – indeed it must become an International

If the working class leaves unopposed our rulers’ launching of sanctions that lead to hunger and inflation, new arms races that consume the resources needed for health, education, averting climate catastrophes, and destructive wars, then our fate is to be their victims and to be incited against one another. That is why the working class, as Karl Marx wrote in 1864, in the founding statement of the First International, has “the duty to master themselves the mysteries of international politics; to watch the diplomatic acts of their respective governments; to counteract them, if necessary, by all means in their power”.

The great anti-war mobilisation of 2003, which brought 20 million onto the streets of every major city in the world, showed the potential power of an international co-ordination. Initiated by the European and World Social Forums, the movement’s failure was due to the fact that the organisers of these demonstrations were not willing and able to organise further mass actions, including general strikes and mutinies, to stop it, or turn the mobilisations into revolutions. This revealed the need for a more disciplined organisation with more determined goals, a Fifth International.

Under capitalism, the workers have no fatherland. In the imperialist countries, the working class movement can never support ‘national defence’ and must always seek the defeat of their rulers, whether in colonial wars of occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan, or in any clash with rival imperialist states like Russia or China. It is the duty of revolutionaries to use the war, as the Second International voted in 1907, to bring about the downfall of the system.

In semi-colonial countries, it is necessary to defend the nation against any attack by an imperialist power or by one of its local proxies or “gendarmes”. At the same time, revolutionaries give no support to the bourgeoisie’s conduct of the war. By fighting for a united front of all national forces against imperialism, by exposing the weakness, vacillation, and timidity of the propertied classes in the anti-imperialist struggle, revolutionaries strive to bring independent working class forces to the head of the fight to free the nation from imperialism and open the road to socialism. In fratricidal clashes between semi-colonies over territory or resources, then the defeat of your ‘own’ country is a lesser evil than suspension of the class struggle at home; the war must be turned into an uprising for working class power and peace.

The major imperialist powers, the USA, Britain, China, the EU states, spend hundreds of billions on their war machines. Today, they claim to act in humanitarian interests, but this is camouflage for their real goal which is to assert and maintain their military domination of the world. In poorer nations, too, huge proportions of the national budget are spent on the army, in countries like Pakistan and Turkey, the military seeks to play a direct political role itself.

• No to imperialist wars, sanctions and blockades. Down with all imperialist occupations such as Russia’s in Ukraine, and previously in Chechnya, to the Nato powers’ occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, to the Zionist state’s occupation of Palestine, the US blockade of Cuba, Iran, North Korea and Venezuela. We support resistance to all such occupations and blockades.

• For the closure of all imperialist military bases around the world! No to US, EU and other imperialist military interventions.

• For the dissolution of all imperialist-dominated military alliances like NATO, CSTO, AUKUS etc.

• Not a penny or a person for any capitalist army, be it professional or compulsory-conscription based. Workers’ representatives in parliament must oppose all military spending by capitalist governments.

• Military training for all under the control of the workers’ movement.

• For full civil and political rights for soldiers, sailors and air force personnel, the setting up of committees and unions in the camps and barracks and the election of officers.. Defend all those who defy orders to attack civilians, rape, torture etc!

• In all imperialist wars, or wars of plunder and oppression of minority nationalities (e.g Turkey of the Kurds, Sri Lanka of the Tamils, Myanmar of the Rohingya) the main enemy of the working class is at home. For the defeat of the former; for the victory of the resistance.

Combat the climate catastrophe

Climate change and environmental degradation can only be mitigated and reversed if control over production is removed from the hands of the large capital formations that have brought humanity to the brink of disaster. In recent decades, strong resistance against environmental destruction and the threats of climate change has developed, ranging from local initiatives against certain big projects, big movements against environmentally damaging policy and resistance in semi-colonies, to environmental movements in the imperialist centres.

In Europe, it was the youth who led the way, with global student and school strikes and direct action. The labour movement, which lagged behind, must link up with them, supporting and extending their actions and campaigns without trying to subdue their militant spirit. At the same time, it must challenging the reformist or bourgeois orientation of the leaderships of the climate movement, like the bureaucratic one of Fridays for Future, and fighting to orient the movement towards the working class.

In certain areas, the previously uninhibited actions of large corporations and their helpers with regard to environmental issues could be slowed down. It is necessary to extend these successes to social control over the socio-ecological effects of economic decisions. Democratic control bodies consisting of employees, consumers, those affected by large-scale projects, young people fighting for their future, etc. must be formed and empowered to decide on projects, risk levels, threshold values, ecological measures, etc. Capital must be systematically confronted with social control with regard to the socio-ecological effects of its actions.

Ultimately, only the socialist revolution will overcome the system of environmental imperialism and enable the planned optimal use of resources under the control of the majority worldwide. Every programme in the struggle against imperialism must, based on the people affected and the global interests of the working class, also centrally develop demands for the struggle against the global ecological predatory exploitation, in particular at the expense of the semi-colonies.

The following demands are not simply directed at state and supra-national environmental policy, they are demands that can only be implemented in an international movement that implements the previously described form of democratically legitimised social control over the measures demanded here.

• For an emergency plan to restructure energy and transport systems – for a perspective of finishing the global consumption of fossil fuels!

• Make the big corporations and imperialist states like the USA and the EU pay reparations for the environmental destruction they have caused in the rest of the world to help the semi-colonial countries bring about the necessary ecological changes.

• For a plan to phase out fossil and nuclear energy production. For massive investments in renewable forms of energy such as wind, water and solar energy as well as in suitable storage technologies.

• For a large global programme for the reforestation of destroyed forests while at the same time protecting the existing close-to-natural ecosystems of indigenous peoples!

• For supporting the struggles of indigenous peoples and populations threatened by environmental destruction! For their protection and right to self-determination

• For a global programme to protect water resources. For massive investments in drinking water supply and wastewater treatment!

• For a global programme to conserve resources, avoid waste and manage waste.

• For the conversion of agriculture to sustainable cultivation methods. For the expropriation of large estates and the distribution of land to the people who (want to) cultivate it.

• For animal-friendly husbandry conditions on all farms! For the intensification of research into sustainable farming systems under the control of farmers and workers! Wherever necessary, obligatory use of environmentally sustainable methods of cultivation, such as organic farming, while taking into account the need to ensure food security.

• The consumption of animal products (especially meat) must be drastically reduced, including the abolition of subsidies that benefit the big ranchers, but at the same time not ruining small farmers. On the basis of expropriating the great agribusinesses, food production can be reoriented by an overall social plan democratically drawn up by the rural and urban working class which meets the nutritional needs of the people and, in the process, combats the effects of climate change.

• Free public transport for all and massive investments in public transport systems! Conversion of the transport system into one based on rail transport, both for passengers and for freight. At the same time, massive reduction of car, truck and air traffic!

Abolition of trade secrets! Abolition of patent protection! To bring this knowledge together to create sustainable alternatives to existing technologies. Real support for less developed countries through technology transfer!

• Nationalisation of all environmental resources, such as soil, forests and waters.

Nationalisation of all energy corporations and companies with monopolies on basic goods such as water management, agricultural industry as well as all airlines, shipping and railway companies under workers’ control!

• For a restrictive policy concerning chemical products based on the precautionary principle! For a ban on chemicals that are proven or likely to be hazardous to health and/or the environment, such as glyphosate! Threshold values or danger levels with regard to the use of chemicals must be determined by organs of democratically legitimised social control.

Transform the city

Over half of humanity now lives in cities, but the majority of them are living in shantytowns and slums without proper roads, lighting, clean drinking water or sewage and waste disposal. Their flimsy structures are swept away by earthquakes, hurricanes, floods and tsunamis as we have seen in Indonesia, Bangladesh, New Orleans and Haiti. Hundreds of thousands die not simply from these “natural” events but from the poverty-stricken human infrastructure. The flood of people into the cities is driven by the failure of capitalism, landlordism and agribusiness to provide a living in the countryside.

Few shantytown dwellers have permanent or secure jobs. Their children have no nurseries, clinics or schools. Criminal gangs, drug dealers and police alike subject the people to harassment and extortion. Women and the young are driven into prostitution, sexual slavery or semi-slavery in dangerous and health-destroying sweatshops. Real slavery and the trade in human beings has re-appeared. This is yet another phenomenon that bids capitalism be gone! This increasing accumulation of human misery must end.

This cannot be done with the pittance of aid from the rich countries, by Millennium Goals, by NGOs or charities run by churches, mosques and temples. Nor can self-help or micro credit schemes solve problems so huge. The population of the barrios, favellas and townships can, as they have shown, take their destiny into their own hands.

By mass mobilisation in Venezuela, Bolivia and South Africa dwellers in shantytowns have forced through significant reforms. But, only by social revolution, in alliance with the working class, can they smash the capitalists’ repressive state and exploitative economy and erect in its place a society based on committees and councils of the workers and the poor, as an instrument for the complete transformation of the cities.

• For housing, light and power, sewage and waste disposal, health clinics and schools, roads and public transport for the inhabitants of the vast and rapidly growing shantytowns which surround all the major cities of the ‘developing world’ from Manila and Karachi to Mumbai, Mexico City and Sao Paulo.

• For a programme of public works under the control of the workers and the poor. For free local public transport and commuter traffic for the workers!

• For massive investment in social and health services, housing, public transport and a clean, sustainable environment.

Support the struggles of small farmers, peasants, rural workers and the landless workers on the land and in industry, making for the gradual elimination of the contradiction between city and country.

Rural liberation

Some 43 per cent of humanity still lives in the countryside; in villages, on plantations and in the rural communities of indigenous peoples, but the United Nations predicts this will fall to one third by 2050. The flight from the countryside is motivated not simply by the attractions of city life. For most migrants, these are more than offset by slum life, crime and super-exploitation. It is rather the failure of capitalism to provide a minimally decent life in the countryside. The failure of land reforms has accentuated rural unemployment and landlessness. The gap between their incomes, their access to healthcare, education and communications and that available in the cities is often enormous. In addition, they face the devastation of the rural environment by industries like logging, mining, and by monocultures and activities that lead to flooding and exhaustion of the soil. Climate change is speeding up this process enormously.

At the same time, capitalism relentlessly concentrates landownership in the hands of a wealthy elite or international agribusiness. From China and Bengal to South America and Africa, peasants and indigenous communities are driven off the best land and forced to migrate to the slums of the cities.

Life on the plantations that produce sugar, coffee, tea, cotton, sisal, rubber, tobacco and bananas reproduces many of the features of indentured labour or chattel slavery. Plantation workers are often thrown into debt bondage. A revolution in the countryside, led by the proletariat, the landless or small landholding peasants, will provide a powerful ally of the urban workers and the latter an indispensable support for their sisters and brothers in the countryside.

• Expropriate the land of the oligarchs, former colonial plantations and the multinational agribusinesses and place them under workers’, poor peasants’ and agricultural labourers’ control.

• Land to those who work it.

• Abolition of rent and cancellation of all debts of the poor peasants.

• Free credit to purchase machinery and fertiliser; incentives to encourage subsistence farmers to voluntarily join production and marketing co-operatives.

• Free access to seeds, abolish all patents in agriculture.

• Modernise rural life. Full electrification, internet access and modern civic facilities. Stop the draining of youth from the countryside by encouraging creative and cultural activities.

• Against poverty in the countryside; equalise income, access to health, education and culture with the cities.

Together, by linking such struggles in both the cities and the countryside, we can reverse the pathological urbanisation of capitalism and the exhaustion of the soil and deforestation and open the road to the goal set out in The Communist Manifesto: “Uniting work on the land and in industry, making for the gradual elimination of the contradiction between city and country.”

The digital revolution

Since the 1960s, advances in computer technology and networking, and their application to many areas of production and everyday life, have been key factors in the development of the productive forces. With the Internet, mobile digitisation and artificial intelligence (AI), recent years have seen new stages in this development at an ever-increasing pace. Cloud computing and other elements in the sharing of resources, ever closer connections between product requirements and product provision, the secure processing of transactions and complex logistics chains via blockchain, etc. have created great potentials for productivity increases. Huge monopolies (Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, Facebook,…) dominate in all these areas, exploiting the productivity gains for their monopoly profits.

An essential factor in this is their enormous control over users’ data and information, from the sale of which they make enormous profits. Many companies are now trying to gather data about all aspects of their employees in order to better control them and compete for performance. Similarly, states (not only China and the US) use artificial intelligence, and their access to the networks, to gather ever more comprehensive information about their citizens, to evaluate them and identify, locate and monitor them.

These technologies are used by the secret services of the world to realise an all-encompassing surveillance. The revelations about the National Security Agency (NSA) scandal in 2013 bear witness to this. Since then, the expansion of surveillance has accelerated. Revolutionaries must be aware that face recognition in public space, Trojan programmes and the mass storage of data are part of the class struggle of the capitalists and are massively used against them and the workers’ movement and not for the “security” of the population.

Data Protection Regulations supposed to control hate postings are little more than fig leaf actions. Hardly any private user can really use them to control his/her data. The mass of abuse possibilities by the state, corporations and right-wing organisations is growing at a pace which all these measures are only hopelessly lagging behind.

The legacy problems of ‘data privacy protection’ now seem small compared to those of the new generation of AI-application development environments. With the increased capabilities and the much easier common access to modules for deep machine learning, large language models, text generation and transformation, natural language processing, etc., not only has the uncontrollable number of databases accessed in searches and problem-solving exploded, but AI-applications seem to have extended answers to any kind of questions. This capacity of generating answers in astonishing quality in regard to language and content is based on very simple statistical models. While in a surprisingly high amount of cases, it gives good results, this simple statistical guessing also delivers nonsense in more complicated cases, and tends to reproduce widespread prejudices. It does not detect wrong information on which its deductions are based, etc.. A relevant proportion of answers are what experts call “AI-hallucinations”. Therefore, while these new AI-applications may help to make easier a lot of work connected to routinely producing texts (in journalism, offices, contact-centres,…), the drive of capital to use these techniques to replace human workers is very dangerous: any kind of product of these applications still needs to be controlled and reworked by humans to avoid gross errors with potentially harmful consequences

We fight for

• Expropriation of large IT monopolies under the control of employees and democratically legitimised user committees!

• For a plan for the socially meaningful use of the productive progress of IT technology

Fight the surveillance from private enterprises and capital like Google, Facebook and employers who use IT to keep citizens and workers in check. A first demand should be for them to go public with algorithms and systems they use to gather information.

• For the social control (by democratically legitimised user committees) of the data collected by the state and companies and of the procedures for their use and networking.

• No to monitoring tools that spy on the network behaviour of users and employees! No to upload filters and other methods that are intended to prevent the free disposal of content shared on the net and to force the form of goods on the net content! Instead, we want to expand the share-economy and state financing of its basis (e.g. state financing of open source under producer control instead of dependence on the “donations” of the IT companies)!

• The application or usage of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the working environment should be allowed only if implemented in a way that its effects and result-generation are open for control by the workforce itself and the social communities affected by it. The applications have to deliver a log that clearly identifies the parts of work that are the result of AI-processing and contain the chain of reasonings the AI uses in regard to data and statistical conclusions.

• Control commissions of workers and communities should regularly check these logs and in case of errors or harmful effects should be able to locate the problems in the applications to correct them. This is especially important in regard to data privacy breaches and harmful conclusions concerning individuals or social groups that are result of the “autonomous” actions of AI. As long as such control mechanisms are not implemented, we are in favour of a moratorium of the usage of the new generation of AI-applications.

The trade unions

All over the world, our trade unions are under attack from the capitalists. In the fight to rouse them to fight back against the bosses’ offensive, the greatest obstacle is the paralysing influence of the caste of bureaucrats that holds our organisations in thrall to the bosses, their governments and their laws. The bosses’ offensive is unrelenting and vicious. In the weaker and less developed countries, the semi-colonies, dictatorial regimes have turned unions into instruments of the state, banning strikes and outlawing the free election of union leaders. Independent unions and workplace organisations have to struggle under illegality, facing arrests, torture and assassination.

In recent decades, trade unions have been under attack in the global south. Very large parts of the working class, even in big industries and the state sectors, are not unionised at all, as a result of neo-liberal attacks and repressive legislation. The fragmentation of the trades unions reflects and reinforces this, as well as the confusion, sectionalism and betrayals of the trade union leaderships. Revolutionaries not only need to demand the organising of the unorganised and fight to overcome this policy in the existing unions, but also to take the initiative to rebuild the trade union movement.

In the advanced capitalist democracies, decades of class struggle secured legal rights for unions so, in place of outright illegality, the state incorporated unions by granting privileges to their leaders and by drawing them into co-production schemes of class collaboration. But the capitalists continued stripping away rights and putting unions under ever-greater legal restrictions, impeding effective union activity and mass recruitment. Western courts repeatedly demonstrate the class character of bourgeois law by intervening to overturn strike votes, confiscate union funds and back union busting companies.

Today, capital finds independent trade unions more and more intolerable. We have to defend our unions, fight for their independence from the capitalists and the state, take up the fight to recruit millions of new members from previously unorganised sectors, from the insecure and super exploited sections of the workforce, many of them young people, migrants or ‘illegals’. This struggle will meet intransigent opposition from within, from the highly paid and undemocratic trade union bureaucracy, which sees its task as an eternal one; negotiating deals in an everlasting capitalist economy. In crisis times, these deals become “give backs” to the bosses, trading conditions for jobs and vice versa.

The ideology of the bureaucratic trade union leaders is poison to the class consciousness of the proletariat. Instead of internationalism, in the imperialist centres they rely above all on a company-centred logic, defending the competitiveness of “their” company. In this way, the trade union bureaucrats, together with the social-chauvinist reformism of social democracy and the self-proclaimed socialists, bear responsibility for ensuring that racist ideologies and national narrow-mindedness can also implant themselves in parts of the working class in times of a shift to the right or that they are not effectively fought against.

The bureaucrats often act as policemen for the state and employers, victimising militants and helping expel them from the workplace. Revolutionaries organise within the unions to increase their influence, up to and including winning the leadership, whilst always remaining honest to the rank and file and as open about this as state repression and union bureaucracy allows. In the bureaucratic unions, we will stimulate the creation of rank and file movements, aiming to democratise the running of strikes and other forms of struggle and to replace the permanent and overpaid caste of top officials with elected and instantly recallable leaders, paid the same wages as their members.

But even the most democratic trade union movement cannot suffice. The syndicalist idea that unions should be independent, not just from the bosses but from working class political parties, too, can only weaken the resistance of workers and the fight for working class power. Instead, revolutionaries aim to orient the unions to fight not just for sectional interests but for those of the working class as a whole; across crafts and trades, across sectors and industries, for the casual and the permanent staff, for the present and future workers, not just in one country but internationally. We promote class, not just narrow trade union, consciousness. In this way, the unions can once more become real schools for socialism, and a massive pillar of support for a new revolutionary workers’ party.

A new working class International and revolutionary parties in every country must commit themselves to renewing the existing unions wherever possible, but not flinch from a formal break and the formation of new unions where the reformist bureaucracy makes unity impossible. Unorganised precarious workers can be organised as can new high-tech industries, despite tyrannical employers or systems to discourage collective action by class collaboration in the workplace. We need organisations in the workplaces which do not accommodate either to the dictates or the blandishments of the bosses but defend the workers with militant methods of struggle such as mass strikes, occupations and, when necessary, a general strike. Unions must not be bureaucratically controlled from the top down but be democratic, where differences can be freely debated, where leaders can be controlled and, if necessary, recalled immediately.

We cannot wait until the unions are transformed; we need to fight now. We demand that the current leaders fight for the urgent needs of the masses and we warn the rank and file not to trust them. We fight for the formation of rank and file movements in the existing unions so that the officials’ stranglehold can be broken and action delivered despite them. While we argue for political organisation within unions, we oppose politically separated unions because this only serves to disunite the workers, leaving many under the influence of reformist or even non-working class leaderships. We fight for the formation of industrial unions, which maximise the collective weight of the workers in bargaining with employers. Where several unions currently exist either within an industry or within companies or workplaces, we fight for their amalgamation on a class struggle basis and for joint committees under rank and file control for purposes of bargaining and action. We fight for unionisation of the vast numbers of our sisters and brothers not yet organised, to open the unions to young workers and the racially oppressed. If union bureaucrats prevent this, then new unions need to be formed. Our watchword must be; action with the official leaders where possible, but without them, even against them, where necessary.

We need unions and mass organisations that can really unite the mass of the working class and the oppressed and are not dominated by male and better-off layers drawn solely from the dominant national or racial group within a given country. This means we promote full rights and full representation in their leadership structures to the lower strata of the working class and the poor, to women, youth, minorities and migrants.

Therefore, we fight for:

• The organisation of the unorganised workers, including women, migrants and casual labour forces.

• Unions to be under the control of their members.

• For the right to caucus independently for all socially oppressed groups: women, racial minorities, LGBT.

• Unity of all trade unions on a democratic and militant basis, totally independent of the bosses, their parties and their states

From picket line defence to workers’ militia

Every determined striker knows the need for picket lines to deter strike breakers. No wonder the capitalists everywhere push for draconian anti-union laws to try to make our pickets as weak and ineffective as possible. At the same time, the bosses are allowed to hire security guards and private thugs to intimidate the workers. From attacks on workers’ marches by mechanised police as in Greece to arrest and imprisonment of trade unionists in Iran, harassment of militant workers goes on. When the police and the employers’ thugs resort to open repression, even the most militant mass picketing can prove insufficient as it did in the historic British Miners’ Strike of 1984-5.

The most notorious case this century was the Marikana massacre, where South African police killed 42 striking miners on the instruction of today’s President and former miners’ leader, Cyril Ramaphosa. Every serious struggle shows the need for disciplined protection, using weapons to match those used against us.

We should begin with the organised defence of demonstrations, of strike pickets, of communities facing racist and fascist harassment as well as the self defence of the sexually oppressed. Always asserting the democratic right to self-defence, militants should launch a public campaign for a workers’ and popular defence guard, based on the mass movement.

In countries where there is a right to bear arms, the workers’ defence guard should take full advantage of it. Where the capitalists and their state have a monopoly of force, all means are justified to break that monopoly. Revolutionaries must fight within the mass organisations of the working class and peasants for the creation of defence squads, disciplined, trained in combat, equipped with the appropriate weapons for success. In key moments in the class struggle, mass strike waves, a general strike, the creation of a mass workers’ militia is essential, or the movement will be drowned in blood like in Chile in 1973 or in Tiananmen Square in 1989. By rising to the challenge, the means of popular defence can become the instrument of revolution.

For a workers’ united front against fascism

Capitalist crisis ruins the middle classes and drives them to a frenzied search for scapegoats, while the long-term unemployed sink ever deeper into despair, making them vulnerable to racists, right wing nationalists, religious demagogues and outright fascists. In the imperialist countries, this often takes the form of classical fascism targeting racial, national and religious minorities, migrants and Roma as scapegoats. In particular, in Europe, Islamophobia, hatred of Muslims, is a fast-growing threat, with marches against mosques and agitation against the hijab and burka spreading under cover of the official ideology of ‘anti–terrorism’ and the non-existent threat of the ‘Islamisation of Europe’. Nor is antisemitism dead, indeed, the fast–growing Hungarian Nazi movement, Jobbik, combines both in a noxious mix of reactionary demagogy.

In the semi-colonial world, fascistic forces often emerge out of communalism and religious bigotry, directing the masses’ emotions against minorities such as Muslims in India, Tamils in Sri Lanka, Hindu, Christians, Ahmadis and Shia in Pakistan.

Fascism is a force of civil war against the working class. By stirring ancient hatreds and promoting irrational fears, it mobilises the petit bourgeois and lumpenproletarian masses to first divide, and then destroy, working class and democratic organisations. It then gathers into its hands the entire apparatus of state control to impose a regime of super-exploitation on the workers under the direct supervision of the police and its auxiliary gangs. Its admiration for mass murderers like Anders Breivik and Brenton Tarrant is testimony to its brutal aims.

Its growth as a mass force is testimony to the intensity of the crisis which enrages millions and drives them to despair, and to the betrayals and failures of the leadership of the working class. It can only be defeated by unleashing the revolutionary movement of the working class and its allies, appealing for a workers’ united front of all workers’ organisations against fascism and a working class antifascist militia to repel its attacks on the labour movement and minorities. As Leon Trotsky said, if socialism is the expression of revolutionary hope, fascism is the expression of counter-revolutionary despair. To defeat it, the despair of the masses must be converted into a revolutionary class offensive against crisis-ridden capitalism, the system which repeatedly gives birth to fascism. As fascism relies for its strength on mobilising masses enraged by the effects of capitalist crisis, the struggle against fascism will only be completed when its source, capitalism, is uprooted.

• For a workers’ united front against the fascists.

• No reliance on the capitalist state and its repressive apparatus.

• For organised self-defence of workers, national minorities and youth. An antifascist militia can break up fascist rallies, demonstrations and meetings and deny a platform to the racist and fascist demagogues.

After the second world war, fascist cadre organisations developed the tactic of building inside fascist front organisations, e.g. the FN in France. Such organisations have an electoralist wing that participates with reactionary right wing politics in the political activities of bourgeois parliamentarism while coexisting with fascist groups inside the party. During the globalisation period, such front organisations grew considerably and could establish themselves in many countries with significant weight in the political scene. While open fascist organisations have to be fought with strict “no platform” politics and have to be confronted as far as possible with physical counterforce, against fascist front organisations a more flexible form of tactics has to be applied. As far as the fascist wing is dominating in action, they have to be treated as any fascist force. On the other hand, where their not-directly fascist propaganda reaches out to desperate underclass people with e.g. reactionary electoral propaganda, we will apply tactics to break these people from the demagogues by counter-propaganda, showing real alternative ways to fight their social deprivation.

Defend democratic rights

Many states in the world, including those that are nominally bourgeois democracies, have powerful executive presidencies, undemocratically elected senates and unelected judiciaries, often chosen for long terms in office or even for life. Even in the oldest republics, the United States and France, many of these restrictions exist – including systematic blocking of registration of voters of colour, gerrymandering of electoral districts etc. The result is to thwart the adoption of vital policies, for women, the organised working class and the racially oppressed, as the US Supreme Court is doing today. And they are often embedded in constitutions, and enormously difficult to amend. Making a clean sweep of them is a truly revolutionary task.

In countries like Turkey, incumbents are able, by control of the media, and arrests of the activists of opposition parties or illegalising them outright, to turn elections into plebiscites – ‘it’s me or chaos’. Countries as different as France and Turkey have seen such Bonapartist or semi-Bonapartist regimes by-pass parliaments. Africa has seen an epidemic of presidents prolonging their allotted terms .The Middle East and East Africa have seen the military repeatedly seize power. In these countries, where workers, women and youth have repeatedly launched mass democratic movements, no permanent solution has proved possible and will never be until the revolutionary forces win over the rank and file of the armed forces and break forever the power of the generals and high commands. Without this, horrific events like Sudan will continue to thwart even the most powerful social movements.

At home and abroad, the western imperialists pose as the defenders and advocates of democracy. They are lying. After 9/11, and the jihadi terrorist attacks in Europe in the last decade, North American and European governments imposed anti-terrorism laws which created a surveillance society and restricted or abolished rights accumulated over centuries of popular struggles.

In the global south, the democratic rights that allow the working class, the peasants, the urban and rural poor to organise and mobilise a fight back are themselves undermined by the courts, the police, the hit squads of the bosses. In the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte’s War on Drugs, in two years has seen police engage in a spree of extra-judicial killings, estimated as between 12,000 and 20,000. In Mexico and other central and south American states, the war on drugs has also led to army and police murders which involve leftists and trade union and peasant leaders as their prime targets.

In Palestine, and especially in blockaded and repeatedly bombed Gaza, the Palestinians are a constant target of the Zionist settler state. Within Israel and the West Bank, it practices a regime not dissimilar to that of Apartheid South Africa. The ceaseless and heroic struggle of the people of Palestine deserves the fullest support including the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, BDS, movement. Our goal must be the right to return of all Palestinian refugees, the dismantling of the Zionist State and the creation of a single state for two Hebrew and Arabic speaking nations in Israel-Palestine. Such a state can only solve the antagonism between the two peoples created by Zionism by becoming a socialist state, where farms, factories, etc. are owned in common and democratically planned to assure social equality.

The poison of racism and pogroms against minority and immigrant communities is used to divide and undermine resistance. All over the world, it is the masses’ own organisations that must take up the fight to protect and extend democratic rights. Our democratic organisations of struggle are the bedrock of any real “rule of the people”. Through regular election, the recallability of delegates and representatives, opposition to bureaucracy and its privileges, the working class movement can be the springboard to a new society.

• Defend the right to strike, freedom of speech, of assembly, of political and trade union organisation, the freedom to publish and broadcast.

• Abolish all anti-union laws.

• Demand the removal of all undemocratic elements in capitalist constitutions; monarchies, second chambers, executive presidents, unelected Supreme Court, and other judiciaries and emergency powers.

• For the unrestricted right to jury trial and the election of judges by the people.

• Fight against the increasing surveillance of our society, including of the internet, and the increasing power of the police and security services.

• Dissolve the repressive apparatus, the police, the security services, replace them with militias drawn from, and controlled by, the workers and popular masses, alongside breaking the soldiers from their high command and winning sections of them for the revolution.

Wherever fundamental questions concerning the political order are posed, we call for a constituent assembly to secure democratic rights and indeed to decide on the social basis of the state. The workers’ should fight to ensure that deputies to the assembly are elected in the most democratic manner, are kept under the control of their electors and are recallable by them. The assembly must be forced to address all fundamental questions of democratic rights and social justice; agrarian revolution, nationalisation under workers’ control of large scale industry and the banks, the self-determination of national minorities, abolition of the political and economic privileges of the rich.

The fight against social oppression

For women’s liberation

The capitalist democracies promised women equality, but the promise remains partial and unfulfilled. In the twentieth century, women, thanks to the first wave feminist and socialist agitation before the First World War and the need to draw women into production and public life posed by the war effort of the major powers, meant most women were given the vote alongside universal suffrage for the hitherto huge unenfranchised sections of working class men. But gaining the vote did not mean real political power either for women or the working class. The Second World War drew even more women into production as did the planned economy of the USSR. Women joined trade unions in ever-greater numbers.

The continued burden of childcare and domestic labour held back women from equally well-paid jobs or continuous careers. The militant workers’ movement and second wave feminism in the imperialist countries and national liberation movements in the so-called third world won a series of important victories for women with birth control and the right to terminate pregnancies in some countries enabling women to exert choice about the number and timing of childbirths.

This period also saw greater consciousness of patriarchal ideology, the small number of women in leading roles in education, politics, trade unions and business. It also challenged domestic violence within the family, rape and sexual harassment. But for all this, in Europe and North America, despite equal pay laws, women’s wages are on average only 70 per cent of men’s and often much less. Women still bear the double burden of childcare, care of the elderly and managing the individual household, alongside their jobs. Rape, sexual harassment and domestic violence are rife. Reproductive rights are restricted and under constant attack.

In the USA, the Supreme Court’s repeal of Roe v Wade which gave women a right to abortion (albeit limited) has encouraged the campaign to reverse the limited right to abortion, won in the 1970s, at the level of the states. Republicans pass laws to outlaw it and close the clinics necessary for it to be carried out safely. In many semicolonial countries, the rise of religious populist parties threatens to drive women back into the patriarchal home, already nearly total in Afghanistan under the Taliban, where they have been driven out of healthcare, education, and public cultural and political life.

Even partial liberation of women is extremely uneven on a global scale. In the global south, the international division of labour, ancient patriarchal relations in the countryside and religious prejudices, revived by fundamentalists of all faiths, magnify these inequalities. Women are denied the right to control their own bodies, to decide if they wish to have children and, if so, when and how many. Domestic violence, family rape, even murder (so-called ‘honour’ killings) often go largely unpunished.

Yet, over the last decades, millions of women have been drawn into mass production, especially in manufacturing in the cities of South and East Asia and Latin America. During crises, in the textile, electronic and service industries, where women make up some 80 per cent of the workforce, they have often been the first to be sacked, with employers leaving wages unpaid, breaking legal obligations to give notice and with governments and courts turning a blind eye. Most cruelly exploited are the huge numbers of migrant women workers whose families back home will starve without their remittances.

Today, male dominated governments around the world show a prurient interest in controlling women’s right to determine their own clothing. In Europe, racists demand restrictions on the wearing of the hijab or niqab and impose bans on women wearing Islamic face coverings. On the other hand, in states like Saudi Arabia and Iran, religious police enforce compulsory Islamic dress codes. Radical Salafist groups and jihadis have tried to re-impose old and oppressive customs on women. We stand:

• Against all forms of legal discrimination against women. Equal rights for women, to vote, to work, to education, to participate in all public and social activity
  
• Help women to escape concentration in the informal and family business sector. Public works programmes to provide full-time job opportunities with decent wages for women.
  
• Equal pay for equal work.
  
• All women should have access to free contraception and abortion on demand, regardless of age.
  
• Fight sexual violence in all forms. Expansion of publicly owned, self-organised shelters from domestic violence and rape. Self-defence against sexist violence, backed by the workers’ and women’s movement.
  
• No to laws which either oblige woman to wear, or not to wear, religious clothing. Women should have the legal right to dress as they please.
  
• For a ban on child marriage and forced marriage.
  
• End women’s dual burden through the socialisation of domestic labour. For free 24-hour childcare and a massive expansion of cheap, quality public canteens, communal kitchens, restaurants and laundries.

We can never achieve a society in which all human beings are equal if we do not show our determination to overcome sexual inequality in our own movements of resistance. We must back the right of women within the workers’ movement to meet independently to identify and challenge discrimination, the right of women to proportionate representation in leadership structures, and the right to establish formal women’s sections of parties and unions.

For an international working class women’s movement, to mobilise women in the fight for their rights, to strengthen the struggles of the workers everywhere, to link the fight against capital to the fight for the emancipation of women and a new social order based on real freedom and equality. The task of communist women is to build such a movement and fight to lead it along the path of social revolution.

End the Oppression of Lesbian, Gay and Non-Binary People

The historic inequality of the sexes, going back millennia to the emergence of class society and the state as an instrument of the exploiters over the exploited, led to repressive rules and customs regarding sexuality and masculine and feminine gender roles. With the emergence of capitalist society, heterosexual relations outside marriage or family or caste arrangement and homosexuality were severely sanctioned, including with capital punishment. People who transgressed binary sex or gender roles were stigmatised, bullied, driven to suicide or murdered. Only in a minority of countries do they have legal equality. In Africa, a wave of violence and repression has followed lesbian and gay demands for civil rights. Most religions sanction this hate-filled repression.

In so-called “liberal democracies” like the USA and Western Europe, trans people are in the crosshairs of reaction. The far right has been joined in these attacks by some supposedly left wing and “feminist” or even “Marxist” groups, who claim trans rights infringe women’s rights. The workers’ movement and the socialist youth must come to the defence of LGBTQIA people everywhere.

• Full rights for LGBTQIA people including full legal rights to civil partnership and marriage.

• Stop all harassment by the state, the churches, temples and mosques: respect for any kind of sexual orientation. All sexual activity between consenting adults should be a matter of personal choice.

• Outlaw all discrimination and hate crime against LGBTQIA people.

• For the legal right of trans people to live, dress and socialise as the gender/sex they identify themselves as belonging to.

• For the right of trans people to self-identify as their chosen gender, including the right to use public facilities (including public toilets etc.) in accordance with their gender identity.

• No discrimination in housing, in access to life insurance, in medical treatment, in access to work or to services.

• For the right of LGBTQIA people to bring up children.

• For the right of transgender people to have unrestricted access to gender affirming treatment under medical supervision, including the right of prepubescent transgender people to have unrestricted access to puberty blocking medication

• No bans on educating people in their sexual orientation! No intrusion into the sexual life of consenting adults. For free expression of all forms of sexuality and relations!

• For the right of LGBTQIA people to form caucuses to challenge oppression in the trade unions and workers’ parties.

For Young People’s Liberation

Capitalist crises hit youth hard because they are both the most insecure section of the workforce and the easiest to dismiss. In the years following the 2008 Great Recession, youth unemployment was double that of adults. There were fewer jobs for school leavers and cuts in state budgets for education that severely reduced the alternative of full time study in higher education. Impoverishing families increased the brutal treatment of children in the slums of the third world. It is certain that the next crisis will produce similar results.

At the same time, far from championing the youth, in many countries the trade union bureaucracy and the reformist apparatus of the workers’ parties restrict and repress the spirit and the rights of the youth. No wonder: youth have the potential to act as a powerful revolutionary force in all countries, filled with fighting spirit, free of many of the prejudices and conservative habits inculcated by bourgeois and reformist parties and unions. They are a vital element of the revolutionary vanguard. A Fifth International must allow them to learn from their own experience and lead their own struggles by encouraging the creation of a Revolutionary Youth International. We fight for:

• Jobs for all young people on wages and conditions equal to those of older workers.
• Scrap cheap labour training schemes, replace them with apprenticeships on full pay with guaranteed employment afterwards.
• End all child labour.
• Free education for all from infancy to the age of 16 and higher education and training to all who want it, at 16, on a guaranteed living grant. Cancel all student debt.
• For the right to vote at the age of 16 or working age if sooner.
• No outlawing of clothes, music styles or culture of the youth. Freedom of expression.
• Down with the phoney war on drugs. Legalise all drugs under a state monopoly to guarantee purity and remove the drug gangs, with education and health services to mitigate and eliminate addiction and unhealthy abuse.
• For youth centres and decent housing, funded by the state but under the democratic control of the youth who use them.
• Stop cuts in education. For massive investment in the public education system. Employ more teachers and pay them higher wages. Construction of more state schools. Nationalisation of private schools.
• Against all restrictions to free access and fees for schools and universities.
• No to all religious or private control of schooling and for secular, state-funded education.

As they develop their sex lives, young people face intolerance, repression and persecution. Sex education must be available in state schools, without religious or parental interference, so the youth can live their sexuality as it develops, according to their sexual orientation and their own choices.

• For free access to sexual and reproductive health services.
• No policing of young people’s relationships or sexuality! For free expression of sexuality for young people, free from intrusion by the bourgeois state, religious morality or family oppression!
• For strict laws against rape and sexual harassment, in the family, in the home, at schools and orphanages, at work. Protect children from abuse wherever it comes from, priests, teachers, parents.
• No control of the education system by the bourgeois state! Students, teachers and representatives of the working class movement themselves should fix curricula and manage schools democratically.

Fighting Racism – Defending Refugees and Migrants

Racism is one of the deepest and most pernicious of the many forms of oppression capitalism creates. Its roots are coiled deep in the history of capitalist development. The world market and trade grew under the domination of powerful capitalist states which plundered weaker powers. Slavery in America, the fruits of empire in Britain, Holland and France, wars of conquest by Germany and Japan, all required that the oppressors deny the very humanity of those they enslaved. The Africans, the Indians, the Chinese and South East Asians and the Jewish people all were presented by the new imperial powers as sub-humans unworthy of the rights they reluctantly extended to their own populations at home.

By systematically instilling the new ideology of racism, the imperial powers justified their crimes overseas, bound their own people to support for national military adventures, however criminal, inured their own workers to the rebellious spirit of their colonial brothers and sisters, and promoted deep divisions between the indigenous and migrant sections of the working class at home.

Today, after the great Civil Rights movement in the USA and the victorious national movements that expelled the colonialists from India, Algeria and Vietnam, and defeated apartheid in South Africa, the bourgeoisie of the imperialist powers swears by anti-racism. Yet, these same governments systematically discriminate against black, African, Asian and migrant communities in their home countries, impose racist immigration controls and subject racial minorities to the worst housing, the lowest pay and persistent harassment by police. The Black Lives Matter movement has drawn attention to the killings by armed cops of young African Americans and similar harassment of Asians and Latinos. In Europe, east and west, Roma and Muslim communities are the targets for police raids and forced deportations, incited by incessant vile racist propaganda by the millionaire media.

The EU’s so-called refugee crisis has seen Syrians, Afghans, Iraqis and Yemenis fleeing war, plus sub-Saharan Africans fleeing poverty and the effects of climate change, obstructed from crossing the Mediterranean and threatened with camps and deportation. The workers’ movement must integrate the migrant workers in a common struggle against racism and capitalism.

• Open the borders. Grant asylum rights for all those fleeing dictatorship, brutal wars, and oppression on the basis of race, sex or gender identity.
• Abolish controls which prevent the free movement or people seeking work and grant them full citizenship, welfare, housing and working rights.
• Down with all forms of discrimination against migrants.
• Equal pay and equal democratic rights irrespective of race, nationality, religion or citizenship. Full citizens’ rights for all migrants, including the right to vote!
• For the right of Muslim women to wear religious dress (veil, niqab, burka) if they wish, in all areas of public life, and for the right of women in Muslim countries and communities not to wear religious clothing, free from legal, clerical or family coercion.
• Full asylum rights for all those who flee war, oppression and poverty in their home countries.
• Fight racism and all forms of racial discrimination. Launch a fight against racism in all sectors of the labour movement. No to strikes against the employment of foreign or migrant labour.

The workers’ movement, especially trade unionists in the press and broadcast media, must mount a campaign, backed by direct action, to answer and halt racist hate propaganda.

National liberation and the permanent revolution

The words which the Third International added to that of the First, “Workers and oppressed peoples of all countries, unite”, reflect the fact that one of the greatest obstacles to achieving the international liberation of the working class is national oppression: the fact that the world system is based on the systematic oppression of most nations by a handful of others. Lasting unity between the majority classes of all peoples cannot be achieved where one nation oppresses another.

Today, whole nations, Palestinians, Kurds, Rohingyas, Uighurs, Balochis, Kashmiris, Chechens, Sri Lankan Tamils, the Tibetans and many others, are denied the right to self–determination. So, too, are many indigenous or tribal peoples in the Americas, in South East Asia, in Africa. They are subjected to ethnic cleansing, rounding up into concentration camps, the suppression of language and culture and even genocide.

The working classes, especially in imperialist states whose ruling classes are responsible for such oppression, must give fullest support and practical aid to the struggle of oppressed nations for their liberation.

• For the right of self-determination of oppressed nations, including their right to form a separate state when they so wish and their right to express their will, free of all coercion and intimidation.
• For the right of indigenous peoples to recover their lands, free of settlement aimed at making them a minority. Material compensation (homes, services, infrastructure) for what they have suffered, paid by the ruling classes that inflicted it.
• For equal rights and full citizenship for members of national minorities.
• Against single official languages. Equal rights for national minorities to use their languages in the schools, the courts, the media and in dealings with public administration. • For the right of immigrant communities to use their mother tongues in school.

In the semi-colonial countries, independent in name only and subject to political interference and economic control by the major imperialist powers, the masses have still not secured many of the basic rights established in the first capitalist countries in the English Revolution of the 1640s, the American Revolution of 1776 and the French Revolution of 1789. Equally, in the semi-colonial world today, many basic tasks of capitalist development such as national independence, agrarian revolution, democratic rights and the legal equality of women remain unfulfilled.

As a result, many national revolutionary forces today, influenced by bourgeois democratic thinking, and by the ‘stages theory’ of Stalin, still upheld by official Communist parties, believe that the solution to semi-colonial underdevelopment is to complete the democratic revolution and establish true national independence and a modern republic, through an alliance of all classes that oppose foreign domination and support democratic development.

This schema is the common strategy of disparate forces in the semi-colonial world, from Fatah and the PFLP in Palestine, through to the democratic movement in Iran, the Communist Party in the Philippines and the Maoists in Nepal. Yet, history has shown time and again that in such countries the national bourgeoisie is too weak, and too closely tied to foreign capital and the imperialist powers and corporations, to lead a classical bourgeois revolution to victory.

That task falls to the working class. To head the national revolution in alliance with the peasants, the workers will need to maintain strict independence from the capitalists and proceed not only to secure the fullest democratic rights but to overcome the limitations of capital; they cannot leave power in the hands of a bourgeois class inherently incapable of breaking with imperialism and able to secure its own privileges separate from the masses. They must press on directly to social revolution. This is the strategy of uninterrupted or permanent revolution.

The working class must champion the establishment of full democratic and national rights in oppressed and semi-colonial nations. The working class must come to the head of the fight against imperialist domination whether by debt, occupation, control by multinational corporations, or the imposition of client dictatorial regimes.

The working class organisations must appeal for the formation of an anti–imperialist united front of all popular classes while maintaining their own independence. No participation of the workers’ organisations in any bourgeois regime, however radical its anti-imperialist rhetoric might be.

• For councils of workers’ and peasants’ delegates.
• For a workers’ and peasants’ government to proceed from the democratic to the social revolution, socialising ownership and control of industry and agriculture, renouncing imperialist debts and spreading revolution to other countries, promoting regional federations of working class states and socialist development.

The struggle for power

For a workers’ and peasants’ government

Economic crises and wars and major upsurges in the class struggle can easily develop into pre- or actual revolutionary situations, in which the ruling class is divided and the reformist leaders lose control, posing to the fighting organs of the working class the need to find a governmental solution in its interests. Such social crises do not wait for the working class to create a mass revolutionary party ready to take power. In its absence, the working class still looks to its existing trade union and reformist party leaderships. When right wing parties are in power, reformist workers may not wait for the next regular election but try to kick them out by direct action, by general strikes or factory occupations, and thus try to bring “their own” parties to power.

Revolutionaries must warn that the reformist leaders, even if brought to power by mass action, will still do all they can to hand back power the capitalist class by demobilising the struggle and the most militant organisations it has created. However, to leave things at the level of denunciation of the reformists would be to abandon the method of our transitional programme, which is not an ultimatum and does not demand that workers must first abandon their existing organisations or leaders before they can fight for the vital demands and slogans of the hour, indeed before they fight to take the power.

In such circumstances, we call on all the existing workers’ leaders, unions as well as parties, to break with the capitalists and form a government to solve the crisis in the interests of the working class, holding itself accountable to the mass organisations of the working class. The workers’ organisations should demand that such a government take punitive economic measures against capitalist sabotage; expropriate their industries, banks etc., and recognise workers’ control of them.

If the working class seeks a government that will solve the economic, ecological and war threats we face, that government cannot rely on the existing organs of the bourgeois state, political, repressive or economic, since these are inextricably linked to, and staffed at their top levels by, the very class that is causing them and obstructing their solution. It must be based on the fighting organisations of the working class and be prepared to impose its programme of control and expropriation on big capital. This task in the end will require a different kind of state to even the most democratic capitalist one, or, as Lenin said, it will have to be a semi-state, working through the democracy, self-administration and self-defence of the producers.

To prevent inevitable sabotage by the civil service heads, police provocations, military or “constitutional” coups, we would need the creation and arming of a workers’ militia and the breaking of the control of the officer caste over the rank and file of the army.

As long as revolutionaries present a growing alternative to the reformists, such a workers’ government could act as a bridge to the revolutionary seizure of state power by the working class, with all power transferred into the hands of directly elected councils of recallable workers’ delegates (soviets) and the establishment of a revolutionary state.

• Break with the bourgeoisie: all workers’ parties to maintain strict independence and to refuse to enter coalition governments at local or national level with the parties of the capitalists.
• For a workers’ and peasants’ government: expropriate the capitalist class. Nationalise all banks, corporations, wholesale trade, transport, social, health, education and communication industries and services without compensation and under workers’ control.
• The nationalised banks should be merged into a single state bank under the democratic control of the working class, with decisions on investment and resources made democratically as a step towards the formation of a central plan under working class control and the development of a socialist economy.
• Introduce a monopoly of foreign trade and capital controls.
• A workers’ and peasants’ government should base itself on the councils (soviets) and armed militias of the workers, peasants and the urban poor.
• The full state power of the working class can only be achieved by the break-up of the armed power of the capitalist state, its military and bureaucratic apparatus, and its replacement by the rule of workers’ councils and the workers’ own militia.

The insurrection

Our goal is political power, power to change the world forever so that inequality, crises and wars, exploitation and classes become a distant memory. But revolutionaries alone do not make the revolution. Objective preconditions are needed; a deep economic, political and social crisis that the ruling class is unable to solve, so that it becomes divided itself. Subjective conditions too are needed: the working class and the lower middle class must be unwilling to continue to support the old order because of the suffering and chaos it has brought about. In these conditions, a pre-revolutionary or revolutionary situation comes about and, in such conditions, a substantial number of revolutionary vanguard fighters can win the majority of the working class to the perspective of revolution

Revolutionaries must recognise pre-revolutionary and revolutionary situations and in them be the most courageous protagonists of the overthrow of power. They must fight for leadership through determined and correct propaganda and agitation in mass movements, uprisings or civil wars and courageously show the way. For revolutionary organisations and parties, missing revolutionary situations, passive commenting, leading one’s own struggles separate from the masses, fear of the revolutionary masses or even subordination to non-revolutionary forces are unforgiveable centrist mistakes that led to the defeat of the workers again and again in the past.

The transfer of power from one class to another can only be accomplished by the insurrection of the exploited masses led by a revolutionary party of their vanguard fighters. Since the bourgeois state is an armed instrument of repression, its hold can only be broken by taking control of these forces away from the high command and officer corps, by winning over the rank and file soldiers and by forcibly dissolving those detachments that remain loyal to the counter-revolution.

We cannot take over the old state apparatus; we must destroy it and replace it with a completely new state, a state in which the working class, the peasants and the urban poor, administer society through councils of delegates elected in the enterprises, the barrios, the villages, the schools and universities. Time and again such bodies have arisen in revolutionary crises; from the Paris Commune, through the Russian soviets, the German Räte, Chilean cordones to Iranian shoras. They arise as organs of struggle, councils of action, but only clear revolutionary leadership can enable them to become organs of insurrection and then of a new working class state power.

As long as there remains an old ruling class capable of taking back power, the working class must do everything necessary to prevent it. Whilst a workers’ state will be the fullest and freest democracy for the formerly exploited classes, it will, at the same time, be a dictatorship against those who seek to restore capitalism. This, no more and no less, is what the dictatorship of the proletariat really means. It cannot be dispensed with until the most powerful ruling classes of our planet have been disarmed and dispossessed.

However, a workers’ state must not allow a caste of bureaucrats to exercise dictatorship over the workers, nor can it be a state in which only one party is allowed to exist. The working masses must be able to express their different views in different parties, ones that have to compete democratically to win and retain a majority in the workers’ councils. Nor must our socialism be one where a president, a caudillo or a lider maximo, concentrates all initiative in their hands and surrounds himself with a cult of the personality like a Stalin, a Mao, a Castro or a Chavez

The full state power of the working class can only be achieved by the break-up of the armed power of the capitalist state, its military and bureaucratic apparatus, and its replacement by the rule of workers’ councils and the workers’ own militia.

Our goal: world revolution and communism

The socialism for which we are fighting needs large-scale means of production in the hands of the working class who can democratically plan their development to meet human need and progressively obliterate inequality and social classes.

Under a revolutionary workers’ state, there will be no monstrous, bureaucratic plan, such as existed under Stalinism, where a caste of privileged bureaucrats tried to decide everything centrally. After the revolution, the working class will socialise the banks, the key financial institutions, the transport and utility companies and all the major industries. This will provide the foundations for a series of interlocking plans, integrated and coordinated from the local to the regional, to the national and the international level, each decided after debate by a workers’ and consumers’ democracy.

This is not a dream as the bourgeois propagandists claim. Modern technologies make it possible to discover and communicate needs and necessities around the globe in seconds and then coordinate production and transport to meet them. Every modern multinational corporation already works in this way. But, in contrast to the capitalist corporations, we will utilise the achievements of modern technologies not for the profit of a few but for the benefit of all humanity.

Artisans, shopkeepers and small-scale peasant farmers will be able to retain their family enterprises as private property, if they so wish. At the same time, they will be encouraged to free themselves from the insecurity of the market and cut throat competition by gearing their production to the society wide plan for economic development. The idea that socialism can be based on small scale private ownership or cooperatives is a backward-looking utopia that can only, over time, recreate the conditions of a market economy and encourage the accumulation of capital once again.

Nonetheless, the socialisation of small peasant property, small shops, and so on must happen gradually and voluntarily and not by force as under Stalin.

Whether revolution breaks out and triumphs first in a backward, semi-colonial or an advanced, imperialist country, it is vital that it swiftly spreads beyond that state’s borders. This is necessary both to defend what has been gained and to achieve the full potential of socialist society. Wherever the workers seize power, they will be attacked by foreign capitalist powers, especially the main imperialist powers. The most effective form of defence is therefore the spreading of the revolution to those countries through aiding the struggle for power by their working classes. Moreover, as the degeneration and ultimate collapse of the Soviet Union proved, it is impossible to complete the building socialism on a national level. “Socialism in One Country” is a reactionary utopia.

The productive forces developed by capitalism over centuries demand an international order. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the nation state itself has become a fetter on their further development. Therefore, the necessity for the strategy of Permanent Revolution flows not only from the need to combat continued resistance from the old ruling classes but from the fact that a rational and sustainable development of humanity’s productive forces can only be finally achieved on a global level.

Then, on the basis of a globally planned economy and a world federation of socialist republics, we will be moving towards a common level of wealth and complete equality of rights for the whole of humanity. As a result of this process, social classes and the repressive features of the state will gradually die out – achieving what Marx, Engels and Lenin called communism. But first we must begin. In country after country, wracked by the historic crisis of the system, we must hurl capitalism into the abyss. World Revolution, and nothing less, is the task of the coming Fifth International.

• Workers and oppressed people of the world – unite!

• Forward to a new, a Fifth International!

A revolutionary party and International

It was Karl Marx who first asserted that the emancipation of the working class from capitalist domination was the task of the working class itself and would never be achieved by “saviours from on high”. Unlike the anarchists, however, he did not counterpose a mystique of “self-activity” or “socialism from below” to political action, whether that was “direct” or “electoral” to the need to build a working class party independent of all capitalist parties or personalities. Such a party, he stressed, must be internationalist, as expressed in the culminating slogan from the Communist Manifesto and the Inaugural Address of the First International, Workers of all countries, unite.

It must unite revolutionary theory with practice. Starting from recognising the laws of motion of capitalism, the nature of exploitation, the recurrence of economic, social and political crises, which create the conditions for the of the liberation not only of the workers but of all the oppressed. Its theory exists to be implemented and to change the world. In turn, such a party’s practice enriches and develops its theory.

It was the Russian revolutionary, Lenin, who distilled these lessons into a practical guide for building a revolutionary party, one whose task was to lead the working class in all its major battles towards an assault on the capitalist state and its sophisticated instruments of repression and deception both in society at large and within the workers’ movements itself, (reformist parties, union bureaucracy). The model of the party that Lenin developed, Bolshevism, cannot be treated as a ready-made formula that can be imposed on any situation; what a revolutionary party looks like will change and adapt according to the historical and national conditions.

However, there are fundamental principles that are vital and must form the foundations of any effective revolutionary party. These were outlined first in Lenin’s classic work, What Is To Be Done? This included the statement, still highly controversial to this day: “Class political consciousness can only be brought to the working class from without, that is only from outside the economic struggle”. This does not deny that class consciousness often has its embryo in day-to-day struggles against the bosses and their state under capitalism, nor does it mean that the working class cannot emancipate itself, that workers must be led by “outsiders”, by an elite of middle class intellectuals or “professional revolutionaries”, misunderstood as a party bureaucracy. It means quite simply that struggles over wages and conditions, over economic issues alone; waged by trade unions alone, will not develop spontaneously into a struggle for socialism; will not create automatically a revolutionary socialist consciousness.

The unions’ ‘spontaneous’ outlook starts from that of the separate trade or occupation and at a certain point these divisions tend to obstruct a class wide outlook. Secondly, workers are always subjected to powerful influences “from outside”, that is, from a society where the ruling ideas are those of the ruling class. This is achieved by ceaseless propaganda from the schools, the media, churches, mosques, temples, all stressing that capitalism is the only possible system.

This barrage of propaganda, aimed at keeping the workers divided and dominated by ruling class ideas, can only be combated by the ideas of socialism and revolution – and these come “from outside” the sphere of pure and simple trade unionism. They can only be systematically created and spread by a political party whose goal is to transform all fragmented and sectional struggles into a political struggle which identifies capitalism as the enemy. Of course, this party cannot stand “outside” the struggles of the working class. In this respect it has to be radically different from the reformist parliamentary parties, which leave the struggle in the workplace to the trade unions or, rather, to their officials, and limit politics largely to elections and whose manifestos limit their objectives to what the leaders think is popular and will win them “power”, meaning governmental office within the straitjacket of the capitalist state.

For a Leninist party, its members must be the most tireless and self-sacrificing activists, able to explain not just the necessity of the current struggles but that capitalism lies at the root not only of low pay, unemployment and austerity, but also of racism, sexism and war. They must be found in the most dangerous places of the class struggle. They must earn the free recognition of their fellow workers as the most reliable leaders, the vanguard, of the class struggle.

Lenin’s idea is that the party members must be cadres, a military analogy referring to the network of NCOs and field officers of an army. They must be professional revolutionaries, not because they are paid officials, but because they are not amateurs, people who devote only a few spare evenings to politics, rather, they make it the centre of their lives. The great majority of such people must be workers if they are to be leaders in the class struggle. A revolutionary party will enormously stimulate the growth of a mass working class movement with which it would be indissolubly fused. That was what the Bolshevik Party was like and why it was able to turn the “spontaneous” revolution of February 1917 into the conscious seizure of power by the workers’ councils in October. These key principles of revolutionary politics and programme and internationalism are as relevant today as when Lenin developed them and it is the burning task of revolutionary socialists to put them into practice in the huge battles we face today.

Unfortunately, during the great mass struggles of 2009-2015 many young fighters, having seen that the mass Labour, Social Democratic and Communist parties were generally an obstacle to struggle, drew the conclusion that political parties as such could not take the struggle forward. They counterposed to them spontaneous social movements, such as the occupation of Cairo’s Tahrir Square, New York’s Wall Street, Madrid’s Puerta del Sol or Athens’ Syntagma Square. The answer, they thought, was to limit themselves to a direct mass democracy. But life proved that the democracy of a single place or a short moment in time, even if it can sometimes lead to the overthrow of governments or dictators, cannot replace them with the power of ordinary working people, of the exploited and repressed. Such a transfer of real power within society will not happen unless there emerges a political alternative to the old parties with the determination and capacity to carry this out.

A revolutionary party must break with the reformism of the old left. Its own members must democratically control it. Its role is not primarily to win elections and therefore it should not be controlled by its MPs and local councillors, lording it over the membership, making up their own policies and pocketing top salaries and expenses for doing so. Unlike the capitalist parties, the revolutionary party must not make big promises and then, in power, do what the bosses and the bankers dictate. Its main task is to win the support of millions through leading them into action. Elections should be used to publicise its programme for mass action, to put tribunes of the people in the councils and assemblies to denounce the capitalists’ representatives to their faces but, above all, to “speak out of the window” to the masses. Their task is not to pander to ideas, claimed to be popular but in fact dictated by the millionaire media. When it wins MPs and councillors, these must not control the party but be under its control.

Such a revolutionary party today could have a huge impact within the movements of resistance, arguing for tactics to take the movement forward, providing a voice for all the exploited and oppressed, fighting racism, sexism and imperialist wars as well as exploitation and poverty. It is the role of a revolutionary party to throw itself into every movement, whether for higher wages or more democracy, for justice for the nationally, racially or gender-oppressed, promoting the fight for a united front of struggle in each case, whilst patiently explaining its politics and programme and winning the best fighters to its ranks. In the trade unions, such a party would organise the rank and file to take the lead. While the trade union leaders are dragging their feet about whether to call effective action to challenge the cuts, it could prepare workers to coordinate a general strike, with or without the trade union leaders. Only with a record of such principled struggles will a revolutionary party worthy of the name be ready for a revolutionary situation in which capitalism can be overthrown.

For a new, Fifth, International!

The work of building new revolutionary parties in every country must be integrally linked to the struggle for a new International from the very outset. The objective necessity dictating this are the global answers needed to combat war, capitalist crisis and climate catastrophe. The programme for combatting these and many other associated dangers, must be based on international action and international organisation to fight for it. This organisation is a Fifth International, continuing the achievements of the First, Second Third and Fourth Internationals before their collapse and degeneration and building on their programmes and practice.

It is a completely false idea that before an International can begin its existence, first of all a number of strong national parties must exist, each with well-established roots in “their own” working class. This ignores the fact that all organisations, if built in isolation from one another, will tend to adopt policies which reflect the limits of their specific milieus and run the danger of succumbing to the pressures and distortions of a national character. Marx’s slogan – workers of all countries, unite – is no rhetorical flourish.

This goal for the parties of the working class must be linked to encouraging all the existing mass organisations of the exploited and the oppressed, to follow the same course, starting from building organised permanent links of solidarity and common action with their peers around the world. Building a new International is not a task confined to small revolutionary propaganda groups, nor does it have to wait for their unification or the resolution of their strategic and tactical differences, important as this might be.

The task of building a successor to the four historic Internationals needs to be posed to the mass workers’ vanguard, those involved in leading struggles today. It is possible that the layer of worker militants and the activists of the many movements of the socially, racially, or sexually oppressed, not dominated by bourgeois leaderships, can create an international gathering or forum where this task can begin in much the same way it did with the International Workingmen’s Association (the First International) or as the so-called anti-capitalist movement did around the turn of the century.

But this does not preclude valuable work being performed by small tendencies, engaging in propaganda and limited engagement in the class struggle, building international organisations and developing common programmes. Trotsky believed that even during the earliest pre-party stages, revolutionary communists must seek out co-thinkers across the globe, and establish the strategy, tactics and organisational foundations for a “world party of socialist revolution”. Thus, on the eve of the Second World War, he and his co-thinkers founded the Fourth International. Because of adverse objective conditions – the second world war and the survival and expansion of both bourgeois democracy and the Russian degenerated workers’ states, Stalinism and Social Democracy exerted huge pressure on the tiny nuclei of cadres and the Fourth international underwent a centrist degeneration and fragmentation long before it could attain fusion with mass revolutionary vanguard forces.

Nevertheless, the Trotskyist tradition in its various splinters has often preserved various important principles of its founder, within a variety of international tendencies. Their mistake was and is either to believe that they, with their tiny forces, still represented the Fourth International of Trotsky, or that either by simple growth, or by reunifying some of all of its degenerate fragments, a new International could be founded. It is a similar error to believe that small propaganda societies numbering dozens, or even thousands, are in reality revolutionary parties.

The revolution of the 21st century and a renewed class conscious workers’ movement, politically independent of all bourgeois forces, must build from the beginning on the principle of internationalism, that is, address in the here and now the task of building a new, proletarian international organisation of struggle.

The struggle against the destruction of the natural conditions of life of humanity, the internationalisation of production, the attacks on the freedom of movement of refugees and migrants, the threat of trade wars and hot wars between rival imperialist blocs, to mention only some of the headlines of our agenda, require coordinated common struggle across frontiers and revolutionary changes on a global scale. A retreat to national “solutions” can only strengthen reaction, indeed is itself an expression of the strengthening of reaction.

At the beginning of the 21st century, the anti-globalisation movement developed forums of exchange and at its peak set in motion, or linked, mass actions, including demonstrations by millions against the Iraq war. Some of its leading figures raised the possibility of a Fifth International only to drop it as a new crisis, the Great Recession, loomed on the horizon. In the end it failed, however, because its reformist and petty bourgeois leadership did not want to fight in nationally anchored mass organisations, be they trade unions or political parties, for binding international decisions.

The Great Recession and the devastating effects of the crisis, the mass movements of the Arab Spring, the struggles in Greece and the occupation of squares once again placed the need for an International on the agenda. But here, too, the left failed on a global and continental level. Thus, the European reformist left, but also the radical and anti-capitalist left, completely failed in the task of uniting the resistance against austerity throughout Europe. It proved incapable of even developing a rudimentary European programme of action against crisis and capitalism. Despite their populist character, Chavismo and the Bolivarian movement had temporarily proclaimed the common struggle in Latin America and beyond. But this turned out to be a fairy tale.

After the beginning of a new, global period of crisis, after the biggest recession since the Second World War, the reformist workers’ movement withdrew to the national terrain. Its “internationalism” is essentially limited to Sunday speeches. This corresponds to the position of the workers’ bureaucracy, whose “bargaining power” is tied to its national capitalist class, therefore lagging behind the internationalisation of capital itself.

Even the “radical”, left reformist, centrist, anarchist or libertarian left today seeks its salvation in the concentration on the national terrain. Even most “international organisations” today find it impossible to base their politics on an international programme, a common strategy and tactics. Either they are nationally directed sects, around which other sections orbit like satellites, or they are increasingly just loose networks that refuse to take binding decisions. They are thus throwing overboard all the lessons not only of the failure of the anti-globalisation movement, but also of the degeneration of the Second and Third Internationals.

This means that the majority of the global left takes a politically passive, if not a regressive, stance towards the spontaneous tendencies towards the formation of international movements. In recent years, international campaigns and movements that spontaneously spread beyond national borders; the Me Too women’s movement, against sexist attacks; the fight against climate change and the threat the natural basis of life; the refugee movements that challenged the border regimes of the EU and the USA; all posed the international question.

Then there have been approaches to cross-border coordination of workers’ struggles; solidarity movements against imperialist interventions and reactionary coup attempts. All these mobilisations represent approaches to trans-national, transcontinental struggles, and coordinated actions. However, they do not yet go beyond the “networking” of independent national campaigns, all the more they do not develop an international programme for coordinated action. However, this is not the fault of the activists who set them in motion. It is above all the failure of the organised left.

Many of them have drawn a fundamentally wrong conclusion from the defeats; that international struggle and the construction of an International cannot be on the agenda today, that larger organisations and movements must first be built and developed on a national scale. Only on this basis would cross-border coordination of struggles and organisation be possible and meaningful. This platonic relationship to the international class struggle represents a fundamental political problem of our period, it is itself an expression of a global shift to the right, a strengthening of nationalism and so the national-centred politics exacerbates the problem.

Revolutionary Marxists, internationalists and anti-capitalists must fight this reactionary tendency irreconcilably. They must actively encourage the spontaneous internationalist tendencies among the workers, the women’s movement, the youth, the struggles against imperialism and environmental destruction. Only in this way will it be possible to win these activists and fighters for a revolutionary programme. Just as revolutionaries have to fight for the transformation of the trade unions on an international level, so they have to work for trans-national action conferences and democratically accountable coordination of the struggle. The social forums, which developed at the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st century, can serve as a model without repeating their weaknesses, the lack of binding decision-making and joint action.

In the emerging global movements of the oppressed, as well as in national upheavals, revolutionaries should emphasise the need for a new International. The danger we now face of an imperialist war makes this even more necessary. While we advocate a revolutionary programme from the beginning, we can’t make approval of it a precondition for common international structures of struggle and real steps towards building a new mass International. In order to be able to stand up effectively and purposefully for such a perspective, revolutionaries themselves must fight on the basis of a common programme of transitional demands, a programme of world socialist revolution. We call upon all comrades, all socialist, communist, Trotskyist currents who agree with such a perspective, to join in seeking unity on an international programme for a revolutionary response to the oncoming attacks.

LFI Congress, 25 June 2023