Call for the First International Conference
of the League for the Fourth International

The following is excerpted from the Call for the First International Conference of the League for the Fourth International.

The First International Conference of the League for the Fourth International is being held 100 years after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution that established a republic of soviets – the first workers state in history. At the outset of the 1990s, the demise of the Soviet Union – undermined and betrayed by the Stalinist bureaucracy and ultimately destroyed by imperialist-led counterrevolution – led the triumphant bourgeoisie to trumpet the “death of communism.” But genuine Trotskyists, who had stood at their posts defending the bureaucratically degenerated workers state against counterrevolution from within and without, fought the wave of defeatism that engulfed the left. Meanwhile, the U.S.-dominated “New World Order” failed to establish an era of stability and prosperity. Instead, it has led to a quarter-century of imperialist war without end, rampant nationalist and communal slaughter, and the onset of a new worldwide capitalist economic depression that continues today. Today that “order” is coming apart at the seams.

Following the U.S.’ humiliating defeat in Vietnam in 1975 and the ensuing sharp economic crisis, the capitalist rulers launched a broad class offensive aimed at obliterating the gains of the working class, from the unions to the Soviet Union. Upon achieving victory by sweeping away the bureaucratically degenerated and deformed workers states of the USSR and East Europe, the bourgeoisie intensified its onslaught, driving down wages, destroying industrial jobs, ripping up social programs and privatizing vital services. The financial crisis of 2007-08 shook the ruling classes to the core, but their response was to intensify the “free market/free trade” economic policies that triggered the crisis, seeking to save their skins by further impoverishing the working masses. So far, the bosses have been winning this “one-sided class war.”

Nevertheless, this inevitably provoked resistance on the part of the workers and oppressed: repeated struggles in France in the 2000s over economic “reforms” gutting labor rights; general strikes in Greece beginning in 2010 against anti-worker “austerity” policies dictated by Frankfurt bankers and Brussels bureaucrats; then in 2011 there was the “Arab Spring” sparked by unemployed youth in North Africa, a near-general strike in Wisconsin (U.S.A.) against union-busting legislation, the taking of city squares by outraged petty-bourgeois youth (the indignados) in Southern Europe, and the Occupy Wall Street movement that swept across the United States. In 2014 there was the explosion of outrage over racist police murder in the U.S. that became known as the Black Lives Matter movement. Yet all these movements ended in defeat.

In Latin America, a “pink wave” of populist and reformist left parties came to power in the early 2000s by heading off explosive struggles of workers and the oppressed (metal workers in Brazil, miners in Bolivia, Indians in Ecuador). Buoyed by a surge of raw materials prices they were able to enact welfare programs and stay in office for a decade and a half, but are now being driven out as commodity prices fall. In Brazil, the Workers Party (PT) in office sank in the mire of pervasive political corruption, eventually being run out by ultra-corrupt hard-line capitalist reactionaries determined to ram through anti-labor measures that PT governments were only able to implement half-way. In Mexico, resistance to privatizing “reforms” reached a high point with struggles led by combative CNTE teachers unions in 2006, 2013 and 2016, threatening to break the corporatist straitjacket that has held Mexican workers in thrall for decades. But insurgent union leaders failed to mobilize the millions-strong industrial proletariat nationally.

Over four decades, from the 1970s to today, the key reason the rapacious imperialists have been able to wage their devastating offensive has been the absence of a revolutionary leadership of the working class, the only social force with the power to defeat the capitalist exploiters. In the 1980s, pro-capitalist Labour leaders in Britain sacrificed striking coal miners to union-buster Thatcher, and then adopted her “neo-liberal” policies. Stalinist bureaucrats from Moscow to Berlin vainly sought “peaceful coexistence” with the Cold Warriors in Washington and Bonn who were hell-bent on fostering counterrevolution. Today, reformist union leaders in Europe forlornly try to resuscitate a capitalist “welfare state” that is dead and gone forever. In the U.S., fighters against racist repression and attacks on immigrants’ and women’s rights are sucked back into the Democratic Party in the guise of “resistance” to the racist, women-hating, immigrant-bashing president Donald Trump.

As Trotsky wrote in the Transitional Program, the founding document of the Fourth International: “The historical crisis of mankind is reduced to the crisis of the revolutionary leadership.” We underlined the continued validity of this fundamental tenet of Trotskyism in the founding statement of the Internationalist Group/U.S. (1996) and the Declaration of the League for the Fourth International (1998). It is repeatedly confirmed as potentially revolutionary crises have broken out the world over but have gone nowhere, precisely because there has been no recognized leadership with the program and determination to lead the struggle to socialist revolution. Yet this thesis, which was the very reason for proclaiming the FI and for building Trotskyist parties, is rejected by a myriad of pseudo-Trotskyists – from the Morenoites, Mandelites, Lambertistes and Grantites to the latter-day Spartacist tendency.

Today, after a decade of continuing economic crisis, the consequences are being felt in full-blown political crises from Europe to the U.S. Following the paralysis and defeat of often explosive but relatively short-lived struggles of the oppressed, there has been an upsurge of bourgeois populist electoral movements (Tsipras’ SYRIZA in Greece, Democrat Bernie Sanders in the U.S.) and the reformist social-democrat Jeremy Corbyn in British Labour, as the ruling class seeks to channel discontent into the dead-end of parliamentary politics. In the U.S. this has led to a dramatic growth of the Democratic Socialists of America, which is channeling youth back to the imperialist Democratic Party. These movements have not set back the capitalist anti-working-class onslaught one iota. Instead, “business as usual” politics have been disrupted by the surge of ultra-rightist racist and outright fascist forces feeding off the failure of the left to stem the deepening impoverishment of the working class and middle-class sectors.

The British vote to leave the European Union (“Brexit”) in June 2016 sent shock waves through the imperialist “establishment,” followed by the electoral shock of the unexpected election of Donald Trump as U.S. president in November. These protest votes included significant sectors of white workers and lower-middle class hurting from falling wages and mass unemployment. Yet while the Democrats’ stranglehold on labor dating back to the 1930s has been cracked, in the name of “resistance” to Trump the opportunist left would lead workers back to that party of war, poverty and racism. “Mainstream” bourgeois politicians breathed a collective sigh of relief when Dutch far-right immigrant-basher Geert Wilders and the French fascist National Front were defeated at the polls in the spring of 2017, failing to match their scores in opinion polls. But the racist ultra-right continues to have significant support, and the explosion of fascist provocation and murder in the United States poses acute dangers for the workers and oppressed in the imperialist centers.

As Trotsky emphasized in his writings in the 1930s, the capitalists resort to use of fascists when they feel that the normal workings of the bourgeois “democratic” parliamentary system are inadequate to maintaining their class rule. Fascism can take different forms in different places, but the focal point is their extra-parliamentary action to smash opposition. In the U.S., where the fascists have long been a marginal phenomenon, there is no radicalized working class contending for power. However, the fascists are increasingly acting as auxiliaries for the police in putting down opposition to racist repression. As the U.S. has been at war constantly for 25 years, this has produced a layer of professional (and even pathological) killers eager to put their skills to use. But the central threat to workers and the oppressed remains the state power, not fascist gangs, and that state power has been immensely bolstered by the Democrats during the Obama years.

The expansion of paramilitary policing aimed at putting down internal unrest was highlighted by the huge military arsenal deployed against protests of African Americans over racist police murder in Ferguson, Missouri (2014) and Baltimore, Maryland (2015), and of Sioux Indians in Standing Rock, North Dakota (2016). This phenomenon of preparation for “preventive” internal war is not limited to the United States, as shown by the massive repression against protests of the G20 Summit in early July (2017) in Hamburg, Germany. As we wrote about this exercise in urban counterinsurgency, while hard-fisted bankers from London and Frankfurt to Wall Street can bring wayward populist politicians to heel and can use the state apparatus to keep mavericks like Trump in line, the imperialist rulers feel the need “to have the police/military apparatus at the ready to crush internal unrest, which they know is coming” (see “G20 Summit Police State Terror in Hamburg,” The Internationalist, July 2017).

At bottom, the crisis of bourgeois politics extending from the U.S. to Europe reflects the coming apart of the U.S.-dominated “post-Soviet” imperialist world order, or more accurately disorder. While American capitalism sought to ratchet up the profit rate by sending industry off-shore, notably through “free trade” pacts, this has diminished its economic clout vis-à-vis rival powers. Instead, Washington requires unquestioned military domination to enforce its imperialist ascendency. This is behind the obsession with Russia on the part of the Democratic Party and the military/intelligence agencies. Weakened economically, they cannot tolerate any challenge to U.S. military domination, and Russia has dared to resist the imperialists in Ukraine, Syria and elsewhere. At the same time, official Washington (under Obama and Trump) has militarily provoked China and is now threatening “preventive war” against North Korea, as the generals and imperialist politicians target the remaining deformed workers states.

An important consequence of the post-Soviet imperialist-sponsored wars without end – from the Middle East, Central Asia and North Africa to Central America – has been a burgeoning refugee crisis. The number of refugees and asylum-seekers is at an all-time high: 22.5 million overall, with almost 3.5 million new refugees in the last year alone. This has fueled increasing anti-immigrant hysteria and crackdowns in the imperialist countries, epitomized by Donald Trump’s call to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border and to exclude Muslim refugees and immigrants. While rejecting utopian liberal calls for “open borders,” the LFI opposes all racist immigration laws and policies and demands that those fleeing war, rampant violence and persecution by the imperialists and their puppet regimes, from Syrian refugees to Central American moms and kids, be allowed to enter. We fight for full citizenship rights for all immigrants, not only in the imperialist countries but also in countries like Mexico and Brazil.

As the imperialist rulers aggressively crack down on dissent, curtailing civil liberties and fostering the growth of far-right and fascist forces, the response of the misleaders of labor and the bulk of the reformist pseudo-socialist left has been to seek to return to the status quo ante, to go back to the “welfare state” capitalism of yesteryear. They seek to make popular-front political blocs with “progressive” capitalist forces calling for “fair trade” instead of “free trade.” They build “anti-war” alliances with “dovish” bourgeois politicians, as if the imperialist predators could somehow turn into peaceful lambs. But these are not economic and military policies to be adopted or discarded at will – they are the necessary expression of a putrefying system. The issue is not “neo-liberalism” but capitalism. It’s not “globalization” but imperialism. And the answer is not yearning for a new era of impossible national reformism, it is to fight for socialist revolution. And that requires above all forging a revolutionary, Leninist-Trotskyist party to lead that fight.

Starting out with a handful of cadres expelled from the degenerating International Communist League, the League for the Fourth International has upheld the revolutionary banner of authentic Trotskyism, going against the stream in the heyday of bourgeois triumphalism. We have withstood the pressures of an ascendant popular front in Brazil, and actively intervened in militant union and student struggles in Mexico. We have uniquely cohered a solid core of immigrant worker cadres in the U.S. and intervened in immigrants’ rights and labor struggles, building transitional organizations including Class Struggle Education Workers, Class Struggle Workers – Portland and Trabajadores Internacionales Clasistas. Fusing Marxist study with intervention in the class struggle, we have won a layer of youth, leading to the recent formation of the Revolutionary Internationalist Youth. And we have regrouped with comrades breaking from left social democracy and the now-moribund, anti-Trotskyist ICL.

Over the years, the intervention of the sections of the LFI in the class struggle has gained some important victories, including sparking workers strikes for the freedom of class war prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal, in Brazil and the U.S. in 1999 and the formation of worker-student defense guards during the strike at the National University of Mexico in 1999-2000, as well as playing an important role in the strike by U.S. workers against a U.S. imperialist war, shutting down all U.S. West Coast ports on May Day 2008.¹ We have contributed to victories in unionizing immigrant workers in New York. In the face of the anti-immigrant offensive in Europe and the U.S., both under Obama (with his record-breaking 5+ million deportations) and now intensified under Trump, we have uniquely fought for workers actions to stop attacks on immigrants and deportations. Our West Coast comrades sparked labor actions against racist police terror in 2015, for gay rights in 2016 and the important Portland Labor Against the Fascists mobilization of workers from 14 unions this past June, the first significant workers action against the race-haters and immigrant-bashers in the U.S. in decades.

We have also carried out coordinated international campaigns involving the sections of the LFI, including a tri-national (Brazil, Mexico and U.S.) day of action in support of striking Mexican teachers in August 2016, and demonstrations in the same three countries in November 2016 opposing the exclusion of Haitians from the U.S. At the same time, these campaigns and the significant but limited victories we have achieved have placed tremendous pressures on our small forces, so that on a number of occasions we have been working close to the limits of our capabilities. In building fighting propaganda groups, we face the challenge of developing newly recruited young militants into seasoned Trotskyist cadres. We are pushing to regularize the frequency of our party presses, which are key to expanding beyond our base and winning potential cadres on a broader scale. As we intervene in struggles for immigrants’, women’s, labor and black rights, we will face situations requiring intransigent defense of the Bolshevik program and effective tactical responses based on that program in often difficult circumstances.

The overall rightward movement of the left following the demise of the Soviet Union has meant that there has been a relative dearth of centrist opponents in recent years, and even reformists have been stymied. This may change as the continuing economic crisis and sharp political crises around the capitalist world foster resistance. One important opponent, both in Latin America and Europe and to a lesser extent in the United States, is the Argentina-based Fracción Trotskista. The FT poses as having broken with the politics of its progenitor, the late Nahuel Moreno, but in fact continues the “democratist” program of latter-day Morenoism, particularly with its ubiquitous calls for “constituent assemblies” rather than fighting for socialist revolution. The real policies of the right-centrist FT do not go beyond social-democratic, Stalinophobic reformism. A key task for the LFI will be producing substantial material tracing the trajectory of and exposing the anti-revolutionary politics of these neo-Morenoites.

As our conference approaches, a dramatic new development is the sharp crisis that has engulfed the International Communist League (the Spartacist tendency) from which the founding cadres of the League for the Fourth International were expelled in 1996-98. After denouncing the LFI for characterizing the ICL’s recent policies on immigrants and refugees as social-chauvinist, the latter has now declared that its politics on the national question for the last four decades have been chauvinist. This is the culmination of years of step-by-step abandonment of key Trotskyist positions. The criticism of many of their leading cadres for U.S. chauvinism is true enough. But the political program they denounce is Bolshevik-Leninist proletarian internationalism, which the ICL has now abandoned in embracing bourgeois nationalism. This accompanies a purge of a whole layer of long-time leaders, whom they vilify in print, in favor of a bunch of careerists with little grounding in Marxism. While the ICL document was reportedly adopted unanimously, and the purged cadres have been corrupted by two decades of bureaucratic purges, rejection of Trotskyist politics and outright betrayals (the ICL’s support for the U.S. invasion of Haiti), this startling turn may shake loose some elements in and around this tendency which once was the voice of revolutionary Trotskyism.

As Trotsky noted in his Transitional Program, the Fourth International arose out of the greatest defeats in history. The League for the Fourth International was founded to uphold revolutionary Trotskyism in the face of the defeatism that swept through the ostensibly socialist left in the wake of a world historic defeat, the fall of the Soviet Union. Like all revisionism, that defeatism was based on a loss of confidence in the revolutionary capacity of the proletariat. Over this period, the workers and oppressed have given ample proof of their will and capacity to struggle. What they urgently require, and what the most conscious elements demand, is revolutionary leadership. Responding to that demand is the central challenge the LFI faces.

As we undertake the First International Conference of the League for the Fourth International, we are guided by the rules of Trotsky’s Fourth International: “To face reality squarely; not to seek the line of least resistance; to call things by their right names; to speak the truth to the masses, no matter how bitter it may be; not to fear obstacles; to be true in little things as in big ones; to base one’s program on the logic of the class struggle; to be bold when the hour for action arrives.”

Executive Committee,
League for the Fourth International
17 September 2017