FROM RESISTANCE TO
REVOLUTION


Manifesto for a Fifth International



 


The Great Crisis and the global
  resistance



Two decades of US–dominated
  globalisation brought the world to the deepest and most destructive economic
  crisis since the Second World War. Every nation was hit. First the credit
  system was paralysed. Then world trade and production slumped. Panicked by the
  prospect of complete economic meltdown, the leaders of the most powerful
  nations agreed to huge state bailouts of bankrupt banks that were deemed too
  big to fail, and launched massive stimulus packages to avoid the collapse of
  key industries. From George W. Bush to Barack Obama, from Angela Merkel to
  Nicolas Sarkozy, from Hu Jintao to Vladimir Putin, from the acolytes of Milton
  Friedman to the apostles of John Maynard Keynes, the response was the same –
spend billions, trillions, to rescue the system... and recoup the losses
later.



State debts soared to unprecedented
levels. US and UK deficits reached 13.9 and 11.6 per cent of GDP. In the
Eurozone, borrowings spiralled to twice or three times the supposed limit on
budget deficits of 3 per cent of GDP. On the bond markets, the billionaires who
lend money to nations flexed their muscles, demanding evidence that governments
would enforce policies that guaranteed repayment with handsome profits. This
“sovereign debt crisis” has crystallised into a series of huge austerity
programmes as the ruling class tries to make the working class pay for the
crisis through public sector job losses, tax increases, wages and pension
freezes, and savage cuts in welfare provision.



While the West and Japan sink into
stagnation, the low–wage and less technically advanced economies of India and
China are growing massively. Far from stabilising the system, they are expanding
capitalism’s contradictions on a world scale.


At the geostrategic level, they emerge
as powerful potential rivals to the dominant imperialist states. Economically,
China holds billions in US bonds, while the USA demands that its Chinese
creditor raise the value of the Yuan to help boost US exports, heightening the
threat of a global currency war.



Above all, the massive scale of
  capitalist development in the East is creating millions of new industrial
  workers, adding a new dynamic to the international class struggle. The Asian
  proletariat will play a decisive role in the world revolution in the 21st
  century.



The credit crunch, recession and debt
time–bomb of 2008–2010 opened a new historic crisis for the capitalist system as
a whole, a period in which intense struggles between the classes will give rise
to revolutionary crises, counter–revolutions, instability and conflicts between
rival powers. This is not just a typical downswing of the industrial cycle, one
of the ‘ordinary’ ups and downs of the system. Its roots lie in the system’s
tendency to over–accumulation of capital. Decades of declining rates of profit
reduced the opportunities for profitable investment in production in the
imperialist heartlands. Instead, major corporations and financial institutions
turned towards speculative investment on stock exchanges, currency markets and
in the derivatives trade where millions could be ‘made’ at the click of a mouse
button. More generally, in the globalisation years of 1992 to 2006, the ruling
class tried to solve the problem with cheap credit and the creation of a vast
bubble of fictitious capital in the form of consumer and household debt and all
sorts of rarefied securities and derivatives. It didn’t work. In fact the only
lasting ‘solution’ for the capitalists is to destroy the ‘excess’ capital – and
this is the inner meaning of the financial crisis and the austerity that has
followed it. In the period ahead, the overall curve of humanity’s development
will be downward until either the capitalists inflict a huge defeat on the
working class around the world, laying waste to productive capacity and plunging
millions into poverty, or capitalism is itself overthrown. When we add to this
the increasing danger of wars between the great powers for the redivision of the
world, and the mounting risk of large–scale climate disasters, it is no
exaggeration to say that unless capitalism is overthrown, eventually
civilisation will be plunged into barbarism.



The huge bank bailouts have not solved
the root causes of the crisis; rather they have ensured even more bubbles and
subsequent crashes. The continued weakness of the credit system and the huge
state debt means that the next recovery will be shallow and unstable, and
austerity will dampen economic activity. Bankruptcies, factory closures and mass
unemployment are continuing, exhibiting a profound trend to stagnation and
  outright decay of the productive forces in the imperialist centres. In the
  years and decades ahead, further economic shocks are a certainty, recessions
  will be sharp and deep and a long period of prosperity spanning several cycles
  is ruled out. As the major powers and their corporations are forced to struggle
  ever more aggressively with one another over the dwindling spoils, we can
  already see them manoeuvring to re–divide the world’s markets, raw materials
  and labour supply, raising again the spectre of new wars between rival
  commercial powers.



This opening of a new historic crisis of
the capitalist system comes at a time when the effects of the blind exploitation
of humanity’s natural environment have reached a critical point. Unless decisive
measures are taken by all the industrially developed and developing economies,
extreme climate events; prolonged droughts, disastrous flooding, melting of the
ice caps, the expansion of deserts, will render large areas of the globe
infertile and uninhabitable, unleashing famines and epidemics. The fact that
production for profit is now in direct conflict with nature is a mighty proof
that capitalism is a decaying and destructive system which must be transcended
to assure a future for humanity. The conflict between the imperialist powers for
resources and markets means that the idea of a“green” capitalist solution to the
threat of climate catastrophe is a utopia. To save the planet we must abolish
capitalism.



As the economy staggers out of
  recession, bankers and world leaders huddle together in a series of
  conferences. They agree on one thing: that the first priority for each state is
  to repay its billionaire creditors. They all agree, too, on who must pay: the
  workers and peasants of the world. They demand working people boost profits by
  accepting cuts in jobs, pay and pensions, by working longer hours, retiring
  later, paying more tax and higher prices for basic goods, by seeing services
  axed to the bone and benefits stripped away.



To divert the anger of those suffering
mass unemployment and plummeting living standards, governments and media
scapegoat migrants, asylum seekers, victims of war forced to flee ravaged
  countries. The USA and the European Union turn their borders into fortified
  barriers and deport those who manage to reach what they hoped was safety. In
  Italy and France, Roma people have their campsites bulldozed and their
  inhabitants deported. As Trotsky wrote 70 years ago, “The governments of the
  entire world have a written the blackest chapter in our epoch through their
  treatment of refugees, the exiles, the homeless.”



On the other hand, we see tremendous
working class resistance to the capitalist offensive. Around the world, workers
have fought back. General strikes in South Africa, Greece, France and
Guadeloupe, mass workers’ action in Spain and Portugal, factory occupations in
South Korea, the USA and Britain and a wave of strikes for higher pay in China.
The resistance in each of these countries appears separate, but must be seen as
a series of linked engagements in what is nothing less than a worldwide war of
the employing class against the workers. The key to repelling the bosses’
offensive is a united front of the working class, spanning all the workers’
organisations, in each country and across borders.



The struggle is not limited to workers’
resistance in the workplace. Across the semi–colonial world, in countries that
have secured formal independence but are tied by a thousand strings of
exploitation to imperialist powers in North America, Western Europe and the Far
East, mass movements have emerged against dictatorial restrictions on the
democratic rights of the people. On the streets of Thailand, Nepal and Iran,
this mass democratic movement has been driven to the point of launching popular
uprisings against military, monarchical and religious dictatorship. In Honduras,
the masses have raised courageous resistance to the US–backed coup d’état. In
Afghanistan and Iraq, determined resistance continues against the US–led
occupations, forcing the invaders to promise withdrawal. America’s brutal
Israeli ally faces sustained resistance, too, in Lebanon and occupied Palestine.




In each sphere of battle, the workers
and poor have all too often seen victories snatched from our grasp, not by the
strength of our enemies but by the weakness, and even treachery, of our own
leaders. ‘Moderate’ trade union leaders in Europe and the USA either accept job
cuts and trade away conditions in return for empty promises from the employers,
or sacrifice the interests of the majority of the working class to preserve the
jobs of a small elite of skilled workers. Social democrats accept the logic of
the market and govern on behalf of the big capitalists, abusing the trust of
their working class supporters and enforcing neoliberal policies like
privatisation and pay restraint. Official Communist parties prop up liberal and
social democratic capitalist governments as in Italy, and carry out neoliberal
programmes themselves as in West Bengal, while their house–trained‘post–Marxist’
intellectuals churn out volume after volume to justify the ‘new politics’ of
age–old class collaboration. Populist generals and strongmen champion ‘the
masses’ while resisting the workers’ justified demands on the grounds of
‘uniting the people’. In the struggle to resist imperialist occupations, middle
class nationalist and Islamist guerrillas refuse to mobilise the masses of town
and country for class struggle against occupation, fearing the roused masses
might go on to challenge landlordism and capital itself.



Nowhere can this crisis of working class
leadership be seen more clearly than on the international terrain. The ruling
class coordinates its offensive globally, while each of our resistance movements
struggles on in national isolation. They have their G8 and G20, their IMF and
World Bank, their European Union and Central Bank. But the workers have no
international organisation to bring our struggles together, to draw up a common
strategy and lead a mass fight back. All we have are the enfeebled remnants of
the organisations our grandparents built; international federations of trade
unions under the tight control of seasoned bureaucrats opposed to struggle, and
the Second so–called “Socialist” International of pro–capitalist parties like
the British Labour Party, the German Social Democrats, the French Socialists.
Their leaders see no alternative to the economic system that caused the crisis
and rush to bail it out at our cost.



Yet the force that can stop this
  capitalist offensive in its tracks, the worldwide working class, is bigger than
  ever. The new millennium sees the workers form a majority of humanity for the
  first time in history. Against the few hundred billionaires and their admirers,
  stand billions of workers who make and circulate their profits. Our labour
  process is more internationally integrated, our interaction and ability to
  communicate with one another greater, than ever before. When we act together
  the machinery of exploitation shudders to a halt. The working class produces
  everything and can produce it without the exploiters, once we are conscious of
  our power and our interests.



All modern large–scale production,
distribution, trade and communication relies on our labour yet we do not own the
capital that sets it in motion. Of the forces of production we own only our
ability to work, which we have to sell every day in return for a wage. Behind
the facade of this apparently free and equal contract, hides systematic
exploitation. Our wages reflect only a fraction of the value of the total social
product we create. The capitalists take the rest in profits.



The working class can only recover this
wealth collectively, by breaking up the state power of the capitalists and
creating a state power under our democratic control. A workers’state would seize
the property of the big capitalists, banks and corporations, and create a
planned economy in place of the madness and crises of the
market.



This strategy relies not on alliances
with capitalists, on parliamentary manoeuvres or populist generals, but on the
self–activity and self–organisation of the working class: it is the strategy of
socialist revolution, the only way to overthrow this system of crisis, poverty
and war.



Today, in the battles we are mounting
against austerity, the working class is showing its potential power. These
immediate struggles need to be coordinated to repel the bosses’offensive, and to
be directed against the system itself: in short, today’s struggles need to
become the starting point of a struggle for revolution and the rule of the
working class.



The capitalists recognise our potential
power if we unite as a class, so they spread every means of deception to divide
us: control over official education, state and millionaire control of the media,
religious, racial and national prejudices and petty controls over daily life. To
set the workers of one nation against another, to set men against women, to set
white against black, Christian against Muslim, old against young, this is the
capitalists’ strongest weapon. That is why, in answer, every generation of
anticapitalists has taken up the great slogan of Karl Marx: “Workers of All
Countries, Unite!”



Today, faced with an historic crisis of
the profit system, we need to ask the question: how can we unite the workers of
the world? To answer this, anticapitalists need to learn the lessons of two
centuries of class struggle. The highest achievement of the workers was the
formation of the four working class Internationals, each of which began as a
world party of socialist revolution. They fought to organise the class struggle
of the world’s workers and poor.



Each of these Internationals represented
a massive gain for the working class, yet each has in turn disappeared, gone
over to the enemy, or abandoned the path of social revolution. The task today is
to build a Fifth International. All over the world, the fighting organisations
of the workers, parties, unions, cooperatives, the peasants, the urban poor, the
women, youth, oppressed nationalities and minorities, need to assemble, convene
a congress, debate policy under the strictest democratic conditions, adopt a
fighting programme against the capitalist offensive, and found a world party to
lead the fight for power.



Its immediate objective must be to
promote the development of fighting forces that can make mass resistance more
and more effective and transform it into world revolution The programme of a
Fifth International must aim not just to coordinate our existing organisations,
the trade unions, peasant and landless workers’ leagues, popular movements of
the shantytowns, women’s and youth organisations, but to transform them into the
weapons of this revolution. Its supporters must fight doggedly within the mass
organisations and, at the same time, they must not flinch from a break with the
bureaucratic apparatus where it becomes an insuperable barrier to the workers’
advance. They must aim to organise the unorganised, the unskilled workers, rural
workers, the youth and the unemployed. The new International must aim to unite
in its national sections all those political forces, both from existing parties
and from new layers, that recognise the need for revolution.



To succeed, this Fifth International
must have firm foundations. Its strength will be a common understanding of the
capitalist world, of the historic goals of the working masses, of the tactics
and strategy needed in the fight to overthrow capitalism and the states that
defend it. It will need to embody all of this in its programme because it will
need to win. The historic crisis of capitalism, which threatens humanity with
economic and environmental catastrophe, poses once again Rosa Luxemburg’s stark
alternative: socialism or barbarism. It challenges revolutionary communists to
respond to the task of building socialism in the 21st century, to become once
more the leading force in the worldwide movement of the oppressed. The only
alternative to capitalism in crisis is socialism, the only path to socialism is
revolution, the indispensable instrument of the world revolution is a world
party of social revolution. The time to build a Fifth International is
now.



An Action Programme that connects the
resistance to the fight for social revolution



For too long, the programmes of the
working class parties of the world 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 disconnects it from present–day demands and
presents it as a far–off utopia, rather than linking it to the real struggle as
it takes place around us.



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 will need to overthrow
bourgeois rule, establish working–class power and begin a socialist plan of
production.



This transitional programme takes up all
the vital social, economic and political demands of the day, including those
immediate and democratic demands which can be granted before overthrowing
  capitalist ownership, such as a guaranteed living minimum 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 threat to its very power and property. Even
  then, the capitalists will try to reverse its 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 slow and peaceful road of social reform and trade union
  bargaining is even more utopian than in the past. 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 take 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 capitalists whose sabotage would
otherwise cause disruption.



Moreover, the struggle to win these
demands, to impose them on the bosses, will require new forms of organisation
that go beyond the traditional limits of trade unionism. At every level of
struggle, decision–making by democratic assemblies of all those involved must
become the norm. Subordinate to those assemblies, elected and recallable
delegates 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 the wives and partners of workers, from
workers’ inspection teams that investigate companies’ 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 severally 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.



We won’t pay for their crisis –Against
unemployment, insecurity and poverty



Since the Great Crisis of 2008, tens of
millions of jobs have been lost. Even in the richest country in the world, the
United States, 50 million people had difficulty feeding themselves and their
children in 2008. That the system throws millions out of work when there is so
much work to do eliminating poverty, this alone should condemn capitalism to the
rubbish bin of history. And the attacks go on. Around the world, capital is
subjecting the workers to the twin weapons of inflation and deflation,
inevitable products of their blind system of profit, either to slash real wages,
or to wipe out even more jobs. Already, three billion people, almost half the
world’s population, live on less than two and a half dollars a day. Well over a
billion are living in absolute poverty. Some 2.6 billion lack basic sanitation
and 1.6 billion live without electricity. Every day, 25,000 children die from
poverty. Almost one billion were never taught to read or write. We cannot allow
the capitalists to make this still worse.



Faced with the global bosses’offensive,
we have to fight for a workers’ united front; the common action of all the
working class forces:


• Against all workplace closures and
sackings, against all wage cuts.


• For strikes and occupations in all
workplaces faced with closure.


• Nationalisation without compensation
of every enterprise declaring redundancies, every enterprise refusing to pay
minimum wages, every enterprise that fails to respect protective legislation or
pay taxes. The entire existing workforce should continue production under
workers’ control and management.


• Nationalise the banks without
  compensation and merge them into a single national bank under the democratic
  control of the people.


• For a programme of public works to
improve social services, healthcare, housing, public transport and environmental
conditions under the control of the workers and their
  communities.


• Cut the hours, not the jobs. Share the
available work amongst all who are able to work. For a sliding scale of working
hours to reduce the working day and absorb the unemployed, with no reduction of
pay or conditions.


• For a national minimum wage with rates
determined by committees of the workers to ensure a decent living for
all.


• Against job insecurity: no to all
forms of insecure, informal, temporary contract working (précarité). All
  contracts should be rendered permanent, with full legal protection. Wages and
  conditions to be governed by collective agreements controlled by trade unions
  and workplace representatives.


• Against inflation. For a sliding scale
of wages to rise 1 per cent for every 1 per cent rise in the cost of living.
Delegates elected in the workplaces, shantytowns, workers’organisations, women,
small traders and consumers to draw up a workers’ cost of living index. Pensions
must be indexed against inflation and be guaranteed by the state, not left to
the mercy of the stock markets.


• Open the books. Around the world,
governments and private employers alike are sacking workers, claiming
  bankruptcy, the need for efficiency savings, the need to improve productivity.
  Private and public sector workers should reply: “Open the books! Open all
  accounts, databases, financial, banking, tax and management information to
  workers’ inspection!”


• Fight the intensification of work.
  Down with the bosses’ constant speed–up and ‘efficiency drives’ which are
  actually nothing more than attempts to intensify exploitation and boost
  profits, endangering our health, safety and lives.


• No to outsourcing and offshoring
without workers’ consent; instead of conflict between workers’ of different
nationalities for the same jobs, level up all pay rates and build international
combines of workers in the same enterprises and branches of production.
Collective agreements and legal rights to apply to employees of subcontracting
companies as if they were employees of the main contractor.


• For a workers’ veto on management
decisions; not co–production, ‘social partnership’ or other forms of class
collaboration in which our unions administer the bosses’ cuts, but a fight for
workers’ control of production.



Tax the rich, not the
poor



While billions live in poverty, a tiny
minority live in unimaginable luxury. In 2010, after two years of global
  downturn, the number of billionaires reached 1,011. The investment decisions of
  these financiers and industrialists can bring entire countries to their knees.
  Just below the billionaires, hundreds of thousands of multi–millionaire rich
  idle their lives away at our expense. This class of parasites loudly denounces
  any attempt to tax them and redistribute their wealth. They move their money
  into ‘tax havens’ and manipulate their citizenship and legal residence status,
  to avoid paying tax at all. At the same time, they never stop campaigning for
  the working class to pay the bulk of the tax burden, through indirect taxes on
  basic commodities like fuel and food, through sharp cuts in taxes on business
  and wealth.



Not the workers and small traders but
the rich capitalists, industrialists, bankers and financiers should pay.



• Seize the private wealth of the
  billionaires and the super–rich.


• For swingeing taxes on the rich to
fund services, schools, hospitals, and a massive programme to abolish
  poverty.


• Fight the tax dodgers – abolish tax
havens, close down the tax avoidance industry.


• Abolish all indirect taxes; cancel all
personal and state debts.


• Nationalisation of the stock
  markets


• Take over the capitalists’major
industries – for nationalisation of the corporations without compensation under
workers’ control.



Fight privatisation – for a massive
expansion of public services



Against a background of unemployment and
falling wages, a massive series of austerity programmes aims to reduce the tax
burden on the rich and make workers and the poor pay the cost of the crisis.
Education, healthcare and welfare systems that workers won as a result of
decades of struggle are under attack. The millionaires who profit from our work
have the nerve to demand that state provision be reduced “to encourage
self–reliance and discourage the culture of dependence”! At the same time, they
are salivating at the thought of the profits to be made when private enterprise
fills the gap left by public service cuts.


• Not a single cut in public services,
not a single privatisation.


• Defend the best existing social and
health care systems and extend them to the billions not covered at all.
  Nationalise private schools and healthcare; put education and hospitals under
  the control of workers and users. Schools, hospitals, doctors, medicines and
  universities should be free to all at the point of delivery.


• No lowering of pensions: increase them
and extend them to all those not yet covered. Nationalise private pension
schemes and combine them into a single guaranteed state pension.


• No more privatisation. Nationalise
basic services like water, energy, and transportation. Cancel public–private
partnership deals, special economic zones and government sweeteners to business:
for state owned development, funded by confiscating the profits of the
privateers.


• Workers and the poor should combine to
draw up an inventory of basic improvements in services and infrastructure, for a
massive programme of public improvements.


• For nationalisation without
  compensation.



For years, the very idea of
  nationalisation seemed lost in the mists of history. Far from nationalising
private property, capitalist governments around the world were privatising the
public sector. Crucial services and resources, like water, health and education,
were handed over to private capitalists to run for profit, not
need.



Yet nationalisation has come back onto
the agenda. For the first time in years, a national government, in Venezuela,
proposed not to privatise, but to nationalise major industries and farms, taking
them into state ownership. Then, in 2008, we saw neoliberal governments rushing
to nationalise large banks, taking over their debts and losses to save their
system.


Socialists must learn to distinguish
capitalist nationalisation, which is used to prop up the system, from working
class expropriation, used to dispossess the bosses for good.


• Oppose bailing out the capitalists at
workers’ expense.


• Resist the socialisation of losses and
the rescue of bankrupt capitalists by the taxpayers.


• Nationalisation of assets, not
  losses.


• The new state owner should resolutely
refuse to sack large parts of the workforce just to hand the enterprise back to
the capitalists at a cheap price.


• Reject compensation for expropriated
capitalists.



In place of a mix of state and private
ownership in a chaotic dog–eat–dog market system, we want a democratic plan of
production, in which all resources of the world, including human labour, are
allocated rationally, according to the will of the people. Then we will really
be able to produce for human need, not greed.



Today, Venezuela under Hugo Chavez,
tries to develop its economy free from the pressure of the big imperialist
governments and multinationals, and sometimes even nationalises certain
companies, usually under strong pressure from the workers. Communists support
nationalisation, while always pointing out the limitations of what the
  capitalist governments are doing, and always pressing forward demands in the
  interests of the working class. We argue that there must be no compensation for
  the bosses and we demand control and management by the workers, not by armies
  of mangers on huge salaries, but by elected committees of the workforce and
  working class communities.



Above all, communists link the fight for
expropriation of this or that industry with the need to expropriate the
capitalist class as a whole. 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”.




Stop the climate
catastrophe



The absolute failure of the 2010
  Copenhagen Summit revealed that no consensus could be reached between competing
  capitalist powers on how to reduce carbon emissions and avert catastrophic
  global warming. Neither the “developed” major polluters like the US, Japan and
  the European Union, nor the “developing” giants like China and India, were
  willing to imperil their own profits by making the radical cuts in emissions
  necessary to slow and halt climate change.


If the bourgeoisie continues like this,
worsening floods, droughts, famines and pandemics are inevitable. Economic and
military rivalry prevents the great capitalist powers from combining their
forces to solve these crises. The horror of the Pakistan floods, the South Asian
Tsunami and the Haitian earthquake will be repeated many times over.




Worse still, governments and
  corporations continue to expand fossil fuel emissions and frustrate all the
  plans and proposals of the scientists to slow or reverse the catastrophe.




The answer is a global shift in
  production away from burning fossil fuels and towards the development of
  sustainable energy. Because profit stands in the way of the necessary changes
  to production, and because the climate does not respect political and national
  borders but is by definition global, the means necessary to solve the crisis
  can only be imposed by a worldwide class with no stake in the profit system;
  the working class.


• For an emergency plan to transform the
energy and transport system – a global shift away from burning fossil
fuels.


• Make the big corporations and the
imperialist states like the USA and EU pay for the environmental destruction
they have caused in the rest of the world.


• For a plan to phase out energy
  production based on fossil fuels and nuclear power, and for massive investments
  in alternative energy forms such as wind, wave and solar power.


• For a huge global programme of
  re–forestation.


• For a massive expansion of public
transport to combat pollution caused by the growth in use of the private
  car.


• Abolish business secrecy in the clean
technology and energy sectors – pool the knowledge to create effective
  alternatives.


• Nationalisation under workers’control
of all energy corporations, enterprises which monopolise basic goods like water,
agribusiness and all air lines, shipping and rail enterprises.



Transform our cities



Over half of humanity now lives in
cities, but the majority are shanty towns and slums without proper roads,
  lighting, clean drinking water or sewage and waste disposal. 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
  environment. 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 shanty town dwellers have permanent
or secure jobs. Their children have no nurseries, clinics or schools. Criminal
gangs and police alike subject the people to harassment and extortion. Women and
the young are driven to prostitution and coerced into sweatshops. Slavery and
the trade in human beings has re–appeared.



This vast accumulation of human misery
must end.



This cannot be done with the pittance of
aid from the rich countries, by Millennium Goals, from 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 and Bolivia they have forced through important reforms. Now, by a
social revolution, in alliance with the working class, they must smash the
capitalists’ state and erect in its place a state based on committees and
councils of the workers and the poor, as an instrument for the complete
transformation of our 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 .


• 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.



Almost half of humanity still lives in
villages, on plantations and in the rural communities of indigenous peoples. The
gap between their incomes, their access to healthcare, education,
  communications, and that in the cities is often enormous. 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 slavery and indentured labour. Plantation workers are often
thrown into debt bondage.


• Expropriate the land of the oligarchs
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.


• Against poverty in the countryside;
equalise income, access to health, education and culture with the cities. This
alone can slow and reverse the pathological urbanisation of capitalism and open
the road to the goal set out in The Communist Manifesto:“the gradual abolition
of the distinction between town and country, by a more equitable distribution of
population over the country”.



For women’s liberation



The capitalist democracies promised
women equality, but the promise is unfulfilled. 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 global south, patriarchal
  relations in the countryside and ancient religious prejudices 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 unpunished. In
  every country, this oppression is rooted in the family structure of class
  society. 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 the crisis 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 headscarves and
bans on women wearing Islamic face coverings. In Islamic countries, like Saudi
Arabia and Iran, religious police enforce compulsory Islamic dress codes.



• 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 women’s shelters. 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.


• End women’s dual burden through the
socialisation of domestic labour. For free 24–hour childcare and a massive
  expansion of cheap, quality public 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.



Against sexual repression – for lesbian
and gay liberation



Lesbians, gay men and transgendered
people have legal equality only in a minority of countries. In many, they are
threatened with punishment by the state, with physical harassment and even
death. In Africa, a wave of violence and repression has been launched against
lesbian and gay demands for civil rights. As with the oppression of women,
religion often sanctions this hateful repression. Nor has the fight for equality
been won in the democratic capitalist countries. The workers’ movement and the
socialist youth must come to the defence of lesbian, gay and transsexual people
everywhere.


• Full rights for lesbian, gay and
transsexual people including full legal rights to civil partnership and
  marriage.


• Stop all harassment by the state, the
churches, temples and mosques: sexual orientation and all consensual sexual
activity must be a matter of personal choice.


• Outlaw all discrimination against
lesbians and gays. No discrimination in housing, in access to life insurance, in
medical treatment, in access to work or to services.


• For the right of lesbian and gay
couples to rear children.


• No bans on educating people in their
sexual choices, no bans on the public expression of homosexual affection and
love.



Liberation for the youth




The crisis hits youth hard both because
they are the most insecure section of the workforce and easiest to dismiss.
There are fewer jobs for school leavers, cuts in state budgets for education
massively reduce the alternative of full time study in higher education.
Impoverishing families increases the brutal treatment of children in the slums
of the third world.



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 are 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.


• For the right to vote at the age of 16
or working age if sooner.


• 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. There should be no laws
against consenting sex and no criminalisation of “underage” lovers. Sex
education must be available in state schools, without religious or parental
  interference.


• 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.


• Drive business out of the education
system. No control of the education system by the state bureaucracy. Students,
teachers and parents themselves should fix curricula and manage schools
democratically.



Defend democratic rights



At home and abroad, the western
  imperialists pose as the defenders and advocates of democracy. They are lying.
  After 9/11, North American and European governments imposed a surveillance
  society and restricted or abolished rights accumulated over centuries of
  popular struggles.



At the same time, 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. 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.


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


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


• Fight against the increasing
  surveillance of our society and the increasing power of the police and security
  services. Down with the repressive apparatus, replace it with militias drawn
  from, and controlled by, the workers and popular masses.


• Where fundamental questions concerning
the political order are posed, we call for a constituent assembly. 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.



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, arrest and imprisonment of
trade unionists in Iran, to murder on the streets by death squads in Colombia,
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. 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. 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 the liberation of oppressed nations
and peoples



The starting point of internationalists
is that workers and peasants of every nationality should unite, since in no
nation can they solve their problems in isolation. The greatest obstacle to
achieving this internationalism is national oppression: the fact that the world
system is based on the systematic oppression of some nations by others. Lasting
unity between nations cannot be achieved where one nation oppresses another.
Today, whole nations, the Palestinians, the Kurds, the Chechens, the Sri Lankan
Tamils, the Kashmiris, the Tibetans and many others, are denied the right to
self–determination. Along with many indigenous peoples, they are subjected to
ethnic cleansing and cultural, sometimes physical, genocide. The working
classes, especially those whose national ruling classes are responsible for such
oppression, must give support and practical aid in the struggle of oppressed
nations for liberation.


• For the right of self–determination of
oppressed nations including their right to form a separate state if they so
wish.


• For the right of indigenous peoples to
their lands, free of settlement aimed at making them a minority.


• Equal rights and citizenship for
members of national minorities.


• Against official state languages.
Equal rights for national minorities to use their languages in the schools, the
courts, the media, in dealings with public administration. For the right of
migrant communities to use their mother tongues in school.



Fight racism



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, 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 bothers 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. 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.


• Down with all forms of discrimination
against migrants. Equal pay and equal democratic rights irrespective of race,
nationality, religion or citizenship.


• Remove all specific laws and
  restrictions concerning people with foreign citizenship. Open the borders.
  Fight racist border controls that prevent the free movement of workers and the
  oppressed across borders.


• 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



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 a non–existent threat of the
‘Islamisation of Europe’. Nor is anti–Semitism 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, Ahmadis 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 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 repel 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.


• 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.


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.




Against militarism and imperialist
war



Every capitalist economic crisis carries
with it the threat of war. Competition between states intensifies. The bosses
try to divert the people away from class struggle and into struggle against a
foreign foe. From Afghanistan and Iraq, to Honduras and Sierra Leone, the major
imperialist powers like the USA and Britain use direct occupation, foment coups
and promote civil wars to impose their puppet regimes. They encourage their
client rulers to act as regional policemen, tasked with undermining rival
governments and repressing the people.



Today, the great economic downturn has
opened a period of revolutionary crisis of the system as a whole, heightening
the struggle between the imperialist powers to re–divide the resources of the
world. At first, the contours of these new rivalries, tensions and standoffs
between the USA and China, Russia and the EU, are only dimly discernible.
Nonetheless, they carry the threat of more deadly regional and proxy wars, and
ultimately of a new world war, a desperate annihilatory clash between the
declining world powers and new, rising, empires.



If the working class leaves
  international diplomacy, the making of war and peace, in the hands of our
  rulers, then our fate is to be cannon fodder. That is why the working class
  needs a new International, as the First International explained in its founding
  statement, “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 antiwar mobilisation of 2003,
which brought 20 million onto the streets of every major city in the world,
proved conclusively that this is possible. Initiated by the European and World
Social Forums, the movement’s failure to stop the war was solely due to the fact
that the ESF and WSF were not wiling and able to organise further mass actions
including strikes, street blockades and mutinies.



The vast scale of the worldwide marches
showed the potential for global action by the working class to stop wars, or
turn them into revolutions; the failure of the movement to stop the Iraq war
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. It is the duty of revolutionaries to use the war
to bring about the downfall of the system, to turn the imperialist war into a
civil war.



In semi–colonial countries, it is
  necessary to defend the nation against any attack by an imperialist power or
  one of its local proxies or policemen. 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, 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 and aggression.
Fight the imperialist occupation of Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, Chechnya.
Support the resistance. Hands off Iran and North Korea.


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


• Dissolution of all
  imperialist–dominated military alliances like NATO.


• Not a penny or a person for any
  capitalist army, be it a professional or a compulsory conscription based army.
  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 rights for soldiers,
the setting up of soldiers’ committees and unions and the election of
  officers.


• In a reactionary war, the enemy of the
working class is at home. For the defeat of imperialist governments in time of
war; for the victory of colonial, semi–colonial and working class states against
imperialist armies.



Abolish the IMF and World
Bank



The system of international financial
institutions (International Monetary Fund, World Trade Organisation and World
Bank) was exposed and discredited by a series of bold mass mobilisations around
the world in the years after 2000. Their hypocritical claims to be cancelling
third world debt and setting fresh development goals have proved totally hollow
as rich countries failed to make good their promises and even cut their aid
budgets. Their claims to have created a “new paradigm”for a crisis free world
were exploded by the crash of 2008. Those NGOs who thought the international
financial institutions would somehow fade away, or self–reform, have been
cruelly disappointed. As the pretence of counter–crisis measures gave way to
austerity programmes, the IMF and its auxiliaries retuned to the attack. Now,
more than ever, it is necessary to keep up the resistance, demanding:



• Unconditional and total cancellation
of the debt of all the countries of Latin America, Africa, South and East Asia
and Eastern Europe.


• The imperialist states must compensate
the semi–colonial world for the plunder of its natural and human
  resources.


• No to protectionism by the developed
countries 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.


• Abolish the IMF, World Bank and
  WTO.


• Nationalise the big banks and
  corporations under workers’ control.



The crisis of working class leadership




The existing leaders of the working
masses showed their weakness in the crisis of 2008–2010. Despite a spontaneous
popular rejection of the bail–out of the bankers at our expense, the leaders of
unions and socialist parties alike meekly accepted it. They said they had no
alternative. There was an alternative, one they had all abandoned decades ago;
socialisation of the banks, with no compensation to the billionaires, whilst
guaranteeing the savings, pensions and jobs of the workers.



Our official leaders remain bitterly
opposed to any attempt to take state power out of the hands of our class
enemies, to replace their power with one rooted in the mass organisations of the
working millions. They simply have no programme to dismantle and replace this
bankrupt system that exploits and degrades the productive force of human labour
and the resources of nature.


In this way, the crisis of capitalism
creates an ever–deeper crisis of working class leadership. To overcome this
crisis, to convert resistance into the fight for 21st century world revolution,
we need to found a Fifth International with sections in every country. It must
transform national labour movements, deliver cross border action and solidarity,
and become a World Party of Socialist Revolution.



Down with reformism



In the rich imperialist countries of
Europe and certain privileged countries of the south, Social Democratic and
  Labour parties have served the capitalists as parties of government for nearly
  a century. In Brazil, the Workers’ Party (PT) has followed the same path, as
  have the two main Communist Parties in India (CPI and CPI–M). A privileged
  layer of bureaucrats and parliamentarians, who regard capitalism as an eternal
  system and serve the bosses whether in government or opposition, frustrate the
  workers’ attempts to use these parties as weapons of struggle. Although they
  once traded their services for limited reforms, over the last twenty years they
  have gone further and adopted the neoliberal, pro–market, policies dictated by
  the capitalist class. Their “reforms” today are cuts in welfare, privatisation,
  and attacks on wages.



With the restoration of capitalism in
the republics of the former Soviet Union in Eastern Europe and in China, the
Stalinist Communist parties of the world have also moved far to the right. In
West 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, as soon as they got even a share of government, parties like
Rifondazione Comunista in Italy, the Parti Communiste Française and Die Linke in
Germany, supported social cuts and privatisation. Ruling for capitalism has led
the CPI and 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.



In apparent contrast, some Maoist
  parties, specifically those in Nepal and India, have played a more radical
  role. In Nepal, the Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) played a leading
  part in the mass movement that overthrew the monarchy. But, having won the
  elections to a Constituent Assembly, it entered into government, with its
  leader briefly becoming prime minister.


This has highlighted, once again, the
fundamental error in the Stalinist–Maoist strategy of “revolution by stages”.
This is based on the belief that in economically undeveloped countries the
working class should not fight for socialism until there has been a“democratic
stage” of capitalist development. Because of this, the Stalinists oppose the
working class taking power and implementing a socialist programme of
  development. Instead, they insist the working class should form an alliance
  with the national bourgeoisie and not demand more than a democratic government.




The Communist Party of India (Maoist)
has grown 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 Maoist strategy of
“surrounding the cities” but, in a country with a huge and growing working
class, the limitations of the stages theory and the guerrilla strategy are
evident, they cannot provide a strategy for socialist revolution in India.




Cuba has enormous influence as the only
state in the Americas where capitalism has been overthrown. Its health and
education systems, in startling contrast to those of its Caribbean and Latin
American neighbours, show something of what a planned economy and the exclusion
of imperialist and native capitalist exploiters can do.



However, since the 1960s, Cuba’s
  Communist Party has done nothing to spread revolution, beyond backing regimes
  that defy the US. Indeed, at key points, like in Chile and Nicaragua, it has
  urged strict adherence to the Stalinist stages theory and thereby contributed
  to the victory of counter–revolution. Within Cuba itself, the one party state
offers little room for democratic debate or independent workers’ and peasants’
organisations. Instead, the economy is entirely controlled by the party and the
  privileged state bureaucracy it represents.



The “Bolivarian socialist”governments of
Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales have recently carried out genuine reforms for the
working class and the urban poor. In Venezuela, since the masses defeated a
US–backed coup in 2002, the revenues of the nationalised oil industry have been
used in part to finance important social programmes for the poor. This marks
them out from most regimes on the continent. At a time when capitalist
globalisation was promoting itself as “the only way”, they declared themselves
socialists and claimed that they were transferring wealth and power to the
working people. As a result, they earned the hatred of the US imperialists and
their own oligarchies.



Nevertheless, despite these left
  populist measures, it is clear that Chavez, Morales and other Bolivarian
  leaders head not socialist, but bourgeois, regimes. They have not expropriated
  the decisive sectors of the big bourgeoisie or foreign corporations. Faced with
  workers’ strikes and occupations, they have often repressed such struggles
  using the police and courts and arrested their leaders. As Chavez himself said
  in mid–2009 “we don’t deny the market, but the free market”. This compromise
  between socialism and capitalism is not sustainable. They are irreconcilable
  opposites and one must triumph over the other. Social reforms and
nationalisations only become “socialist” when a workers’ state coordinates and
defends them. Only with workers’ control in the workplace, and workers’ power in
the state, can it become possible to eliminate the waste and chaos of the market
and replace it with democratic planning.



Free our unions from bureaucratic
  control



All over the world, our trade unions are
under attack from the capitalists. In the fight to rouse our unions to resist
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 the advanced capitalist democracies,
decades of class struggle have secured legal rights for unions, so in place of
outright illegality the state incorporated unions by granting privileges to
their leaders and through 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, in the economic crisis, 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 bureaucrats often act as out–and–out
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 of them, 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 International must commit itself
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 We need organisations in the workplaces which do not
  accommodate to the dictates of the bosses but which 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. Our watchword must be; action with the official leaders where possible,
  but without 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.


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



Fight centrist
vacillation



Between the mass reformist parties and
revolutionary communism stand a myriad of unstable intermediate organisations,
groupings and sects. Although these centrists claim to represent formal
continuity with the revolutionary programmes of the Third International in the
days of Lenin, or Trotsky’s Fourth International, in their political practice
they zig zag wildly between craven opportunism and helpless sectarianism.




When the opportunist mood is upon them,
they systematically adapt their policy to that of social democracy, Stalinism,
populism or petit–bourgeois nationalism. When this fails to break the hold of
reformism, they typically retreat, nursing their wounds to sectarianism,
opportunism’s anaemic twin. Then they work to immunise their supporters from
contact with the reformist masses, who repay the compliment by ignoring them in
return.



Invariably, centrists cover for their
own failings by appeals to the spontaneity of the masses, as if this spontaneity
does not always demand conscious expression and leadership if it is to achieve
results. If the centrists are adapting to reformist leaders, they hail the
masses’ illusions as forms of nascent class consciousness. If the centrists are
in sectarian retreat, they deny that the masses hold illusions altogether or
berate the masses for insufficient fighting spirit. In reality, they only reveal
their own inability to connect revolutionary policy to the mass movement.




The common element of centrism, in both
its opportunist and sectarian forms, is failure to fight in the mass movement to
win the reformist masses away from the programme of reformism and to a programme
of revolutionary transition.



None of this is to detract from the role
centrist organisations can play in class battles, building solidarity,
  anti–racist, anti–imperialist and internationalist actions. Today, in some
  countries, such as France and Greece, forces like the New Anticapitalist Party,
  Syriza and Antarzya have grown sufficiently in the fightback to the crisis to
  mount a serious challenge to reformism, becoming more influential precisely at
  times when the class struggle overflows the banks of everyday parliamentary and
  trade union activity. Since, in the years ahead, this is ever more likely, we
  can expect to see substantial growth of some centrist organisations.




However, just as the capitalist
  offensive and the wave of resistance can push some centrist groupings forward,
  others find themselves unable to respond effectively. The inadequacy of their
  latest opportunist schemas or adventurist tactics are cruelly exposed by the
  changing conditions of struggle. Such is the case for the Socialist Workers
  Party in Britain, whose arch–opportunist attempt to create a joint
  reformist–liberal ‘Respect’ party with Muslim businessmen, collapsed
  ignominiously, resulting in further splits and disorientation, and derailing a
  key opportunity to break the trade unions from the neoliberal Labour Party
  after the Iraq War.



Internationally, the most prominent
centrist organisation remains the Fourth International, followers of the ideas
of Ernest Mandel. In France, its supporters have established the New
  Anticapitalist Party (NPA), bringing together thousands of activists looking
  for an alternative to the reformists and opening a key series of debates on the
  way forward in the French working class. At the same time, the NPA stands in
  elections on a reformist programme of its own, and has failed to mount a
  coordinated challenge within the resistance to break the hold of the official
  trade union leaders. Its leadership is torn between an impotent strategy of
  electoral blocks with the Communist Party and standing on a bold anticapitalist
  platform. The task of revolutionary communists is to help this party overcome
  its centrist heritage and develop a fully revolutionary transitional programme.



Worse, the Fourth International’s
  supporters in Portugal, the Left Bloc, voted in parliament for the EU’s Greek
bailout programme, including for its austerity measures. In Brazil, faced with
the neoliberal programme of social democratic president Lula, the Fourth
  International cannot decide whether its goal is to build a revolutionary
  alternative to the reformists of Lula’s Workers Party (PT), or to build a PT
  Mark 2, on a left reformist programme. Recognising that it has failed to become
  a world party, the Fourth International welcomed the call by Hugo Chavez for
  the formation of a Fifth International and correctly warned that this must be
  tied to no bourgeois state. At the same time, however, the Fourth International
  advocates, as a strategic goal, the creation of a “pluralist” international
  encompassing both reformists and revolutionaries. Here a vital distinction must
  be drawn!


Of course, in contemporary conditions, a
new mass International is likely to be an arena of political struggle between
revolutionaries and left reformist militants. But this can be no final goal.
Again and again, in the period ahead, revolutionary crises in various countries
will pose the question of power point blank. Unless revolutionaries can overcome
the hold of reformism and defeat its domination of the movement, we will suffer
defeat after defeat. When we recognise that reformist workers will be drawn into
a new International, we do so not with the strategic goal of peaceful
co–existence with their prejudices, but with a perspective of struggle, to wrest
these militants from the leadership of the reformists and win the new
International to revolutionary communism.



Other fragments of the Fourth
  International rally some thousands of activists across the world. The
  International Marxist Tendency and the Committee for a Workers’ International,
  from the British–based tradition of Ted Grant, have adapted systematically to
  imperialism, both refusing to call for the withdrawal of British troops from
  Ireland and from the Malvinas. Both backed the shameful strikes for ‘British
  jobs’ against Portuguese and Italian workers in 2009.



Today, they cover for their refusal to
solidarise with the resistance to imperialist occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan
with phrases about workers’ unity and dire warnings of Islamist reaction, as if
the socialist movement could come to the head of the resistance in these
countries without taking sides in the war against the US led invaders!
  Unconnected with the IMT and CWI, but singing from the same hymn sheet, the
  Worker–Communist Party of Iraq and Iran, and the Labour Party of Pakistan,
  advance the same criminal policy and reap the unintended but inevitable
  consequence: the Islamists’ hegemony over the resistance is unchallenged (...by
  them at least).



In Latin America, a policy to break the
hold of populism over the masses is crucial to revolutionary advance in
Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Argentina. But this is the great blind spot of the
principal break from the Fourth International on that continent, the followers
of the late Nahuel Moreno. Oscillating wildly between opportunism and
  sectarianism, Moreno’s heirs either debase themselves before the leadership and
  reformist policy of Chavez and Morales, or diligently inform the working class
  of the polar opposite, that they have no illusions in their leaders. They
  dismiss demands on the workers’ leaders to act as self–defeating, and refuse to
  fight for the mass workers’ organisations to break from populism and form an
  independent workers’ party.



In general, centrism remains unwilling
and unable to break in practice with left reformism and thus ultimately with
capitalism, and to build an open and bold revolutionary alternative. They often
turn left under the pressure of the masses but then turn right under the
pressure of the bureaucratic apparatuses in the name of‘realism’.




A new revolutionary International will
need to attract thousands of the militants of these parties and groups, just as
it will have to win tens and hundreds of thousands of the most militant
  reformists. It cannot do so by making concessions to centrism. In
  pre–revolutionary and revolutionary situations, centrist organisations will
  usually go further than the reformists but at the decisive moment, whenever the
  question of power is posed, they will either capitulate to the reformists or
  pursue disastrous sectarian or adventurist courses. It is no accident that the
  centrist organisations display the greatest instability on the very question of
  developing a new revolutionary programme, of building revolutionary parties and
  a new world party. Building a Fifth International therefore requires a
  relentless struggle against centrism.



The struggle for power



Our goal is political power, power to
change the world forever so that inequality, crises and war, 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.



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 or a Castro.



For a workers’ and peasants’
government



Economic crises and wars create
  revolutionary situations and force the working class to seek a governmental
  solution in its interests. But 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 looks to its existing trade union and reformist party
  leaderships. When right wing parties are in power, reformist workers may not
passively wait for the next regular election but try to kick them out by direct
action (general strikes, factory occupations) and 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 serve the capitalist class by demobilising the struggle. 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
expect that workers must abandon their organisations before they can fight for
the vital demands and slogans of the hour.



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. 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.


• 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.



For permanent revolution




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 today, 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 these 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 transition to socialism




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, ascending 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 cutthroat 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.



Our Goal – Global Revolution




Whether revolution breaks out and
  triumphs first in a backward, semi–colonial or an advanced imperialist country,
  it is vital that it spreads internationally. 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. 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, Fifth
  International


http://www.fifthinternational.org/