The crisis of imperialism and the popular rebellions are growing

Workers and oppressed people, we are confronted with new challenges

The Coordinating Committee of the Movement for the Refoundation of the Fourth International meeting in Rome, Italy on November 23/25, 2003 calls all the revolutionary organizations and fighters of the international working class and of the oppressed popular masses to join our common struggle at the International Congress on the Refoundation of the Fourth International, which will take place in Buenos Aires, Argentina on April 20/22, 2004.

All the developments in the world situation the last six months following our initial Call demonstrate the objective necessity of such a Congress for the regroupment of the international revolutionary vanguard forces. U.S. imperialism and its coalition of willing accomplices are sucked in the quagmire of occupied and resisting Iraq. The same fate faces the U.S. strategy of an "indefinite war on terror" whose goal was, by invading and occupying Iraq, to reshape the political map of the Middle East and reorganize the international relations between States and classes in the post Cold War world according the U.S. capitalist interests and the needs of the capitalist system’s crisis.

The continuous and escalating popular resistance of the Iraqi people against the Occupation forces transforms Iraq from the basis of the imperialist reorganization of the Middle East into a major factor of disorganization and destabilization in the region and internationally, from Indonesia and the Philippines to Saudi Arabia and Turkey.

In occupied Palestine, the Bush’s "Road Map" to end the Intifada and impose the imperialist Zionist rule on the Palestinian masses, directly connected from the first moment with the war against Iraq, has failed together with Abu Mazen collaborationist government. The infamous Wall of shame that the Sharon Zionist apartheid regime is building and the huge economic crisis with its devastating effects on the living conditions of the Israeli Jews themselves are manifesting the putrefaction of the Zionist project. The so called "Geneva Peace Plan" drafted by a section of the Labor Zionists and of the Palestinian bourgeois leaders is a reactionary attempt not only to revive the Oslo agreement in the terms most unfavorable to the Palestinian national aspirations but above all to help the U.S. imperialists and their Zionist allies in the deadly impasse they face in Iraq and the Middle East as a whole.

The destabilization produced by the war fuelled the unresolved crisis in post Soviet Russia and in the entire former Soviet space. The offensive of the Putin regime against a sector of the oligarchs, the fall of the Center Left in Croatia and the collapse of the Shevardnadze regime in Georgia manifest new convulsions in the capitalist restoration process that become, in their turn, a factor of the world crisis.

The threat of a "new Vietnam" for the United States deepens the political crisis inside the American Metropolis and its acolyte, the Blair government in the UK, divides the ruling classes, sharpens the conflict between Europe and America and gives impetus to the mass anti-war movement, which continuous after the historic world wide mobilization of the 15th of February 2003 as the massive 200.000 strong demonstration in London against the visit of Bush shows.

The imperialist "indefinite war on terror|" not only did not opened a way out to the systemic crisis nor did terrorized the vast majority of the oppressed but made even more intractable the crisis and accelerated the tendency towards revolutionary rebellions internationally.

Following a non stop series of rebellions, in Latin America in the backyard of U.S. imperialism, against the IMF, global finance super-exploitation and the globalization of misery, in Ecuador in 2000, in Peru, in Venezuela against the coups orchestrated by U.S. imperialism and the local oligarchy, in Bolivia in 2000 and afterwards, above all in Argentina in December 2001, the revolutionary events that swept Bolivia in October 2003 represent a qualitative leap: the necessity and the possibility to take the power by a proletarian revolution supported by the poor peasantry and the indigenous population were posed in the most unambiguous way.

But the Bolivian revolution has exposed in the most unambiguous way as well the counterrevolutionary role played in today’s conditions by the Center Left governments and their leftist allies ‘movimentistas’ to secure the continuity of the bourgeois democratic constitutional order of capitalism. Abstract, i.e., bourgeois democracy, ‘self-management’ and even indigenous rights are counter-posed to the ‘authoritarianism’ of Revolution and the necessity to break the State machine, above all the armed bodies of the ruling class, by the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The Lula government in Brazil, supported by the Kirchner government in Argentina, mediated with Evo Morales, the leader of MAS in Bolivia, the "constitutional way out" which established Mesa as President and prevented the workers and peasants in insurrection to take the power. It is the same Lula government, so praised by the ‘alterglobalist’ gurus of the World Social Forum, which leads inside Brazil itself the most vicious neo-liberal attacks against pension rights, the public education and the Movement of the Landless demanding an agrarian reform. In the first 9 months of the Lula government 44 peasants were killed and leaders of the Brazilian MST like Jose Rainha were imprisoned and put on trial. In that government, the position of the Minister dealing precisely with the Agrarian Question is kept by Miguel Rosseto, one of the leaders of ‘Democracia Socialista’, the Brazilian section of the so called ‘ United Secretariat of the Fourth International’.

The United Secretariat, which still usurps the name of the revolutionary International founded by Leon Trotsky and his comrades in 1938, does not expel the class collaborationists and covers up for them, without opposing their presence inside the pro IMF neoliberal capitalist government and finding ‘positive aspects’ in the policies of the Lula government, particularly in its …international policies and its attitude to the …agrarian problem! The ‘Brazilian’ policy of the United Secretariat is a continuation of its "home policies" in Europe and particularly in France, where its section, the Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire, in its recent National Congress, has changed its Statutes abandoning even formally the reference to the strategic aim of the dictatorship of the proletariat, [in a strategic surrender to the ruling class - formulation supported by JA and SM, in the name of a utopian and de facto classless "revolutionary democracy" - formulation supported by PJ and FG].

This change is absolutely consistent with the policies both in France, where in the name of defense of democracy they called for a vote to Chirac in the second round of the 2000 Presidential Elections, as internationally. In the last World Congress of the USFI (as well as in the Congress of the LCR), it was declared that "the historical cycle opened by the October Revolution was closed" and that a new International will emerge through regroupments in the framework of the ‘non global’ or ‘alter-globalist’ ‘ movement of movements’ as its ‘political expression’ without being in continuity with the historical tradition in the working class through the First, Second, Third and Fourth Internationals and without having the form of a World Party of Socialist Revolution. The method and a program of transitional demands is rejected and replaced by a reformist program, by no program at all, or at least by the WSF ‘Charter of Porto Alegre’ (the "Call of the Social Movements").

The reality of the "another possible world" put forward by the movementist leaderships of the World Social Forum and the European Social Forum has showed itself clearly as illusory and in fact subordinated to the domination of international capital. This is true also, in particular, of the so-called "alternative" or "anti-capitalist" left, which presented the Italian Party of Communist Refoundation led by Fausto Bertinotti as the center of a new regroupment of left political forces at least on the European ground. The rapid turn of Bertinotti in recent months toward unity with the Italian liberal center-left (the Olive coalition) with a perspective of a change of the bourgeois government shows that the perspective of the "European Anti-Capitalist Left" -- tailended by both the USec (LCR) and the IST (Socialist Workers Party of Great Britain) -- represents nothing but left cover for the policy of attacks on the working class put forward by the totality of social democracy and the various center-lefts.

The question is not simply to give a political expression to the social movements nor to resolve the "crisis of representation" of the working class with the far left occupying the vacuum left by the bankruptcy of the traditional bureaucracies of the left, social democracy and Stalinism. The international working class itself under the impact of the current world crisis of capitalism has to become a class for itself fighting for its revolutionary dictatorship to open the road to a classless society. The struggle for the socialist revolution, for the dictatorship of the proletariat and the transition to world communism, and the building of the revolutionary International are indissolubly interconnected tasks of the working class, of its vanguard, and of all the oppressed.

The historic divergence with our struggle to re-found the Fourth International on the basis of the 4 principles of our Genoa Declaration in 1997 could not be made more sharp:

1. We stress the actuality of the socialist revolution and of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

2. We denounce any form of class collaboration and ‘popular front’.

3. We stress the need of Program of transitional demands, based on the method of the founding Transitional Program of the Fourth International, linking the immediate struggles with the systematic mobilization of the masses for the socialist revolution.

4. We stress that the world socialist revolution that opened its circle in October 1917 in Russia has not ended; our epoch is the epoch of imperialist decline of capitalism and transition to world communism, an epoch of wars and revolutions, as Iraq and Bolivia reminds us. A revolutionary International of the proletariat and the oppressed is needed now more than ever before; and this International cannot but to be based on a revolutionary program and the all the experiences of the struggle for emancipation, not on historical amnesia nor on lack of program that always facilitates class collaboration and leads inescapable into treason and defeat. For these reasons, we propose to all vanguard revolutionary forces, coming both from Trotskyist and non Trotskyist traditions, that the new International should be a re-founded Fourth International.

The speed of world developments makes necessary to accelerate our struggle. The World Congress next April in Buenos Aires should be at the center of the conscious preparations of all revolutionaries, both inside and outside the framework of the MRFI. The program and the next steps towards the International are the more urgent tasks of this historical moment in every country and every continent.

The Coordinating Committee of the MRFI

Rome, 25 November 2003