Resolution of the International Secretariat of the CRFI

The War, the economic and political crisis and our tasks

1. The re-election of George W. Bush for a second term as President of the United States in the elections on November 2, 2004 is a manifestation of a deepening crisis and polarization and will intensify it both at home and abroad.

It demonstrated deep divisions within American society and in the ruling class. The operation of a change of a President during a major war proved to be too risky for the strongest sectors of the bourgeoisie and Bush kept his position despite the fact that a sizeable part of the ruling class as well as of the population has opposed him. The electoral strategy of the Republicans was oriented not to the centre as usual but to the mobilization of the religious Right and of the most backward elements in the country to secure not only electoral victory but also a basis for further attacks on people's social and political rights at home and a bellicose policy of continuation of the imperialist terrorist "war on terror" abroad. From the other side Kerry and the Democrats, despite the support of all those who wanted "anybody but Bush", did not represented a real, persuasive alternative for working people on the main social issues and the war. Between a hard-line Bush and a Bush-light, the first won. The electorate was politically mobilized as never before for decades and was split between 51 to 49- an indirect political indication of the social polarization in the United States, which is deepening many years now. Amidst such polarization, the middle of the road positions of petty bourgeois candidates such as Ralph Nader, running on a program with a capitalist content, and proposing as a phony alternative to the war and occupation of Iraq "the replacement of US troops by UN military forces" could only be smashed.

The political crisis will not disappear but it will escalate further with a huge impact on Europe and internationally. The financial crisis with the gigantic US deficits and the falling dollar is driving the US ruling class and the Bush Administration into an offensive against the pensions and the living conditions of the American workers and poor as well as against its competitors in Europe and Asia. The imperialist onslaught against the oppressed peoples abroad in the Middle East, Asia, Africa and Latin America will escalate. The war becomes a major factor affecting directly the political situation in every country in Europe, in America itself and all over the world.

2. In Iraq, the US-led Occupation forces are sinking deeper and deeper into a quagmire.

The barbaric assault of 20.000 Marines armed to the teeth with the highest military technology against the few thousand fighters and civil population of the heroic Fallujah is an attempt by imperialism to smash the Resistance and to unite the local political and religious elites around the fraudulent election scheme in January 2005 to legalize and institutionalize the Occupation.

The fierce resistance in Fallujah against the invaders, the escape of most of the guerrilla fighters and the extension of the armed struggle by the insurgents in other cities of Iraq, including the third biggest city of the country Mosul, show that the confrontation is far from over. It will be protracted destabilizing the entire region and all the countries involved in it.

The popular resistance against imperialism has to be extended and united in the entire region, into an Intifada from the Gaza to Basra to kick out all the imperialist troops, end the occupation, the Quisling regimes and all collaborators of imperialism and Zionism, the local feudal and bourgeois rulers, for workers' and peasants' governments.

As the impact of that war produces political shocks in Europe and America, the anti-war movement has to overcome its limitations, deepen these political crises and create the conditions for the overthrow of the capitalist governments and of the capitalist system responsible for the barbarism of war. This is the central responsibility of the Sections of the CRFI.

3. After Yasser Arafat's death, U.S. and European imperialisms and Zionism are intensifying their efforts to promote collaborators to impose their plans against the right of the Palestinian people to national self-determination.

The popular forces of the Intifada will not easily surrender. On the contrary, they have shown above any doubt, both in the gigantic mobilization during Arafat's the funeral and afterwards, that they will resolutely oppose capitulation.

Now more than ever before, the CRFI and its Section in Palestine has to fight resolutely for a revolutionary way out from the apparent impasse, by defending the Intifada and the Palestinian national rights, including the right of the return of all Palestinian refugees, until victory, uniting in struggle the Palestinian national movement and the Jewish workers and poor to defeat Zionism, destroy its apartheid State and establish a socialist secular Republic in the entire historic territory of Palestine, as the cornerstone for the Socialist Federation of all the liberated peoples of the Middle East from the Atlantic to the Gulf.

4. The crisis in Europe that it was analyzed in the Declaration issued by the International Secretariat in its previous meeting in July 2004 is deepening.

The EU Constitution that it was signed in the EU meeting of October 29, 2004 is not a constitutional superstructure of a non existent European "Super State" but solely a treaty between the principal capitalist powers of Europe to establish an imperialist Directory against the working class and its labor rights, for the absorption of the Eastern European countries into European capitalism and for the strengthening of the economic, political and military capabilities of European imperialism in the international arena, against US imperialism in their antagonism for world hegemony.

The question of referendum in each country- member of the European Union has to be examined case by case. The danger to give the pretence of a "popular legitimacy" by a referendum vote of this reactionary document has to be averted. In cases where a popular movement against the EU Constitution and for a "NO" develops, it has to be supported and to be connected with the fight to overthrow the imperialist European Union, for the socialist unification of the European Continent.

5. The financial- industrial crisis is sharpening the class struggle in Europe. There is a rise of workers' militancy in Germany, Italy, Spain etc. but also serious reverses of the workers movement in the fight to secure jobs positions, as the trade unions are confronted with the blackmail of the big corporations "delocalizing" their factories in Eastern Europe or Asia where the "labor cost" is much lower. The "compromises" of the trade union bureaucracy to accept wages' and jobs' cuts in exchange to keep the factory in the country are totally worthless as in most of the cases these cuts are made with the aim of re-structuring and fusion of the companies (and new gains for their shares in the stock market), leading inescapably to losses of jobs and new cuts of wages.

The on-going class conflicts are interacting with the deepening crisis of the bourgeois parliamentary political system. In the recent German elections the main Parties that alternate in governments, the SPD and the Christian Democrats had faced serious defeats. The Right in power in France was defeated both in the regional elections in March 2004 as well as in the European elections of last June. In Italy the Berlusconi government, although it survived from the last summer's crisis threatening it with collapse, is in a precarious position. New attempts are made now to prepare a new wave of Centre Left alternative bourgeois governments, co-opting the Left, including the Far Left. Developments in Italy with the "governmental" turn of Bertinnoti's Rifondazzione Comunista, in France and elsewhere as well as the right wing orientation of the left forces leading the European Social Forum shows these preparations.

The co-optation by imperialism of a number of parties, movements and governments of the Left in Latin America is the forerunner of similar "experiments" in Europe. These forces of the Left have to prove in practice before hand their capacity to control and halt the working class and other powerful social movements and defend the capitalist state and imperialism, before coming to the government.

The CRFI uncompromisingly opposes the Center Left and all forms of class collaboration and agitates for the overthrow of the capitalist governments and for workers' governments all over Europe.

Following the example of the unlimited strike by the workers in Melfi-FIAT in Italy, in Volkswagen and in Opel in Germany, in the factories in Serbia, we call for occupations of factories all over Europe against "delocalization", closures and mass firings, for workers' management and expropriation of capital, as it was proposed by Asociazzione Marxista Rivoluzionaria Progetto Comunista for FIAT, Alitalia and others.

Against the offensive of the bosses and the bankers, we have to build up the counter-offensive of the workers, the unlimited General Strike and for an alternative of the working class and of the social movements, on an anti-capitalist program for workers' power.

6. The world and European crisis is interconnected with the contradictory, often explosive developments in the former Soviet space and in Putin's Russia.

The brutality of the reaction of the Russian repressive forces during the Beslan atrocity and afterwards is the manifestation of a disintegrating regime trying to stop disintegration by force and by strengthening the centralization and authoritarianism of the State. These tendencies are shown also after Beslan with the measures taken by Putin to abolish elections of local governors and to appoint them directly from the Kremlin in a Bonapartist fashion.

In the Yeltsin period, the open turn to capitalist restoration was initiated by fuelling all the centrifugal national and local forces in the multinational former Soviet Union, leading to its demise. Now the Putin regime tries to check these forces and the threat of further disintegration, to centralize power as well as the main economic resources, particularly in the field of oil and energy. The attack on the oligarchs and the taking over of Yukos is part of that strategy.

This strategy against disintegration is neither an orientation towards a "new Soviet Union" nor to a "new Czarist empire" whose historical conditions are ended long ago. The Putin regime seeks to centralize resources and power to be in position to find a better agreement with foreign capital and to advance further the integration of this vast country into the world capitalist market. It was under Putin, not Yeltsin that U.S. imperialism succeeded to establish its military presence in Georgia and military bases in the former Soviet Republics in Central Asia, during the aggression against Afghanistan in 2001. Through the collaboration of the Putin restorationist regime with imperialism's "war on terror", both Kremlin and Washington have escalated their actions in Caucasus and Chechnya.

The Russian restorationist regime opens the door to the imperialist penetration to the former Soviet space. The Russian war against the Chechen people is entirely reactionary, it has to be opposed and the national rights of the Chechen people to be defended. The CRFI is for the immediate withdraw of the Russian troops, to defeat and end imperialist penetration and presence, for freedom to the Chechen people and for the establishment of a Socialist Federation of the peoples of Caucasus.

The restorationist regime of collaborators with imperialism becomes a factor of deepening of imperialism' crisis. The inter-imperialist antagonisms for control of the former Soviet space are exacerbating, as it is shown with the events in Caucasus and Ukraine, where Europe and America competes for the control of Russia itself and of the post-cold war world at large.

It becomes more and more clear, as the Programmatic Theses of the World Congress in April 2004 emphasize that 15 years after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the implosion of the Soviet Union and the turn to the capitalist restoration in the former workers' states, the world capitalist crisis not only did not find any way out from its crisis so far but it is plunging much deeper in it.

Franco Grisolia, Savas Matsas, Jorge Altamira

Rome, November 15-17, 2004