Introduction to the debate by Manos from OKDE-Spartakos
Hello. I am presenting the TRI document about the role and tasks of the 4th International, which is actually the only « Role and tasks » document in the room. Now this is very serious. The former leadership has not been able to come up with a proper role and task document in the World Congress, and this has happened for the first time in the history of World Congress of the Fourth International. The outgoing leadership was in no position to present any orientation in these documents. So in the past, we were skeptical or we opposed the orientation within the Role and Task documents, but at least, there was some orientation. We were skeptical about the concept of broad anti-capitalist parties at the fifteenth World Congress because we didn’t know who they would include. Our fears came true with the formula of broad left parties at the sixteenth Congress, of broad left parties that would include revolutionaries and reformists; however, always under the leadership of reformists. Things got even worse at the seventeenth World Congress with a formula of “useful” parties that could include currents that are not even left-wing, such as populist currents or others. But today, we don’t even have that. We don’t even have something to disagree on. We only have in the majority text a hasty reaffirmation of the orientation of the last congress and then routine organizational matters about seminars, commissions, the Youth Camp, etc. Which are important for the everyday tasks of our organization, but they are not a political orientation to build organizations within our countries.
This is to conceal the weakening and decline of the Fourth International that is clear to all. This decline is because of political reasons. This decline as can be seen in the fragmentation of almost all national sections, the collapse of the most important organizations, including our traditional flagship, the French section, the degradation of our international events such as the Youth Camp, and the inability to take common initiatives, as was the case for example, during the anti-globalization movement in the early 2000s. All these will not be addressed with minor routine organizational measures, no matter how clever they might be, and even more so if they are not. Because the real reason behind all these visible aspects of the decline is political disintegration. Organizational disintegration reveals political disintegration. So we insist on a strategic discussion starting with an honest balance sheet. For us, the political reason for the decline of the Fourth International is a policy of following behind reformism, social democracy, or progressivism; through broad parties and through the “critical” support, if even critical, to progressive governments all around the globe.
The balance sheet on the participation of our section in the first Lula government in Brazil in the early 2000s, came very late and didn’t manage to be a guideline against new support and partial participation in the current Lula government. No balance sheet has been drawn about Italy and the PRC supporting the Prodi government. No balance sheet about what happened in Greece with Syriza, which the Fourth International leadership openly supported. No balance sheet about Podemos and their support and participation in the PSOE government in the Spanish state. There is no discussion today about all of these cases. There is almost no discussion of the hottest issue in Europe in the last months, the New Popular Front in France.
Nevertheless, the majority still seems to be advocating the policy of being the catalyst for unity. But there are currents much bigger and more suitable for this job than the Fourth International. By adopting this imaginary role of the catalyst for unity among the left, the particular reason for our very existence disappears. And at the same time, nobody remains behind. Nobody remains there to defend an internationalist revolutionary strategy within the workers’ movement, even if those views only represent a minority of the workers’ movement.
But we do not only criticize. We also have an orientation to propose. We defend a modern day version of Leninism. We still think “no revolution without revolutionary parties”. This means parties of conscious cadres. This is the point. Cadres devoted to the aim of taking power, all the way to communism, because even intermediate tasks cannot be fulfilled, and this has been proven recently, cannot be fulfilled by intermediate parties. That is, parties indecisive about what they want to do or pretending to not know what their reformist leaderships want in fact to do. We need parties that educate, but also act, take initiatives, that are embedded in real struggles. We reaffirm the actuality of the insurrectional general strike as a strategic weapon. Not because this is a dogma, but because the working class is objectively the social subject that has the material interests to unite all the oppressed. We believe in the role of the youth as a tactical vanguard, of a youth that does not carry the burden of previous defeats. This investment in the youth is what permitted our current to play an active role in May 68. We fight for parties that actively abolish divisions in their ranks, between women and men, between cis and trans persons, among all sexual orientations, between disabled or not, between foreigners or not, between manual and intellectual work, this is very important. We fight for the modern day transitional program not in the sense of a temporary or intermediate program, but one that strives to create a bridge to seize power, to the revolution, under the present circumstances, today.
We fight for parties that are against the policy of popular fronts. That is the policy of class collaboration, which is in fact always an operation of class cooptation and exploitation. We now know that Syriza in Greece undertook the task to heal the wounds of the bourgeois political system in Europe’s weak link, the Greek state. Reformists closed the window for the revolutionary possibilities that were opened up during the capitalist crisis and the mass movement in Greece. The outcome was a massive setback for the mass movement, and this did not happen in spite of, but because of, the rise of so called new reformists of Syriza.
We don’t want to just discuss the mistakes; we also want to discuss what was correct. Refusing to join the all-out support for Syriza in Greece and instead defending an independent, anti-capitalist alternative – even as a minority – was the right decision. It was the right thing to do. We think that our comrades in Sri Lanka were correct to present an alternative candidate in the face of the rise of reformist government that would foreseeably succumb to the IMF pressures. We believe that those comrades in Brazil who advocate an independent anticapitalist candidate and give no direct or indirect support to the new Lula government are correct. We think that our comrades who refused to join the class collaborationist New Popular Front in France, while fighting for unity with all currents against the far right, were correct to do so.
Because the main conclusion in our recent history is the need for independence from reformism, from bureaucracies, from the bourgeois states and institutions, from all imperialist camps. Comrades who believe that underlying independence comes at the detriment of massiveness are incorrect. Nobody wants to be marginalized. We definitely don’t want that. But those comrades have to ask themselves if, by their more flexible policy, they have themselves achieved massiveness. Because what I see is so called sectarian currents being more massive than us in most countries around the world. Does the supposedly mass policy of the majority lead the masses, or does it merely follow them? Because the issue is not to do what is already done anyway. The issue is to change the course of events. Have we done so with the majority’s politics?
Let’s dare to fight for new mass revolutionary parties. Let’s dare to fight for a new mass revolutionary International, not just a massive one. Thank you.
