The strategic role of internationalism and the need for an international. 18.

1. World capitalism and the need for internationalism

- today's situation - wars in Palestine and Ukraine, multi polarity,

- the class nature, the imperialist and oppressive nature of the global system

- resistances: US autoworkers, women’s movements, Palestinians, Sudan, movements for democracy

What is internationalism?

- international solidarity, national to national - “weak” internationalism?

- cross-border organization, “an injury to one is an injury to all” (IWW) - “strong” internationalism?

2. History of the Internationals

1st International 1864 London - 1876 Philadelphia

- 1863 Polish uprising,

Prevent import of foreign workers to break strikes - very simple basis of organizing workers to refuse to strike break in another country, an organization for sharing labour information across borders

- 1868 Bakunin joins

- 1871 Paris Commune

- 1872 Hague conference: expulsion Bakunin, move to US

2nd International 1889 Brussels -1914 (officially Geneva 1920)

Complicated process to foundation - two parallel meetings in Paris -> unified conference in Brussels : German social democracy Karl Kautsky, Belgian, French SFIO, British Russians Plekhanov, later Lenin, Trotsky (Bolsheviks and Mensheviks)

- 1889 1 May,

- 1910 International Women’s Day

- 8-hour working day campaign

- 1914 First World War: Vote war credits, assassination Jean Jaurès

3rd International 1919 Moscow - 1943 Moscow

- 1917 Russian Revolution

- 1919, 1920, 1921, 22 Annual conferences

- 1924 death of Lenin

- 1924-1927 rise of Stalinism - battle within Bolshevik party

- 1943 - dissolution by declaration of IEC - manoeuvre by Stalin?

4th International 1938 Paris – today – 18th World Congress planned for 2025

	- 1927 Left opposition to Stalinist degeneration

- opposition to rising fascism

- political revolution USSR

- 1938 founding conference

- 1939 Second World War

- 1940 Assassination Trotsky

- 1945 post war period: Continuing prestige of CPs: Russian Revolution, defence of USSR , growth of CPs, resistance in WW2 (as USSR and CPs in occupied countries), Chinese revolution,postwar boom – increased TU influence, Cuba, South Africa

- 1953 split

- 1963 reunification - Cuban revolution, solidarity Algerian revolution

3. The Fourth International post 1968

• 1968

- world wide student radicalization

- Vietnam solidarity

- FI sections - turn to youth and workers

• Collapse of Soviet bloc 1989 => “broad anti-capitalist” or new parties (1995)

• what did this mean?

looking beyond Trotskyist tradition

currents in movement

transitional form

• what sort of parties

The points we have highlighted are:

• participation in the social movements and struggles of the oppressed and exploited. learn from these movement to deepen and enrich our own programme.

• building active, radical and class-struggle trade-unions,

• independent attitude to the state, institutions; to elections as a support to the activity in the mass movement,

• the importance of an active international and internationalist understanding of the world political situation

• the necessity for democratic and transparent functioning with broad democracy including tendency rights,

• the importance of addressing the questions thrown up in the struggles and fightbacks of the oppressed and exploited (notably feminism, ecology, LGBTQI, and others);

• an unremitting fight against all forms of racism - including against indigenous populations, anti-Semitism, islamophobia and for free movement of migrants, on the basis of solidarity and unity; • the importance of renewal of organisations through an open and dynamic attitude to recruiting radicalizing youth

• the need for continuing educational programmes including on strategic questions such as the state or the question of power, and international questions.

Commitment to need to build political organizations:

Daniel Bensaïd (Translated by PD from Le pari mélancolique, Fayard 1997, p. 121.)

This is also why the conception of the revolutionary militant for Lenin is not the good combative trade-unionist, but that of a popular tribune intervening in “all layers of the population” to grasp the real way in which a multiplicity of contradictions come together. This question is at the heart of the famous debate over the statutes of the party, discussed in a very detailed way in One Step Forward, Two Steps Back https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1904/onestep/index.htm. The definition of who should be a member of the party (someone who is satisfied with identifying with the party, helping it, “sympathizing”, or someone who is active in one of its regular bodies, who pays dues, who feels responsible for the collective decisions) is not a formal or administrative dispute. What is at stake in this small difference, that seems innocuous, is the boundary between the party and the class. Because it is precisely the party form which makes it possible to intervene in the political field, to have an effect on what is possible, not to passively submit to the ebbs and flows of the class struggle.

'Developed in Ernest Mandel Leninist Theory of Organization 1971 https://www.ernestmandel.org/en/works/txt/1970/leninist_theory_organisation.htm'

• In this text we read: “it would be giving the capitalist mode of production too much credit to assume it to be a perfect school for preparing the proletariat for independent activity” and thus need for “counter-tendencies”

=> positive action for women and others object of oppressions

Including right to meet together:

1. The specific oppressions/discriminations that exist in society will be felt within our organisations.

2. Comrades suffering from these oppressions/discriminations have the right to meet in a non-mixed way if they so choose/see fit - it is not for the party to impose such meetings or to determine who attends them.

3. The purpose of these meetings is to share experiences and therefore to identify how these oppressions/discriminations are felt and to propose necessary measures to counteract them.

4. It is important for comrades to be able to share experiences, to realise that experiences of oppression/discrimination are not individual but collective, precisely in order to identify the way in which these oppressions/discriminations exist within the party.

5. These meetings are not decision-making meetings; decisions on proposals are taken by the party as a whole (in the appropriate bodies).

Why the International (extracts Role and Tasks of the Fourth International 2010 https://fourth.international/en/world-congresses/513/75)

The Fourth International and its sections have played and still play a vital role in defending, promoting and implementing a programme of demands that are both immediate and transitional towards socialism; a united-front policy that aims for mass mobilization of workers and their organizations; a policy of working-class unity and independence against any type of strategic alliance with the national bourgeoisie; opposition to any participation in governments that merely manage the State and the capitalist economy having abandoned all internationalism or fight for an end to inequality and discrimination on gender, racial, ethnic, religious or sexual orientation grounds.

The Fourth International has played and still plays a functional role in keeping alive the history of the revolutionary Marxist current, “to understand the world”, to confront the analyses and the experiences of revolutionary militants, currents and organizations and to bring together organizations, currents and militants who share the same strategic vision and the same choice of broad convergences on revolutionary bases. The existence of an international framework that makes it possible “to think about politics” is an indispensable asset for the intervention of revolutionaries. Consistent internationalism must pose the question of an international framework. […]

[…] a major difference between the FI and all these tendencies, over and above political positions, which is to the credit of the International, is that it is based on a democratic coordination of sections and militants, whereas the other international tendencies are “international-factions” or coordinations based on “party-factions” which do not respect rules of democratic functioning, in particular the right of tendency. […]

Reading material

Dan La Botz The World Up in Arms Against Austerity and Authoritarianism

September 1938 - the founding of the Fourth International

Role and party-building tasks of the Fourth International

Additional reading: Daniel Bensaïd: The formative years of the Fourth International (1933-1938)

Gus Massiah: The new world struggles to be born

Michael Löwy: The Fourth International is 80 years old!

Pierre Rousset: Reflections on the “party question” (expanded version) – an overview