Statement of the RCIT and ISL on 19.4.2013
1. The Revolutionary Communist International Tendency (RCIT) and the Internationalist Socialist League (ISL, Israel/Occupied Palestine) declare that they are fusing their forces to build a joint international organization in order to advance the struggle for a new World Party of Socialist Revolution – the revolutionary Fifth Workers International. As a result the ISL becomes the section of the RCIT in Israel/Occupied Palestine and will elect a representative for the RCIT’s International Executive Committee.
2. The RCIT was founded in April 2012 with sections in Pakistan, Sri Lanka, USA and Austria. Before this it’s founding cadres were mostly leading members of the League for the Fifth International and were expelled or resigned because of their opposition struggle against the centrist degeneration. The ISL fought for many years in Israel/Occupied Palestine a fearless, revolutionary struggle against imperialism, Zionism and for the national liberation of the Palestinian people. They developed towards revolutionary communism through their experience in the struggle against the centrists of the International Marxist Tendency of Alan Woods as well as the US-American group League for a Revolutionary Party.
3. We fuse our forces on the programmatic and organizational heritage and experience of the revolutionary workers movement: the First International of Marx and Engels, the Second International before 1914 and in particular the struggle of the Bolsheviks, the Third International up to it Stalinist degeneration in 1924 and from then on the Left Opposition and later the Fourth International led by Leon Trotsky. However the centrist degeneration of the Fourth International in 1948-52 – expressed in particular in their leaders capitulation towards Tito’s Stalinism, the Popular Front in the Bolivian Revolution in 1952 and Zionism in the 1948 war – led to a break in the revolutionary continuity.
4. Furthermore we fuse our forces on the basis of the RCIT’s program “The Revolutionary Communist Manifesto” as the international program to fight for a new revolutionary leadership in the present period. In addition we agree on the programmatic conclusions of the ISL which it published in its statements on the Land Day, the Nakba Day as well as in its Draft Action Program for National Liberation and Socialist Revolution in Palestine. Furthermore we have developed programmatic agreement on a number of important issues of the current international class struggle which found expression in numerous articles and resolutions (see on this the websites of the two organizations as well as the RCIT’s English-language journal Revolutionary Communism.)
5. We know that an indispensable element in the struggle for building a new World Party of Socialist Revolution is the consistent struggle against the various misleaderships of the masses – reformism, petty-bourgeois nationalism, populism and Islamism. In addition Bolshevik-Communists have to fight against the centrists and left-reformists which spread anti-Marxists strategy and tactics in the name of Marxism. Marxism is Bolshevism applied to the condition of the present period or it is no Marxism.
6. We agree in our understanding of the importance of building revolutionary pre-party formations on a national as well as international scale based on the development and application of the principles of Bolshevism. Against the Anti-Leninist trend of Liquidationism which is currently so fashionable amongst the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia and the centrist left, we emphasize the necessity of building vanguard organizations and parties which fight for a revolutionary program amongst the workers and oppressed and which are based on the principles of Democratic Centralism. We agree on the importance of building such communist parties as well as pre-party organizations which orientate towards and which are formed from the middle of the lower and middle strata of the working class and the oppressed. We reject the orientation of the majority of the centrist organizations toward the middle class intelligentsia as well as the labor bureaucracy and aristocracy.
7. We agree in our understanding of applying the Bolshevik methods in the early stages of party building. We recognize the importance of the unity of theory and practice, of propaganda and exemplary mass work, of polemics and united front work.
8. We see the fusion of the RCIT and ISL as an important contribution to advance the struggle for the revolutionary Fifth Workers International. Such a fusion of authentic revolutionary forces is of particularly urgency given the explosive character of the present historic period. This period which opened in 2008 has a revolutionary character, i.e. the contradictions and the struggles between the capitalists and the working class, between the imperialist states and the semi-colonial people as well as the rivalry between the Great Powers reach such a sharpness that they will result repeatedly in wars and (pre-) revolutionary situations. In such a historic period it is of particularly urgency to build a stronger, united international revolutionary combat organization which orientates to the new, militant and growing layers of the working class instead of the old, agonizing sectors of the reformist or centrist left and their basis, the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia and the labor aristocracy. Forward to the revolutionary Fifth Workers International! Join the RCIT!