In a World of Crisis, Wars and Revolutions, the creation of a new World Party of Socialist Revolution is more urgent than ever!
Statement of the Revolutionary Communist International Tendency (RCIT), www.thecommunists.net
Comrades, Brothers and Sisters on all continents!
The Revolutionary Communist International Tendency (RCIT) sends its May Day greetings to all fighters for the liberation of the working class and oppressed peoples throughout the world. There can be no doubt that we are living in historical times. The course of human history is changing at an accelerating pace. We are living in the midst of this vortex so that, in a very few years, the world will be very different from what it is today. Therefore, our most urgent task and responsibility as revolutionaries are to intervene in these events with a correct program and orientation. Only then will it be possible to create an organization that will unite all the fighting vanguards; one which will make a revolutionary imprint on the struggles of the coming epic.
As we have elaborated in greater detail in our World Perspectives 2017 document, the reason for the dramatic developments in world politics today is the rapid acceleration of all the contradictions of global capitalism. The capitalist world economy is characterized by extraordinarily deep contradictions which, in the near future, will manifest themselves in yet another global economic crash even worse than the one of 2008. Only recently, a new study revealed that, in 2016, the global level of debt continued to grow rapidly and now stands at 325% of the world’s gross domestic product, which translates to an astounding $215 trillion!
In this historic period of capitalist decay, the bourgeoisie, which has reacted for over 40 years to decreasing profits by attacking workers’ wages, which in turn only exacerbates their inability to sufficiently consume capitalist production, has resorted to a vain panacea ‒ unleashing the behemoth of unbridled credit; thus the world’s ever expanding black hole of debt. Furthermore, the resulting weakened tax revenues of capitalist states (only worsened by the tax deductions which the rich have been legislating for themselves for decades) has entirely undermined the funding of what was once called the “welfare state,” meaning that the those who are paying the ever-rising cost of the crisis of casino capitalism are, once again, the workers and oppressed who today receive only a small fraction of the public services and benefits they once thought themselves entitled to. This is the destructive dynamic which has and is continuing to cause the laboring masses on all continents to get poorer, while the rich elite shamelessly accumulate the world’s wealth.
On the backdrop of this capitalist decay, we are also witness to growing divisions inside the bourgeoisie of important national states (e.g. in the U.S.) as well as inside regional blocks (UK’s Brexit from the EU).
Furthermore we see the increasingly rapid acceleration of rivalry between the imperialist Great Powers: the US, EU, Japan, Russia and China. The growing tensions between Russia and the US in Syria, as well as the conflict between the US and China in East Asia – to take only the most recent and most visible examples – are clear testimonies to this exacerbated rivalry. There can be no doubt that military provocations and proxy wars between the Great Powers and, ultimately, a third World War are inevitable if the international working class will not succeed in overthrowing the ruling classes in time.
Similarly, we see an acceleration of imperialist aggressions, wars and occupations against the oppressed peoples of the South. The endless carpet bombing of the Syrian and the Iraqi peoples both by Russia as well as the US and their allies (like France, Britain and others) has caused – according to their own accounts – the death of more than 100,000 people in 2014-16. In Afghanistan, the US is continuing its occupation with the puppet regime in Kabul. Likewise, the US is stepping up its attacks in Somalia as are the French – with the help of their European allies – in Mali. Other examples for this reactionary offensive include the Saudi aggression – supported by the Western imperialists – against Yemen and US war mongering against North Korea. And there is, of course, the never ending brutal oppression of the Palestinian people by the apartheid state of Israel, as well as that of the Chechens by Russia, the Uyghurs by China, the Kashmiri by India, the Balochi by the Pakistan and the Kurds by Turkey.
Another manifestation of the imperialist oppression is the accelerating racism against migrants in the imperialist metropolises (e.g., Trump’s wall and Muslim ban, Islamophobia in Europe, pogroms against black migrants in South Africa) as well as against ethnic minorities like the blacks in the US, Britain or Brazil, and religious minorities like the Muslims in India.
All these phenomena derive from the reactionary offensive cited above of the ruling class against the global working class and oppressed, which is, as we have indicated, driven by capitalism’s rapidly spreading decay. But, if you were just to follow the business analyses of the corporate media, you would never know the source of the global malaise. Instead, this corrupt fourth estate of the bourgeois regimes merrily continues to frame the fatal dysfunction of capitalism as something which will eventually pass, so long as the governments in charge continue to adhere to the austerity programs, vigorously marketed to the public by politicians and media, while the masses are stupefied into inertia by idiotic programming and, on less quiet days, are further distracted by the whipping up of chauvinism, xenophobia and, in particular, Islamophobia. As state budgets for social programs dry up and disappear, money abounds for the expansion of the machinery of the police-surveillance state being prepared and strengthened to eventually put down future explosions sparked by the seething anger and desperation of the masses, whether black, brown, or foreign. The growth of right-wing parties (e.g., Le Pen, Wilders, Strache) is advanced by the same insular fear so perpetrated by the capitalist media. And in its most politically degraded form, this fear is used to justify coup d’états (like in Brazil, Egypt, and Thailand) and put an end to the last pretenses of bourgeois democracy.
However, the working class and the oppressed are not rolling over on their backs and placidly accepting these reactionary offensives, but are, in ever larger numbers, beginning to fight back against them. Examples of determined resistance by popular masses are witnessed in the ongoing liberation struggle of the heroic Syrian people against Assad’s tyranny; in the Yemeni resistance to the aggression of Saudi Arabia; in the mass protests against the Gasolinazo in Mexico; in the general strikes against the coupist government of Temer in Brazil; in the powerful general strikes in Argentina and French Guyana, the burning of Paraguay’s National Congress, the huge mobilizations in Chile and Perú; in the courageous popular women’s movement against violence in Latin America; in the struggle of black workers and youth in South Africa; in the popular resistance against the AMISOM occupation troops in Somalia; in the mass protests against corruption in South Korea that brought down the right-wing President Park Geun-hye; in the innumerable strikes of workers in China; in the militant movement of poor women in India; in the Black Lives Matter movement and the anti-Trump movement in the US; in the mass protests in solidarity with Theo in France; and in the demonstrations in defense of refugees in Spain.
The liberation wars, strikes and mass demonstrations in numerous countries around the world are a sign that the working class and the oppressed are awakening and ready to fight back against dictatorships and austerity. It is crucial to take these struggles to a higher plane by creating mass action committees in all workplaces and neighborhoods, by the unifying and radicalizing the trade unions and by creating popular militias. Such steps will fulfill the prerequisites for overthrowing the ruling class and creating a workers’ and poor peasants’ government.
However, currently all these struggles are seriously hampered by the devastating crisis of revolutionary leadership of the working class movement. Currently, the workers and oppressed struggles are controlled by various official leaderships – treacherous labor bureaucrats, leaders of Social Democratic parties, heads of Stalinist parties or Castro-Chavismo parties, their centrist fellow travelers, parties representing petit-bourgeois nationalism, and parties based on Islamism. These current leaderships consciously or unconsciously mislead the workers and oppressed. In major class struggles they often openly support the counterrevolution or take a cowardly neutral position (e.g., on Assad, General al-Sisi, the coup d’état in Brazil, the Euromaidan regime in the Ukraine, the state of emergency in France, the imperialist wars in the Middle East, the ANC regime in South Africa, Russian and Chinese imperialism, etc.).
Hence, the most burning task of revolutionaries is to join forces, internationally, in order to advance the struggle to build a new World Party of Socialist Revolution as a clear and unequivocal alternative to reformism, centrism and petty-bourgeois-populism.
Revolutionaries should combine fighting for a revolutionary program with making this program concrete as a series of strategies and tactics for the current major class struggles. Only organizations which correctly understand the Marxist program for the present period, and clearly perceive the current world situation and the tasks for the class struggle derived from it, can serve as instruments for the creation of new revolutionary parties and a new World Party of Socialist Revolution.
Some, otherwise sympathetic readers, may argue with us that the authentic revolutionary forces are so small that it won’t be possible to build a strong world revolutionary party anytime soon. To this we reply that we are fully aware of the weaknesses and difficulties of the path ahead. However, there is no alternative to building such a new party by learning the lessons from past struggles, revolutions and counter-revolutions. We have witnessed enough mass uprisings that were defeated and demoralized because of the lack of an authentic revolutionary party. If we sacrifice the serious struggle for such a vanguard party but only look for quick results, we will continue the terrible chain of defeats of the past years and decades. No, our class has already paid a much too high prize for the lack of a revolutionary party. It is highly urgent to change the course and to build a new world party based on a serious revolutionary foundation. Otherwise, the working class will continue to suffer defeat after defeat for years and years!
We therefore want to draw the attention of all serious fighters for the liberation of the working class and the oppressed to our recently published Urgent Call in which we summarized the most important conclusions to advance the unification of authentic revolutionaries:
In our opinion, revolutionaries all over the world should immediately start collaborating in laying the foundations for a principled unification, so that we drive forward the process of creating a new World Party with stronger forces. The starting point for the creation of such a party has to be agreement on the most important issues of the global class struggle. The RCIT considers the following issues as such programmatic keystones in the present political phase:
a) Recognition of the accelerating rivalry between the imperialist Great Powers – the US, EU, Japan, Russia and China. It is only possible to understand the driving dynamic of the present period of capitalist crisis and to take a correct position if one recognizes the imperialist character not only of the US, EU and Japan but also of the new emerging powers, Russia and China. Only on such a basis is it possible to arrive at the only correct program on this issue – revolutionary defeatism, i.e., the perspective of consistent struggle against all imperialist powers. This means that revolutionaries refuse to lend support to any Great Power in inter-imperialist conflicts under the slogan “The main enemy is at home!”
b) Consistent struggle against imperialism. Revolutionaries stand for the defeat of imperialist states in any conflict with forces representing oppressed people and for themilitary victory of the latter without, at the same time, giving any political support to the non-revolutionary leadership of the oppressed (e.g., petty-bourgeois Islamists, nationalists). This is true both in domestic conflicts (e.g., against an oppressed nation like the Chechen people in Russia) as well as in wars abroad (e.g., Afghanistan, Syria, Mali, Somalia). Likewise, revolutionaries have to fight for Open Borders in the imperialist countries and for full equality for national minorities and for migrants. Furthermore, revolutionaries refuse to lend support to one imperialist camp against another in any given conflict (e.g., Brexit vs. EU; Clinton .vs Trump).
c) Continuing support for the Arab Revolution. The mass popular uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen and other countries have been the most important and progressive class struggle development so far since the beginning of the new historic period in 2008. True, given the lack of a revolutionary leadership, the masses have suffered a number of terrible defeats – like the coup d’état of General al-Sisi in Egypt in July 2013, or the ongoing slaughter of the Syrian people at the hands of Assad and his foreign backers. However, the revolutionary process is continuing, and this is reflected in the ongoing popular resistance in Syria, Yemen, Egypt, etc. Authentic revolutionary forces must give unconditional support to these popular struggles against dictatorships and reactionary forces, without giving any political support to their non-revolutionary leaderships (e.g., petty-bourgeois Islamists).
d) Participation in all mass struggles against austerity programs and against reactionary attacks on democratic rights. Revolutionaries oppose all forms of sectarianism which refuses participation in mass struggles under the pretext of their non-revolutionary leaderships. Instead they apply the united front tactic in the struggles of the workers and peasants led by reformist or populist forces against austerity program (e.g., trade unions, mass organizations of the peasants and the urban poor, but also political parties like MORENA in Mexico, SYRIZA in Greece before 2015, PODEMOS in Spain) or against anti-democratic coups and dictatorships (PT, CUT, MST in Brazil; Islamists in Egypt; rebels in Syria). Such an orientation must be combined with a consistent struggle against all forms of popular-frontism and petty-bourgeois populism, and for the breaking of workers and peasants away from these non-revolutionary leaderships and to advance the formation of an independent and revolutionary Workers’ Party.
Hence we call upon all organizations which honestly strive towards the creation of a new Revolutionary World Party to join forces on the basis of these programmatic keystones. Concretely, the RCIT proposes that revolutionaries constitute a Joint Contact Committee in order to politically prepare and organize an International Conferencewhich will discuss concrete steps to advance the formation of a Revolutionary World Party. The RCIT is committed to serious discussions and the closest possible collaboration with all forces who share such an outlook.
We urge all comrades, brothers and sisters, to study this document and to contact the RCIT so that we can jointly discuss steps towards closer collaboration in our mutual effort to build the most important instrument of the working class in its struggle for liberation: a new World Party of Socialist Revolution! Let us march forward!
No future without socialism!
No socialism without revolution!
No revolution without a revolutionary party!
The Revolutionary Communist International Tendency has sections and activists in 14 countries: Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Brazil, México, Venezuela, Israel/Occupied Palestine, Yemen, Tunisia, Turkey, Zimbabwe, Aotearoa / New Zealand, Germany, Britain and Austria.
www.thecommunists.net, rcit@thecommunists.net
In order to get a fuller view of the RCIT’s analysis of the world situation and its programmatic response we refer readers to the following documents:
World Perspectives 2017: The Struggle against the Reactionary Offensive in the Era of Trumpism, https://www.thecommunists.net/theory/world-perspectives-2017/
Urgent Call for Unity and a Joint Struggle on a Revolutionary Platform, https://www.thecommunists.net/rcit/urgent-call-revolutionary-unity-1/
Manifesto for Revolutionary Liberation, https://www.thecommunists.net/rcit-program-2016/)