Date: Fri, 22 Jan 93 20:38:07 PST
From: Hank Roth <pnews@igc.apc.org>
Message-Id: <9301230438.AA08932@igc.apc.org>
To: radical@redspread.css.itd.umich.edu
Subject: Manifesto of the Fourth Internatio
Status: RO
/* Written  8:35 pm  Jan 22, 1993 by pnews@igc.apc.org in igc:p.news */
/* ---------- "Manifesto of the Fourth Internatio" ---------- */
/* Written 12:36 pm  Jan 22, 1993 by bidom in igc:gen.socialism */
/* ---------- "Manifesto of the Fourth Internatio" ---------- */

                     Socialism or Barbarism
                 On the eve of the 21st century

      (Programmatic manifesto of the Fourth International)

     The world is at a crossroads. The knowledge and productive 
capacity exist to satisfy the basic material, social and cultural 
needs of our whole planet. But hunger and homelessness grow even 
in the richest countries. Countless millions suffer premature 
death or crippling effects from preventable diseases, industrial 
accidents, pollution. As a result of such practices as 
infanticide against female babies, medical neglect of women, 
overwork, and other forms of discrimination in many poorer 
countries, it is estimated that there are 100 million women 
missing from the world's population today. 
     The gulf between rich and poor is widening. In 1960 the gap 
separating the richest 20% of the world's population and the 
poorest 20% was 1 to 60. In 1990 it was 1 to 150.
     Above all, the threat of self-destruction--from accumulated 
nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons or as a result of the 
poisoning of the ecosphere--looms over humanity. Yet despite 
continued opposition and struggles against oppression--taking 
different forms in each of the three sectors of the world: the 
imperialist countries, the "Third World," and the countries of 
the East--the international capitalist system (imperialism) that 
is the root cause of all these evils seems more strongly 
entrenched than it has been for decades. It's ideological 
"victory over socialism"--falsely identified with the 
bureaucratically dominated societies in the USSR and Eastern 
Europe--is widely proclaimed.
     This is above all due to a crisis of credibility for 
socialism as an international perspective in the eyes of the 
masses--a crisis that has been developing at least since the 
beginning of the 1980s. It is a result of the mass awareness that 
Stalinism/post-Stalinism, social democracy, and populist 
nationalism in the "Third World" have all proven bankrupt. 
     The specific form taken by the collapse of the bureaucratic 
dictatorships, without an advance in the direction of socialism, 
contributed powerfully to this. And the crisis blocks in turn any 
immediate solution to the burning problems of humanity by giving 
a fragmentary and discontinuous character to massive popular 
protest movements.
     In the final analysis the dangers that threaten humanity can 
only be resolved if the alienated, and alienating, character of 
human work is overcome in a decisive manner, if the great 
majority of men and women become masters and mistresses of their 
destiny in production, in consumption, and in their communities. 
To this end they must conquer the power to decide that destiny 
consciously, freely, and democratically. Herein lies the meaning 
of a "self-managed society" and of a superior civilization which 
is, for us, the essential content of socialism.

I. The stakes
1. The widening dangers
     Despite agreements to reduce nuclear weapons, the arms race 
continues. The destructive power that is accumulated ends up 
being used, with barbarous consequences. There have been more 
than 100 so-called "local" wars since 1945 causing more than 20 
million deaths. Imperialism's brutal aggression against Iraq in 
1991 revealed the full murderous consequences of this arms race. 
Enormous military stockpiles, including biological and chemical 
weapons, and the proliferation of nuclear power stations likely 
to be transformed into so many nuclear disasters, even in a 
conventional war, could physically wipe out the human race.
     The greenhouse effect, the destruction of the ozone layer, 
the devastation of tropical and temperate forests, the poisoning 
of oceans, rivers and reservoirs, air pollution, the progressive 
loss of topsoil, the massive elimination of living species which 
are currently disappearing at a rate 1000 times greater than they 
would naturally, the choking of cities and degradation of the 
countryside--all these threats combine to undermine the basis for 
humanity's physical survival.
     Famine increasingly threatens entire peoples--not because 
agricultural productivity is inadequate, but because it is too 
high to guarantee sufficient profits in the richest countries, 
where the state hands out subsidies to systematically reduce farm 
land. This "sustains prices," but at the risk of eliminating the 
whole of humanity's grain reserves should there be several 
successive bad harvests.
     The long international economic depression since the 
beginning of the 1970s has been disastrous for living conditions 
in nearly all the "Third World." According to an official report 
of the United Nations, using a very conservative definition, 
there are presently one billion poor people in the world.
     In the imperialist countries, the effects of the 
crisis--though increasingly visible--have so far been limited by 
the social protection won by decades of workers' struggles and 
the strength of the working class. Nonetheless, unemployment has 
shot up: there are now 40 million unemployed in the richest 
countries, compared with 10 million at the beginning of the 
1970s. Millions of "new poor" represent 10% to 35% of the 
population, depending on the country. 
     The growth of casual labour, instability, marginalization 
and insecurity in society are expressed on the political terrain 
by the trend towards a strong state and the restriction of 
democratic freedoms and trade-union rights, as well as by the 
growth of racism, xenophobia, attacks on women's rights, gays, 
and the resurgence of a neo-fascist extreme-right. Torture and 
state terrorism are systematically practiced in more than 60 
countries in the world, some imperialist countries among them. In 
the "Third World," the fight against repression--including 
abductions and disappearances--gives a wider meaning to the 
struggle for democracy today; over 150 years after the formal 
abolition of chattel-slavery. One million people are once more 
enslaved around the world.
     The exploited and oppressed will not let themselves be 
passively dragged towards the catastrophes that threaten their 
future and even their survival. In the last few years, millions 
of women and men have participated in mobilizations against war, 
nuclear weapons and militarism, for the defense of the 
environment, in defense of abortion rights, for the self-
determination of oppressed nations, against racism and neo-
fascism, against austerity and unemployment, against imperialism, 
famine and the scourge of the "Third World" debt, against the 
privileges and dictatorships of the bureaucracies.
     This points to a way out of the crisis that safeguards the 
possibilities of social emancipation and fulfills the liberating 
ideal of human rights, including not only civic and political 
rights, but also social rights--to work, to a decent standard of 
living, to dignity, to healthcare, education and housing.
     Neither the capitalist jungle nor the bureaucratic 
dictatorship can meet this challenge. An international socialist 
solution to the crisis of civilization will be based on the 
overthrow of these systems. The possibility of this comes from 
the combative and innovative potential of the proletariat and the 
oppressed.
     The idea that patient sacrifices and sensible reforms are 
enough to ward off the danger is a deadly illusion. Reformist 
preaching has never prevented crises, avoided wars or contained 
social explosions. And it will never do so in the future. A 
failure to fight has always proven far more costly than struggle.

2. No soft landing out of the depression
     The illusions of those intoxicated by the post-war boom--who 
believed in a peaceful capitalism guaranteeing social justice, 
full employment and continuously rising real wages--have already 
come crashing down. Those who foresee a gradual way out of the 
depression through more patience and more sacrifices by the 
exploited do not understand the intimate link between the 
catastrophes threatening us and the intrinsic logic of a 
generalized market economy, the very essence of capitalism: 
exacerbated competition with no regard for its overall effects on 
society; the never-ending pursuit of short-term profits and the 
drive to accumulate private wealth, without taking into account 
their human costs and the irreparable damage inflicted on nature; 
the extension of competitive and aggressive behaviour in 
relationships between individuals, social groups and states; 
generalized egoism greed and corruption, the law of the jungle 
and the "weakest to the wall"!
     The present long depression is the result of this pitiless 
capitalist logic. It does not exclude phases of economic upturn. 
But such upturns mean an ever-growing transfer of the cost of the 
depression onto the "Third World" and the most destitute in the 
imperialist countries. They do not succeed in reducing 
unemployment even in the rich countries. This is already an 
endless nightmare for the poor and those left on the scrap heap. 
     If, during the decades following the war, the recessions 
have been less drastic than they were during the preceding 50 
years, the trend has been for them to become more severe since 
the 1970s. The international capitalist economy has not succeeded 
in overcoming the dilemma: either increased inflation or 
increased crises of overproduction. A new bank/financial crash of 
the 1931 type, if it remains improbable, is not excluded. 
     Technological development based on the whims of competition 
and profit, or bureaucratic irresponsibility--and not any 
"uncontrollable perversity" of technology or of science in and of 
themselves--is leading us to disaster. This results from the 
subordination of science to the narrow imperatives of short-term 
profit expectations, provoking an apparently irresistible growth 
of intrinsically dangerous technologies. In capitalist society 
decisions which seem rational given the limited concerns of 
individual capitalists, corporations, regions, etc., can turn out 
to have totally irrational and destructive consequences for 
society as a whole. 
     Even if it is illusory to believe in the automatic benefits 
of scientific progress, humanity still does not need less of 
these things, but more science that is in harmony with an 
awareness of long-term social interests and a technology that is 
subject to the collective intelligence and morality of the 
associated producers--which implies the objective of universal 
human emancipation and solidarity. We do not need a return to 
obscurantist superstitions and myths.
     The struggle to win human rights on all continents is at the 
heart of this battle, because in a society where the ruling 
principle is respect for capitalist property and the priority of 
profit, it is simply impossible to guarantee basic democratic and 
social rights for all. The workers' movement must turn the 
campaign for human rights against the bourgeoisie and become the 
most resolute defender of democratic liberties. But it will only 
win confidence and authority if these same principles are applied 
in its own ranks and if it refuses to accept any violation of 
them in countries where it is in power.
     Powerful interests oppose universal disarmament; block a 
solution to the pollution of air, sea, and land; prevent the 
elimination of hunger, misery and the desperate anxiety of 
everyday life; and make it impossible to eliminate alcohol and 
drug addiction which are the murderous antidotes to this anxiety. 
     It is illusory to imagine capitalism without periodic crises 
of over-production (22 since 1825). This means, of course, the 
production of more than can be sold at a profit, not more than 
can be used by human beings. Such a phenomenon is a veritable 
insult to humanity given the billions of people around the world 
whose most basic needs are not satisfied. It is illusory to 
imagine capitalism without unemployment, without poverty, without 
discrimination against women, young people, the aged, immigrants 
and national minorities, without racism or xenophobia. These 
things cannot be avoided tomorrow any more than they were 
yesterday. 
     The growing internationalization of productive forces 
involves a tendency toward the internationalization of capital. 
This implies above all a growing globalization of the main 
problems of humanity which can now only be resolved on a world 
scale through a world socialist federation. 
     But despite its broad temporary hegemony on the 
international political scene, imperialism is incapable of 
mastering this internationalization. Torn apart by 
interimperialist competition which is aggravated by the 
depression, trapped in the framework of existing national states, 
challenged by important sectors of the world population, 
imperialism is unable to actually crush its own people as fascism 
did yesterday. 
     But we do see the development of a strong state, sowing the 
seeds of a racist prefascist culture. In the face of this 
reality, blindness is impermissible. Refusing to clearly see the 
current dangers--along with who and what are responsible for 
them--is just as irresponsible and cowardly today as it was 
before Auschwitz and Hiroshima.

3. Catastrophe is already on the march in the "Third World"
      In the dependent countries, where the vast majority of the 
world's population lives, barbarism is already at work. 
Capitalism cannot be judged simply by looking at the living 
conditions of a small minority of the world's population--the 
middle classes and the highest paid workers in the richest 
countries. 
     With few exceptions, the countries of the Third World have 
suffered a disastrous decline in living standards over the last 
ten years, resulting in sub-human living conditions. 
      Absolute pauperization has often gone beyond that 
experienced in the 1930s, and is less and less cushioned by 
subsistence agriculture. The purchasing power of wage-earners has 
been reduced by around 50%. In the poorest countries, the calorie 
intake of half the population approaches levels that existed in 
Nazi concentration camps of 1940. Endemic unemployment has 
reached up to 40.5% of the potential work force. 
     In these countries fifteen million children die every year 
from hunger, malnutrition and the lack of healthcare and 
medicines. Every five years, this silent massacre claims as many 
victims as World War II--including the holocaust and Hiroshima. 
This is the equivalent of several world wars against children 
since 1945: that is the price paid for capitalism's survival 
during this time.
     The resources to feed, care for, house and educate these 
children certainly exist on a world scale--provided that they are 
not squandered on arms spending, that they are distributed to 
benefit the most destitute and that control over them is taken 
out of the hands of those whose sole consideration is their own 
thirst for private riches. 
     Pollution is now being deliberately exported. "Third World" 
countries are becoming a cheap dustbin for dangerous, non-
recyclable industrial waste. There is growing desertification, 
faster destruction of tropical rain forests and the transfer to 
poorer countries of industries that are particularly harmful to 
the environment. All of this rapidly creates even worse 
ecological disasters than those already affecting the richer 
countries.
     The search for hard currency to finance debt and the 
systematic development of export agriculture to the detriment of 
staple food crops for domestic use worsen trends of malnutrition 
and famine. The poor countries are now exporting capital to the 
rich ones. And this does not even take the effects of corruption 
into account, the embezzling of funds and public grants by "Third 
World" ruling classes for private gain. A concentrated expression 
of dependence and under-development, the debt's iron vice 
strangles the poorest of the poor above all.
     The struggle against the debt--for the immediate and 
complete cancellation of both principle and interest--starts with 
day-to-day opposition to prevailing policies of wage austerity 
which exercises a terrible pressure on purchasing power, to 
massive cuts in public education and health budgets ordered by 
the International Monetary Fund, to the broader dismantling of 
the public sector and to ecological havoc tied to the savage 
penetration of capital. 
     Workers, peasants and the underprivileged of the towns and 
shanty-towns have resisted this unbearable deterioration in their 
living conditions. In Latin America, Asia and Africa there have 
been successive waves of strikes, land occupations, peasant 
revolts and urban explosions of pauperized and marginalized 
masses. There have also been electoral victories, general 
strikes, community struggles, attempts at political and trade-
union organization independent of the state and the bourgeoisie, 
as well as some efforts to create pockets of armed resistance.

4. The crisis of the USSR, and Eastern countries
     This crisis has been maturing for years. Mikhail Gorbachev's 
policy did not provoke it, but simply brought it out into the 
open. In the USSR and Eastern Europe, it was manifest 
particularly in a slow-down of economic growth; in increasingly 
pronounced technological backwardness compared with the 
imperialist countries; in social stagnation and regression, in 
the appearance of new, widespread poverty; in deep moral and 
ecological crises; and in the brutal loss of credibility of 
political institutions.
     Added to this were the growing absence of a motivation to 
work, a pronounced decline in social engagement--a turning back 
toward private life and conformism in important sectors of the 
masses--which undeniably prolonged the life of the bureaucratic 
dictatorship. These tendencies were only partially and 
insufficiently compensated for by a rebirth of workers' self 
confidence confined to the level of the enterprise and by a 
rebirth of autonomous public opinion within small groups. 
     This crisis represents neither a crisis of capitalist over-
production, nor a crisis of socialism. 
     Capitalism presupposes that not only labor power, but also 
the large means of production must constitute commodities, which 
can be bought and sold on the market. It presupposes that money 
capital is the point of departure and the goal of reproduction. 
But none of this has characterized the economy of the ex-USSR.
     Real socialism is inseparable from a high productivity of 
labor and a satisfaction of the consumer needs of the masses. It 
presupposes the greatest democracy for the largest numbers of 
people, the free confrontation of ideas, the independence of mass 
organizations from parties and from the state, the exercise of 
power by the masses themselves and self-management. Socialism has 
never existed in any of these countries. Associating the word 
socialism with bureaucratic monstrosities--such as the Gulag; 
growing inequalities; generalized corruption; reinforcing women's 
confinement within the nuclear family; and stifling bureaucratic 
control of young people, science and literary and artistic 
creation--was not the least of Stalin's crimes.
      This is a specific crisis of a post-capitalist transitional 
society, crushed by the weight of a privileged and parasitic 
bureaucracy which has usurped power from the workers. The crisis 
has been characterized by an increasingly explosive contradiction 
between the fragments and the potential of social progress, on 
the one hand, and the economic chaos, inequality, oppression and 
corruption resulting from bureaucratic dictatorship on the other. 
     To save its political power, the source of its privileges, 
the bureaucracy can undertake reforms. But, in spite of any 
initial success, the attempted reforms of Tito, Khrushchev, Mao 
and Deng all reached a dead end. Gorbachev's efforts suffered the 
same fate. But they had already made possible a deep social 
differentiation, including within the bureaucracy. We have thus 
seen in the USSR the emergence of political and social forces 
inclined towards capitalism as well as a reawakening of mass 
activity at the base of the workers' movement. This is 
unprecedented since the Stalinist counter-revolution.
     The way in which the masses in Eastern Europe and the USSR 
reacted to the growing crisis changed gradually from the end of 
the 1970s to the beginning of the 1980s. Revolutionary Marxists 
were very late in recognizing that change. The attitude of the 
masses affected the short or medium term possibility for an 
outcome favorable to socialism. Of course, one important factor 
in this was the continuing repression. Intellectuals and 
especially working class dissidents were severely attacked and 
gradually broken. The repression wiped out the socialist 
potential that was present in Solidarnosc during 1980-81. But 
what was really new in the equation was the objective results of 
the system's growing crisis which started to manifest themselves 
during these years. The masses' living conditions began to 
deteriorate. They became more and more aware of the bankruptcy of 
bureaucratized state semi-planning and pseudo-planning, which 
they mistakenly identified with socialist planning, because of 
the bureaucracy's claim to represent "really existing 
socialism"--a claim that was, furthermore, endorsed by bourgeois 
propaganda.
     In addition, the failure of the international working class 
movement to rally in support of previous anti-bureaucratic 
struggles between 1953 and 1981 contributed to this process. When 
the Eastern European bureaucratic states finally crumbled the 
insurgent mass movement looked not to the world working class but 
to the international bourgeoisie, for both ideological and 
material sustenance.
     As a result of these factors, the continuity between the 
East German uprising of 1953, the Polish workers mass upsurge of 
1956, the Hungarian revolution of 1956, the "Prague spring" of 
1968-69 and the socialist self-management potential of the 
workers explosion in Poland of 1980-81, was broken. By the time 
the Stalinist (post-Stalinist) dictatorships collapsed, the East 
European masses no longer had any independent political class 
alternative that they could turn to. The initiative was left 
exclusively to the various factions of the bureaucracy, including 
its openly pro-capitalist tendencies, and the "liberals"--new 
middle and petty-bourgeois layers who favor the "free market" for 
reasons of private accumulation.
     By crushing basic democratic freedoms and individual 
liberty, the bureaucratic regimes have given all bourgeois 
political institutions--falsely identified with "democracy"--a 
new value in the eyes of the masses. But even the first attempts 
at privatization and openings to international capital, the 
beginning of capitalist restoration, has meant harsh austerity 
policies. A full restoration of capitalism would represent a 
historical regression with catastrophic social 
consequences--adding tens of millions of unemployed and 
impoverished people to the present "new poor" in these countries. 
The more the new regimes push in that direction, the greater 
becomes the likelihood of fierce mass resistance, especially 
among workers and youth. We can expect generalized resistance 
against attempts to worsen the conditions of women, particularly 
attacks on abortion rights. Faced with such resistance, the 
supporters of all out economic liberalization, far from 
maintaining even the present forms of democracy, will be forced 
to resort more and more to new restrictions of democratic 
liberties, indeed to authoritarian repression if the balance of 
forces permits. 
     The generalization and consolidation of these rights 
requires institutionalized workers and popular power. In the 
absence of this type of power, given the magnitude which mass 
resistance can be expected to take, there will be a protracted 
period of chaotic instability in these countries, during which 
the conditions for a workers victory might gradually mature.
     Therefore, in the USSR and Eastern Europe it will take some 
time and experience in struggle before workers can reconquer 
their political class independence and the level of consciousness 
necessary for such a victory.

5. The transition to socialism excludes the rule of the market
     Faced with a massive economic crisis in the USSR and Eastern 
Europe, significant sections of the working population--East and 
West--are today resigned to the idea that the domination of the 
market is a lesser evil than bureaucratic chaos. From that to 
extolling a "market socialism" is only a step, one that has been 
taken by nearly all the reformist and neo-reformist ideologues. 
     But the idea of "market socialism" is a contradiction in 
terms. In a truly socialist society, freely-associated producers 
will themselves determine what they produce, how they produce it 
and how they distribute it--at least in their main outlines. 
Democratic management of the economy, conscious and collective 
determination of what priorities to satisfy and the means to get 
there, is incompatible with the blind rule of the market and 
competition.
     Before the communist society of abundance--that is the 
fulfillment of all rational human needs--comes into being, any 
economic system will always be constrained by a relative shortage 
of productive resources. This means that certain needs must be 
met at the expense of others. Those who control the social 
surplus product--ruling classes, or castes like the Soviet 
bureaucracy--have the power to decide, in the final analysis, the 
priorities in the use of those resources that are still 
relatively scarce.
     In capitalist society, these decisions are taken by the big 
companies and the very rich, that is by the imperative needs of 
profit and accumulation of private capital. The "laws of the 
market" are refracted by these constraints and necessities. 
Luxury second homes are built while there are millions of 
homeless people even in the so-called rich countries. There are 
1.7 billion people without access to running water while there 
are hundreds of thousands of private swimming pools in California 
alone. Massive investment is made in producing less and less 
useful--sometimes dangerous--gadgets while even the most 
elementary needs of several billion human beings remain 
unsatisfied.
     In the bureaucratically-dominated Soviet Union and similar 
economies, these priorities in the use of resources were imposed 
in a despotic and arbitrary manner, which led to enormous and 
growing waste.
     In a socialized economy managed by the 
producers/consumers/citizens themselves, however, these 
priorities will be democratically decided by the toiling masses. 
The priority needs thus determined will be the basis of the plan. 
Democratic socialist planning is indispensable for ensuring that 
these priorities are respected. It can prevent economic trends 
from imposing themselves "spontaneously" behind the backs of the 
workers, and ensure that they are consciously 
determined--particularly in questions of employment; the duration 
and intensity of work; growing equality; priorities in health, 
education, protection of the environment and culture. It is this 
relationship between planned, democratic self-management and the 
satisfaction of consumer needs which makes a real socialist 
economy superior to capitalism--even in its "welfare state" 
guise. This is linked with a combination of diverse forms of 
property, municipal and regional collective property for the 
large means of production and exchange, cooperative and private 
property for the smaller.
     The associated producers will liberate an enormous potential 
of creative and inventive work processes, of careful and thrifty 
managers--when they see in practice that this can ensure freely 
available, high quality goods and services. From this point the 
"enterprise spirit," in the rational sense of the term, which 
under capitalism and the rule of the market is the preserve of a 
small minority of private property owners (usually less than 10% 
of the active population in the most industrialized countries), 
will be extended to the vast majority of producers. Basing itself 
on the enormous potential of computer technology, further 
encouraged by the possibility of a radical reduction in the work 
week and an increasing socialization of domestic tasks, taking 
into account all ecological considerations, the self-managed, 
democratically-planned socialist economy will show itself to be 
more efficient, more rational and more humane than the most 
advanced capitalist economy.
     The Yugoslav experience has tragically confirmed that 
"workers' self-management"--limited to one firm--and market 
economy are mutually exclusive in the long term. Workers could 
benefit from important prerogatives at a factory level, including 
the power to fire their manager. But as soon as the factory's 
future depends on its market performance, which in turn depends 
on a myriad of factors independent of the workers' will 
(including the initial technological level, the extent of the 
product's monopoly, the differentiated access to credit, the no 
less differentiated access to hard currency allowing the import 
of machines, raw materials and spare parts), these workers can 
find themselves penalized by the market regardless of their 
efforts. Their workplace may even be driven to bankruptcy. What 
will then remain of self-management, except the workers' "right" 
to fire themselves?
     In the transition from capitalism to socialism, recourse to 
market mechanisms remains necessary and useful, especially in 
sectors where an insufficient objective socialization of work 
means that the basis has not yet been laid for collective 
ownership: handicraft industries, some distribution and service 
sectors (such as repairs), and so on. The market can serve to 
eliminate shortage by breaking monopolies that fail to take 
consumer needs sufficiently into account in agriculture, retail 
trade and certain services--on condition that private monopolies 
do not begin to substitute for state monopoly. 
     But this recourse to the market can only be positive in the 
framework of a conscious effort to gradually reduce such 
relations and to ensure the rule of a multi-party socialist 
democracy which leaves, in all spheres, power of decision in the 
hands of the masses. The use of a stable currency and the partial 
and provisional functioning of the market must therefore take 
place within a democratically planned economy--that is to say a 
combination of political decision-making which guarantees that 
the partial market mechanisms do not increase social inequality 
or undermine the system of social protection that assures every 
citizen the satisfaction of basic needs and does not worsen the 
conditions of women who are particularly vulnerable both as 
workers and as consumers. This assumes a strengthening of 
socialist democracy, of public control over all aspects of 
economic and social life. 
     Without real political control by the workers, even the 
partial strengthening of market mechanisms--far from going in the 
direction of openness and democratization--would reinforce 
bureaucratization and corruption in the state apparatus, the risk 
of political expropriation of the proletariat by privileged 
layers.
     None of these problems can be resolved through 
preestablished schemas or simplistic formulas. Revolutionary 
Marxists approach them in an open and undogmatic way, wanting to 
learn from practical experience and adjusting their positions 
over time according to that experience, constantly exchanging 
views with other progressive currents and with the most combative 
sections of the masses in these countries.
     The construction of socialism is a long-term process, a 
genuine historical laboratory in which there is no predetermined 
path nor any infallible pope to guide history. Mistakes are 
inevitable.
     The power of the masses to overcome mistakes through a broad 
socialist democracy, and the determination of revolutionaries to 
make sure that their practice conforms strictly with their 
principles, are the main guarantees that such errors will be 
rapidly corrected and will not hold back the march of progress.

6. Wage labour remains alienated labour
     The bourgeoisie prides itself today, especially in the 
imperialist countries, on having successfully "integrated" the 
workers both as consumers and as citizens. One can question the 
degree to which this has actually happened, but the claim 
certainly has some basis in fact. The long suppression of 
democratic freedoms in the bureaucratically dominated countries, 
as well as their incapacity to satisfy the masses' needs for high 
quality consumer goods, lends additional support to bourgeois 
propaganda in this field.
     However, in the light of experience over the last decades no 
one can claim that capitalism, even in its richest and most 
"enlightened" form, has been able to convince workers to accept 
their role as producers in bourgeois society. Wage labour is 
doomed to remain alienated labour, trapped by each capitalist 
firms' search for profits. Workers' needs remain subordinate to 
the bottom line. They remain constantly under threat of temporary 
or permanent unemployment, the fear and reality of income loss in 
the event of sickness, infirmity and old age.
     Wage labour is inevitably linked to social inequality. 
Whether wages are low or high they are always spent in immediate 
or delayed consumption. They do not enable the workers to 
accumulate financial fortunes making it possible for them to live 
without having to work. This remains the privilege of the 
capitalist class.
     There is also inequality in the fulfillment of consumer 
needs--especially housing, health care, education and culture. 
Social inequality under capitalism is also inequality of sickness 
and death.
     But wage labour is above all alienating and alienated in the 
labour process itself. In order to subordinate labour to the 
needs of profit, capital must subject wage workers to constant 
control during the production process. It must try to control the 
use of their time on the job. Workers are slaves of the machine 
and the clock, more and more in the office and in service 
industries as well as in the industrial plant.
     Even when new forms of work organization in industry, like 
the so-called "quality circles" and small team work, are 
substituted for the conveyor belt system--and this has only 
happened up to now in a minority of work places--workers do not 
become masters of the production process. They still do not 
determine what is made, how it is made, or by whom it will be 
consumed. Whether this is accomplished flagrantly or subtilely, 
they remain cogs in the machine, bossed over by a hierarchy of 
petty and high-ranking masters.
     Under wage labour, output and profits remain goals in and of 
themselves. Productive activity is not a means to develop the 
whole creative potential of all working women and men. It remains 
essentially a way to acquire money.
     It is not surprising, under these conditions, that the great 
majority of wage earners, having become alienated human beings as 
a result of their main daily activity, also remain frustrated and 
alienated as consumers. Mass culture more and more takes the form 
of passively absorbing images (such as from television) rather 
than actively engaging the mind through reading or genuine social 
interaction. It is not at all remarkable that people increasingly 
look for a way out of their daily frustration through alcohol and 
drugs, trying to drown fatigue, monotony, solitude and the lack 
of hope. 
     No society producing such effects can be a free society. 
Human freedom can only be based upon an abolition of wage labour.
     The universal alienation of men and women especially 
includes their separation from the natural environment. Living in 
an increasingly artificial milieu removed from nature, they face 
growing barriers to understanding the way humanity and nature 
interact.
     It also includes an alienation of human nature itself, a 
negation of the human being as a social and political animal 
prioritizing richer and richer relations with other human beings, 
and no longer subordinating this to the irrational accumulation 
of less and less useful material goods.
     The disalienation of work is neither a pious wish nor a 
fantasy. It is the goal of the real movement of opposition to all 
forms of exploitation and oppression which develops in the very 
heart of the existing society, even if in a fragmentary manner.
     Revolutionary socialists do not approach this real movement 
with preestablished criteria. We do not judge it according to 
whether or not it can be coopted by the established order, is 
gradualist or non-gradualist. Given its emancipatory nature it 
has the potential to strike at the very heart of bourgeois 
society (active strikes). The task of revolutionary socialists is 
to realize this potential and to stimulate it through our support 
and through practical political and theoretical initiatives. We 
try above all to progressively unify this movement until it 
attacks the bourgeois disorder in its entirety.

II. Obstacles to be overcome
7. Socialism's crisis of credibility 
     The exploited and the oppressed continue to put up 
resistance against the evils of imperialism, capitalism and the 
bureaucratic dictatorships. But for the moment, that resistance 
is combined with a generalized crisis of credibility regarding 
the possibility of a socialist solution. This has been developing 
for at least a decade.
     This crisis has its roots in a new awareness on the part of 
both the broad masses and their most politically advanced 
vanguard layers that there is a complete practical and political 
bankruptcy of both Stalinism (post-Stalinism) and social-
democratic reformism, as well as of populist nationalism in the 
"Third World." Therefore, no model for overall social 
reorganization, is considered realizable by masses of people 
today. This fact not only eliminates the reference to the Russian 
October revolution in mass consciousness, but even the hope, very 
widespread since before World War I, that socialism, i.e. a 
classless society fundamentally different from capitalism, could 
be realized through an accumulation of electoral successes and 
reforms.
     Under these conditions, many mass struggles are tending to 
become fragmented. Workers often participate in them as private 
citizens or isolated individuals, not feeling a connection to the 
workers movement.
     Socialism's crisis of credibility is, however, not absolute. 
It has a stronger grip in countries with a traditional mass 
labour movement--where the burden of past disappointments, 
disenchantments and defeats weighs heavily. Places like Brazil, 
South Africa, South Korea, are characterized by a relatively 
young and fresh proletariat, unburdened by such concerns. The 
crisis likewise tends to be less pronounced in certain South 
Asian countries.
     Women have never identified as strongly with the traditional 
workers organizations because these organizations have for 
decades tended to ignore women's specific concerns and a 
predominantly male leadership has almost universally expressed 
patronizing and dismissive attitudes. Therefore, women involved 
in struggle today are also less likely to be discouraged by this 
crisis of credibility. In addition, older generations are more 
likely to suffer from it than younger ones.
     But, whatever its weight may be, the negative effects of the 
crisis are noticeable everywhere. To understand the reasons for 
this, two essential factors must be appreciated.
     For one thing, broad masses became aware for the first time 
during the eighties of the recent grave crimes of Stalinism (the 
repression of Polish Solidarnosc, Pol Pot's crimes in Kampuchea; 
the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan; the repression of Tienanmen 
square, etc). The same decade saw the most shameful capitulation 
by Social Democracy in the face of the employers' austerity 
offensive (France, the Spanish state, Portugal, Holland, 
Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Austria, New Zealand, Sweden, 
Greece, Finland, etc.)
     Under these circumstances, the attachment of the working 
class to its traditional mass parties--already more tenuous than 
in the past--took a qualitative turn. Less and less do such 
parties embody the hope of a breakthrough towards socialism. They 
are now viewed as essentially a "lesser evil" choice, subject to 
wider and wider fluctuations in the votes they receive.
     In addition, the past decade has not seen generalized mass 
struggles with an anti-capitalist potential. This is quite 
different from what happened in the sixties and seventies. There 
has not been a single victorious revolution since Nicaragua in 
1979. There has not been a single revolutionary explosion in an 
imperialist country since the Portuguese revolution, nor a 
prolonged general strike. there has not been a generalized 
workers upsurge in the East against bureaucratic dictatorship 
since the Solidarnosc explosion in Poland of 1980-81.
     The skepticism of the masses with regard to an alternative 
social model is thus fed not only by the obvious political 
bankruptcy of the traditional Stalinist, post-Stalinist and 
Social-democratic apparatuses. It also reflects an instinctive 
awareness of a deterioration in the relationship of class forces 
on a global scale, at the expense of the proletariat. This is 
undeniable--although it is less severe and universal than various 
propagandists make it appear--and it puts a brake on any overall 
political commitment by broad masses of workers and other 
oppressed peoples. 

8. Consumer society and privatization
     The long post-war "boom" has been accompanied in most 
imperialist countries, and to a lesser degree in some semi-
industrialized dependent countries, by an increased capacity of 
the "middle classes" and the upper strata of wage earners to buy 
durable consumer goods. In fact, the massive sales of houses, 
household equipment and automobiles--very often on credit--fueled 
that "boom" to a large extent. The resulting transformation of 
consumer habits takes the form of an increased turning inward, or 
"privatization" of individuals.
     One should not radically condemn this transformation of 
consumer habits. Its partially liberating dynamic--especially for 
women, yesterday condemned to back-breaking housework --is 
undeniable. It is profoundly reactionary to assume that access to 
a minimum of comfort implies "becoming bourgeois." No serious 
socialist ever preached deliberate self-denial. Women and men 
need not be doomed to produce their livelihood by the sweat of 
their brows.
     The echoing of such superstition by certain radical 
ecologists is likewise unjustified. It is false to assert that 
there is not enough in the world to assure all its inhabitants a 
minimum of comfort. The earth can feed the world population 
foreseen for the beginning of the 21st century. Such goals can be 
reached if existing resources are rationally used; if waste and 
the output of harmful goods, weapons to start with, are radically 
suppressed; if enough resources are devoted to discover new 
environmentally friendly sources of energy, technologies and 
products to substitute for the present system of waste and 
pollution. It is simply inhuman to defend economic choices which 
deliberately sacrifice present human needs and even survival on 
the altar of some alleged priority of future generations--which 
nobody can precisely define today.
     But the positive effects of increased consumption among some 
layers of the working population also have their negative 
counterparts which erect new obstacles on the road to 
emancipation.
     Capital's control over the output of durable consumer goods 
leads to growing waste and irrational use of resources. 
Individual consumption is encouraged at the expense of collective 
consumption (social services). The quality of products is 
systematically undermined in order to make rapid replacements 
necessary. Artificial "needs" are stimulated. Frenetic over-
consumption of "new products" is promoted through advertising and 
market techniques, exploding the myth of "consumer freedom." Late 
capitalism breeds a permanent atmosphere of unsatisfied needs, 
which feeds a permanent generalized frustration.
     In addition, growing privatization in the sphere of 
consumption more and more deprives individuals of the elementary 
fabric of human relations. The rule of crude egoism, of "every 
person for her or himself," which is already a source of 
unbalance, crisis and growing irrationality in the realms of 
output, of income and of work, now extends its havoc to the 
spheres of consumption and leisure.
     This privatization plunges people into an even deeper 
solitude, cynicism and psychological depression by reducing their 
capacity for mutual communication, affection and reciprocal 
sympathy--things which become possible when life revolves around 
a collective unit, be it large or small. This creates new and 
serious obstacles on the road of acquiring socialist 
consciousness, of engaging in the fight for a qualitatively 
superior social order. These obstacles are not insurmountable, 
but they are real. Concrete strategies to overcome them must be 
worked out.
     In the "Third World" countries, the striving for a "consumer 
society" is above all manifested in the urban centers. This is 
less a result of a growth in income--except for a very small 
minority of the population--as it is of the overwhelming image of 
"the consumer model" of the metropolitan countries disseminated 
through the media (radio and TV). In rural areas, this tendency 
is much less pronounced.

9. The decline of the "counter-cultures"
     The tendency towards privatization and the connected, 
generalized decline in collective modes of thought and action 
among sectors of the toiling masses has had its severest result 
in a decline of working class "counter-culture" in the more 
industrialized countries.
     The ruling ideology in any class society is the ideology of 
its ruling class. It would be an illusion to hope that the 
proletariat, deprived of sufficient economic power, could conquer 
ideological hegemony before overthrowing bourgeois society. But 
stating that bourgeois ideology is the ruling ideology in 
bourgeois society does not imply that it is the only one. At 
least three ideologies coexist there: that of the bourgeoisie, 
that of pre-capitalist classes, and a working class "counter-
culture" which is at least partially inspired by socialist 
values.
     The extent of this counter-culture varies from period to 
period and from country to country (in certain countries even 
from region to region). But during the epoch of a growing mass 
labour movement, from the 1890s until the 1950s, it was, in its 
own way, hegemonic among workers in numerous imperialist 
countries and in several semi-industrialized ones. 
     This "counter-culture" was based upon the values of 
solidarity and cooperation. It influenced, inspired, gave hope 
and perspective to tens of millions of human beings. To a large 
extent it determined their daily behaviour.
     It was institutionalized in a network of organizations 
encompassing children, youth, adults, retired people, throughout 
most of their lives: trade-unions, political parties, People's 
Houses, pioneers (children), youth and women's organizations, 
societies for mutual protection against illness and disability, 
sport organizations, theatrical societies, choirs and musical 
ensembles, chess clubs and other leisure groups. The mass trade-
unions were the most important of these organizations. Together 
they encouraged at least a beginning of political consciousness 
and of electoral choices, even if they didn't determine these 
things directly.
     With privatization resulting in a "consumer society," this 
network began to come apart. The mass trade-unions were less 
undermined than other organizations, but they too have been 
weakened. All the other networks suffered a decline, some a 
disastrous one.
     What happened to the workers' press is the most dramatic 
expression of this process. In the past, there were more than 100 
daily papers published by the labour movement around the world, 
with a press-run in the millions. Today, those social-democratic 
parties which are still powerful on the electoral front, like the 
German SPD, the British Labour Party, the Austrian SP, not to 
mention the French and Spanish social-democrats, all of whom 
score around 40% of the popular vote, do not have a single daily 
paper left.
     This decline of the working class "counter-culture" has 
certainly not been accompanied by an immediate parallel decline 
of votes for the reformist workers parties. It is even consistent 
with occasional increases in votes by workers for these parties 
as "lesser evils." But the decline means that sectors of the 
working class are more susceptible to "solutions" inspired by 
narrow self-interest, and thus to reactionary demagogy. The 
expanding influence of racist and xenophobic ideologies and of 
far-right formations in certain minority sectors of the 
proletariat demonstrate this dangerous trend. And this is all the 
more true since the traditional workers' parties make scandalous 
concessions for purely electoral purposes.
     In the countries of the "Third World" the cohesion at the 
heart of the village community, even where it is undermined by 
the caste system as in India or by a growing social 
differentiation, has also constituted a serious counterweight, 
blocking a total domination by prevailing bourgeois ideology and 
values. 
     In the former USSR and Eastern Europe, the decline of a 
workers' culture and of the value-system properly associated with 
it has very specific causes: all of the monstrous discredit that 
the Stalinist and post-Stalinist dictatorships have brought down 
on communism, on Marxism, on socialism, which have been 
identified wrongly but effectively with the misdeeds of the 
dictatorship. The result has been a profound ideological/moral 
crisis which in its early stages undermines, in these countries 
also, the inclination of the masses to counterpose themselves to 
the ideological values of the bourgeoisie.
     Reactionary and retrograde ideological tendencies invade the 
vacuum thus created: superstition; religious fundamentalism; 
chauvinism; the cult of violence; the open rejection of universal 
human rights; opposition to equality of the sexes and contempt 
for women; xenophobia and especially racism--contempt, if not 
hatred with regard to a substantial part of the inhabitants of 
the planet.
     To say that the decline of countercultures based on 
cooperation and collective solidarity has this negative character 
is not the same as rejecting the right of individuals to develop 
their own personality. "Collectivism" and "individualism" need 
not be counterposed to each other. What can be counterposed is a 
socioeconomic collectivism that creates the indispensable 
material framework for the emancipation of all, and bourgeois 
individualism which only assures the material possibility of 
individual freedom for a small minority of society. 

10. The new stage in the crisis of working class leadership and 
its objective roots 
     The crisis of humanity is, in the final analysis, a crisis 
of working class leadership and class consciousness. The Fourth 
International proclaimed this truth at its founding conference, 
in the "Transitional Programme." Nothing has happened since 1938 
to refute that historical diagnosis; quite the contrary.
     But socialism's crisis of credibility, already lasting for a 
decade, adds a new dimension to this crisis of leadership and 
consciousness. The weakening control of the traditional 
apparatuses on the working class, especially in factories and 
offices, in the trade unions, in the "new social 
movements"--something which is incontestable--has not, for the 
most part led to the emergence of new mass parties on their left, 
nor to a serious strengthening of revolutionary organizations.
     The masses are generally skeptical about any broad social 
project distinct from "welfare state" capitalism. This tends to 
fragment mass protest and revolt. And that, in turn, reduces 
their duration and facilitates the process of mass sentiment 
being recaptured electorally by the traditional apparatuses.
     For the same reason, the centralization of experiences and 
the accumulation of cadres--even the maintenance of an average 
level of militancy--become more difficult. On a world scale tens 
if not hundreds of thousands of active and exemplary 
militants--cadres and leaders of workers, feminist and anti-
militarist struggles, movements of solidarity with "third world" 
peoples--have broken in recent years with the Communist and 
social-democratic parties. But in the present context, most are 
skeptical about the possibility of creating something better. 
They retire to local or occasional activities, or to private 
life.
     This represents a serious loss from the point of view of 
rapidly reconstructing strong revolutionary organizations. It 
also represents a serious loss for the class as a whole, as these 
militants and cadres embody a treasure-house of experience in 
struggle.
     The objective and subjective causes of this trend must be 
understood.
     Since the 1970s, there has been a gradual change in 
traditional conditions of employment, of labor organization, and 
of class struggle--especially in the older industrialized 
countries. A massive shift from manufacturing and mining jobs to 
those in the service sector has taken place. This included a 
partial reduction of the numbers employed in the largest 
factories. Labour organization based on the assembly line, which 
made possible embryonic forms of workers' control over the work 
rhythm is less and less the norm.
     An inherent part of the transformation of the capitalist 
economy has been a progressive feminization of waged work. The 
growing possibilities for women to obtain an independent income 
through such means is certainly a step toward their emancipation. 
At the same time, however, in most cases this is accompanied by a 
worsening of their material conditions (the double work day) in 
view of the difficulty they have involving men in domestic tasks 
and the absence of a satisfactory network of social institutions 
to take responsibility for a good part of traditional housework. 
It increasingly subjects them to the constraints of alienated and 
mechanized work which is now more and more becoming a reality in 
the service sector where women are predominantly employed.
     The situation is, moreover, marked by a pronounced lag in 
the feminization of the trade unions. That makes it all the more 
difficult for women to get paid the true value of their labor, or 
even to organize a fight around this question. 
     Simultaneously, there has been an increased 
bureaucratization of traditional workers organizations, and their 
bureaucracies are more and more tied to state and para-state 
bodies. Some of these governmental institutions have even become 
the main prop of traditional workers parties, at the expense of 
their ties to the workers themselves.
     Flowing from this is a growing crisis of identification by 
important sections of the working class with the organized 
workers movement, as well as a growing internal crisis of that 
movement itself.
     Workers were suddenly confronted with new conditions. They 
were not able to react spontaneously in a massive way. They were 
thus thrown on the defensive by the generalized employer and 
government attack, to which their traditional organizations 
largely capitulated. This has led to a widespread disorientation.
     While the low point of this retreat seems to be behind us, 
time and at least a little success in defensive struggles will be 
necessary before these subjective effects can be overcome.
     Despite this, the response of workers to the capitalist 
offensive already begins to adopt new radical forms: active 
strikes; broadening of strike actions in order to involve 
consumers; increasingly "subversive" attitudes towards the state. 
     Gradually, the workers movement will reestablish itself on a 
new foundation, in all probability based on a growing convergence 
by more combative sectors of the mass movement, fighters for 
women's rights, the most visionary layers of the youth, and 
groups of workers who are today outside organized labor--combined 
with radicalizing sectors of the new social movements. 
     The essential task for revolutionary socialists is not only 
to participate in this radicalization, to stimulate and help 
organize it, but also to overcome its fragmentation and its still 
occasional character, to generalize it, and to help the workers' 
fight back rediscover the road to and the values of generalized 
solidarity, to deepen it by prioritizing the defense of the most 
vulnerable sectors of the class: women, immigrant workers, 
oppressed nationalities, youth, unemployed, old-age pensioners, 
the sick and disabled. The necessity is posed of reorganizing 
permanent structures and new networks of struggle.
     The undeniable rise in the living standards of many workers 
during the post-war "boom" has nourished conservative reflexes 
among some--in both the positive and negative sense of that term. 
They tend to give priority to a defense of their own economic and 
social position even if this is sometimes interpreted to mean 
making alliances with their own ruling class rather than with 
other oppressed and exploited peoples. Again it will take time to 
overcome this obstacle to genuine solidarity which, in the end, 
is even an obstacle to the defense of those past gains it is 
intended to preserve. The attack on the living standard of these 
layers, which is inevitable if the present depression continues, 
is one factor which will force working people to confront this 
dilemma.
     Finally, after 1975 the possibility existed for many 
"veterans" of struggles in 1968 and later years to successfully 
find a place for themselves in bourgeois society (a possibility 
which is destined to decline in coming years). This meant a loss 
of numerous precious activists who could be expected to 
participate in and support working class struggles, and a loss of 
militants and cadres for revolutionary organizations .
     But the countervailing trends and forces are also important. 
In the long run they favour a positive solution to the crises of 
revolutionary leadership and of proletarian consciousness.
     Except during exceptional, revolutionary moments in history 
revolutionaries are always in a minority among wage earners. The 
proletariat has always been strongly influenced by bourgeois and 
petty-bourgeois ideologies, as a result of the very contradictory 
reality of bourgeois society itself. 
     In the difficult but exalting uphill historical struggle of 
reformulating the socialist perspective and making it credible 
again in the eyes of a large vanguard and broader mass movement, 
revolutionary socialists start today with some advantages which 
their grandparents did not enjoy. The hold of the traditional 
bureaucratic apparatuses on the class is weaker than in the 
twenties, thirties and forties. The barbaric, inhuman character 
of imperialism/capitalism and its so-called "values" is much more 
widely recognized. Broad sectors of the youth tend to question 
them in a radical way.
     It is up to socialists to take advantage of this new 
situation, to conduct a struggle that is vital for the future of 
the human species: to transform the proletariat once more into 
the battering ram of the fight against capitalism. A victory in 
this is not at all assured. It will require much hard work, 
imagination, and sacrifice. It will be long and difficult. But it 
is both possible and necessary to undertake the struggle. 

III. The goal: total emancipation
11. The overall purpose
     A radical solution of the world crisis involves challenging 
the generalized market economy, private ownership of the means of 
production and exchange, production for profit, the sovereignty 
of nation states and the bureaucratic grip over systems of social 
protection. All of this implies a democratic, pluralist, self-
managing world socialist federation.
     The real potential inherent in human intelligence and 
generosity can blossom only under a genuinely socialist and 
democratic regime--where science and technology are at the 
service of human needs, and submitted to open and critical public 
control. All the benefits of culture and higher education will be 
completely and freely available to everyone for the first time. 
This will result in an explosion of cultural creativity, the 
liberation of a gigantic reserve of still-unexplored intellectual 
energy. Scientific development will contribute to liberating 
women and men from the burden of fragmented, repetitive, 
mechanical, monotonous work which is physically and mentally 
destructive. But this demands that technology be used creatively, 
which is inconceivable without accountable, collective behaviour 
of freely-associated producers and without generalized planned 
self-management.
     A different motivation for economic activity can gradually 
come about based on the interests of all in a continuous 
reduction of mechanical, repetitive work, experienced by most 
simply as forced labour. The realization of a new citizenship, 
for the first time establishing society's control over a state 
and administrative apparatus destined to wither away, requires a 
radical reduction in working hours. A 4-hour day would 
effectively eliminate the need for a professional bureaucracy, 
allowing workers sufficient time to truly manage society 
themselves. Without this, self-management remains largely a 
fiction. Implementing it will have a powerful impact on the 
entire world. This pilot measure of the socialist revolution--at 
least in industrialized countries--is not a utopia. There is a 
solid objective basis for it. 
     Even conservative sources estimate that at least 50% of the 
total productive potential is unused or used for destructive and 
harmful ends (arms), or simply wasted. With the rational and 
productive use of already existing resources, respecting 
ecological needs, it would be possible to simultaneously reduce 
the hours of work, move towards the abolition of misery and 
under-development in the "Third World," while also improving the 
quality of life and eliminating poverty in all countries. 
     Today, a significant minority already questions the so-
called "work ethic," along with the goal of accumulating more and 
more material goods, as the supreme purpose of human existence. 
For millions, to work less in order to have a more purposeful 
life is becoming a higher priority than simply pursuing a less 
and less meaningful increase in consumption. For millions of 
women and men who have become conscious of the threatening 
ecological catastrophe, the quality of life, protection of the 
environment, a respect for the natural world of which we are an 
integral part, the conquest of human dignity, have become higher 
priorities than the unlimited accumulation of material things.
     The overall goal which we pursue is the increased 
emancipation of all human beings from every form of exploitation, 
oppression, alienation and violence which today bear down on us. 
Socialism will be self-administrative, democratic, pluralist, 
multi-party, feminist, ecologist, anti-militarist, 
internationalist, and it will abolish wage labor--or it will 
never exist.
     This implies most importantly that all of the requirements 
of the broadest socialist democracy be realized, that the 
election and replacement of governments depend on a genuinely 
free choice--with a choice, therefore, between diverse 
possibilities--based on universal suffrage.

12. Only the proletariat can construct a society without classes
     Men and women wage workers, forced to sell their labour 
power, represent the only social force capable of finally 
paralyzing and overthrowing capitalist society on a world scale 
and successfully building a new society based on the cooperation 
and solidarity of the vast majority of the population. This is 
why the working class, thus defined, is the backbone of unity 
among all the exploited and oppressed in the struggle for 
socialism.
     It is true that in the older industrialized countries the 
percentage working in large manufacturing and mining enterprises 
has declined, compared to those working in the so-called service 
sectors. But one should not exaggerate the weight or consequences 
of this trend, nor its long term subjective effects upon the 
working class and the labour movement.
     If traditional concentrations of workers in the automobile, 
steel, mining and the metal industries have become partially 
weakened, they have by no means disappeared. If employment has 
strongly increased in the so-called service sectors, many of 
these really represent branches of industry--such as 
telecommunications and transport. New important massive 
concentration of wage-earners now exist in these areas. The 
industrialization and mechanization of labour in these jobs makes 
such workers more militant than in the past. And bank workers, 
telecommunication workers, workers in the energy sector, can 
today paralyze the capitalist economy and bourgeois society more 
efficiently than the industrial workers of yesterday.
     More numerous and capable than ever before, the world 
proletariat now comprises more than one billion human beings. The 
dominant tendency everywhere in the world is for wage work to 
expand, not contract, including in the most developed countries. 
Of course, this expansion is not the same in every country, 
region, industrial sector or branch. Growth in one area is often 
accompanied by a relative decline in another. But the overall 
result of these movements is in the direction of an expansion, 
not a decline.
     For the proletariat to gradually acquire the experience and 
the consciousness necessary to conduct--at the decisive moment of 
pre-revolutionary and revolutionary crisis--an uncompromising 
struggle against capitalism, propaganda and agitation for 
transitional demands, and whenever possible a beginning effort to 
implement these demands, remains necessary now more than ever. 
Such demands include the fight for wages which go up 
automatically as prices rise (the "escalator clause"), workers 
control over production, the opening of the books of large 
companies, the expropriation of banks and the "commanding 
heights" of the economy, the suppression of the military budget, 
as well as an expropriating tax on the largest private fortunes 
and estates. Likewise, the policy of the united front--especially 
against attacks on human rights, and against the rise of the 
extreme right, etc.,--remains absolutely necessary.
     The specific transitional demands should always start from 
the real day-to-day concerns of masses of people, to think 
through what demands can be raised at any particular point in the 
struggle, in order that they might realize for themselves the 
need to fight for the overthrow of capitalism and the conquest of 
power.
     The proletariat has been heterogeneous since the origins of 
wage labour. The divisions within the working class result from a 
segmentation of the labour market. Along with the conscious 
policies of the bourgeoisie and its capitalist states there is 
also a basic reality of uneven and combined development of 
productive forces. These factors maintain and reinforce the 
divisions within the working class. They are expressed from one 
end of the planet to another in wage differentials between old 
and young, men and women, workers and unemployed, citizens and 
immigrants, skilled and unskilled, manual workers and 
intellectuals, workers of different ethnic backgrounds, more and 
less industrialized countries. 
     The present crisis leads to deepening differences and 
inequalities. The explosion of youth unemployment in a number of 
countries produces a layer that has never worked. This combines 
with immigrant workers and women who have been pushed out of the 
labor market, along with similar victims, to create a sub-
proletarian layer that is marginalized and finds itself outside 
the framework of traditional proletarian solidarity. The 
beginnings of a dual society in the industrialized countries with 
an unprotected part of the proletariat reduced to unstable 
conditions of existence similar to those of 19th century cities 
or the "Third World" today, corresponds to a deliberate plan by 
capital to weaken the labour movement once and for all. Opposing 
this with the demand for full employment through a radical cut in 
working hours--with no loss of pay or speed up of production--is 
a central task of the workers' movement.
     On the other hand, the internationalization of productive 
forces, the advent of multinational corporations and the third 
technological revolution objectively favors a gradual convergence 
of workers' demands, connections, struggles, and organizations of 
all countries. 
     The proletariat includes the mass of agricultural workers, 
of whom there are several hundred million in the world. Their 
social weight has declined relative to the total active 
population, but their absolute numbers are rising in countries 
like India, Indonesia, Brazil, Egypt, Pakistan and Mexico. There 
is a fuzzy boundary which both separates and unites the 
proletariat in the cities and the semi-proletariat in the 
countryside (independent peasants who do not have enough land to 
earn their living year-round, and are forced to take on temporary 
paid work), including poor peasants. The potential for 
mobilization among these social layers has already been 
demonstrated in the growing movement of land occupations, putting 
land to productive use. This will be an integral part of the 
socialist revolution in these countries.
     The same goes for the vast mass of marginalized semi-
proletarians in the cities of the "Third World," who represent 
one of the most explosive forces in conflict with the social 
order. They can serve as a base to be manoeuvred by populist, 
reactionary forces. But, even though up to now workers' 
organizations and the proletariat as a class have seldom acted as 
allies of these disinherited--defending their material and social 
interests, promoting their own self-organization--the fight for 
"urban reform" can become one of the driving forces of the 
permanent revolution in the under-industrialized countries, 
alongside the fight for agrarian reform.
     In a number of key capitalist countries--notably the USA, 
India, Mexico, Argentina, Egypt and Iran--the proletariat has not 
yet won its political class independence. Overwhelmingly, it 
continues to be represented politically by populist, if not 
traditional bourgeois forces. In these countries, the struggle to 
conquer this political independence remains a primary task.

13. The Proletariat, its allies, and the "new social movements"
     The working peasantry in the "Third World" countries, 
despite its gradual decline, continues to number more than one 
billion human beings. It is the most important ally of the 
proletariat in the struggle against capitalist rule. Together 
with a part of the marginalized population of the cities and a 
fraction of the urban petty-bourgeoisie, it can be mobilized for 
anti-imperialist objectives. It is an integral part of, if not 
the main actor in, the emancipation of these countries.
     During the past few decades social movements have developed 
in many countries around issues such as women's rights, ecology, 
peace, anti-racism and gay and lesbian liberation, on the margin 
of, and sometimes in contradiction with, the workers' movement. 
They express a deeper and broader awareness of the multiple 
facets of oppression under capitalism and in bureaucratic 
societies. They have involved large sectors in struggle, 
especially young people. 
     The working class and the organized workers movement needs 
to commit itself fully to these struggles. Since it has not done 
so up to now, these movements have developed autonomously for the 
most part, and the responsibility for this lack of connection 
lies above all with the traditional leaderships of the workers 
movement--though also, to some degree, on the weakness of the 
revolutionary left and the backwardness of its approach to these 
questions.
     Actively participating in these movements and conscious of 
their anti-capitalist potential, we fight for a strategic 
alliance with workers' struggles and with the workers' movement. 
At the same time we respect the legitimate autonomy of these 
social movements which cannot simply be subsumed within the 
workers' movement as such.
     In the imperialist heartlands, as in "Third World" countries 
and in the Eastern countries, the proletariat--alongside the poor 
peasantry--is the force with the power not only to overthrow the 
existing order but to lay the basis for a new society based on 
freedom and human solidarity. However, while the bourgeoisie is 
even better organized internationally than it was in the last 
century, the working class is less so. It is necessary to 
overcome this crisis of political leadership through the 
development of new generations of militants, the assimilation of 
lessons from the past, the accumulation of new partial victories 
that can help the masses to regain confidence in themselves, the 
reestablishment of dialogue--interrupted for too long--between 
workers in the capitalist countries and those in the 
bureaucratized societies, and a thoroughgoing reorganization of 
the mass movement and its most advanced layers.

14. The struggle against women's oppression
     The feminist movement is a response to the oldest oppression 
known by humanity. It defends the interests of more than half the 
human race and is an essential dimension of all struggles for 
human liberation.
     Women make up 53% of the world's population and, counting 
both wage and domestic work, put in the majority of working hours 
realized in the world. But when it is remunerated, women's work 
is very largely undervalued in comparison to men's. Women are 
generally excluded from positions of power and decision-making 
responsibility. In most societies they are kept in a subordinate 
position and are often not even able to make basic choices about 
their own lives. 
     The responsibility for the care and upbringing of the next 
generation falls on women's shoulders. They are called on to do 
this even without the necessary economic and practical means, and 
most of the time without any substantial support from men. This 
situation puts women in a very vulnerable economic and social 
position, where they suffer degradation, health hazards, violence 
and sexual abuse.
     Although the situation of women varies from country to 
country--and although there has been significant progress in 
terms of contraception and abortion rights combined with a higher 
level of remunerated employment in most advanced countries--it is 
still true to say that women everywhere are victims of economic 
super-exploitation and political subjugation. They are the first 
to be hit by all sorts of disasters: droughts, poverty, war, 
economic austerity, depression and unemployment. Women are the 
most vulnerable section of the toiling masses. Thus, women and 
children make up 85% of the tens of millions of refugees in the 
world. 
     The fight against women's oppression is, therefore, a 
fundamental part of the overall struggle for social liberation. 
It is not simply a question of democratic demands or civil 
rights--important as these things are. Ending women's oppression 
is an essential part of any successful struggle for a better 
society. This includes the absolute right for women to control 
their own bodies, the right to abortion and contraception on 
demand and the right to adequate economic and social support in 
the bearing and rearing of children, full equality at work and in 
job training, sexual freedom, freedom from sexual and sexist 
abuse and violence, and an end to domestic servitude. 
     We give unqualified support to the struggle and the self-
organization of women to end their subordination. We unreservedly 
recognize the right of women to decide their own fate. This 
battle is an integral part of the struggle for socialism: There 
can be no genuine women's liberation without socialism--that is, 
without the abolition of both capitalist and patriarchal private 
property. And there can also be no socialism without women's 
liberation. While half of humanity is oppressing the other half, 
neither will be free. As part of our commitment to this two-sided 
task, revolutionary socialists, men and women, must fight for the 
feminization of all the bodies which run society, including those 
of the workers' movement and their own political organizations. 

15. The fight for gay and lesbian rights
     In each sector of the world lesbians and gay men have 
organized autonomously in defense of their rights, against state 
and street violence, ideological repression and heterosexist 
attitudes and practices that permeate all of society. Often 
taking the form of struggles for democratic rights, the dynamic 
of lesbian and gay liberation struggles can strike further than 
simple legal equality for sexual minorities. It is a challenge to 
one of the most deep-seated prejudices that exists today and 
therefore contributes to the fight against all kinds of 
prejudices and divisions amongst working people. It is also a 
challenge to the patriarchal family and the imposed sexual 
division of labour that are pillars of women's oppression and a 
mainstay of social control in both the advanced and dependent 
capitalist countries as well as in the bureaucratic societies. 
     Socialism must have, as a clear and forthright goal, the 
liberation of all human beings from the sexual repression that 
distorts their individual development. Revolutionary socialists 
therefore encourage, and participate in, the struggles of 
lesbians and gays and should support their demand for complete 
legal protection against any discrimination based on sexual 
orientation. 

16. Without socialism there can be no effective struggle to save 
the environment
     Marx and Engels perceived the destructive tendency of 
capitalist production in relation to nature. Toward the end of 
his life, Engels developed a clear vision of the high price 
humanity was in danger of paying for its mechanical domination 
over natural forces. But these anticipations of an ecological 
consciousness were scarcely developed by the organized workers 
movement and were also ignored by Marxist theorists after Engels. 
On the contrary, the workers movement, including its 
revolutionary wing, allowed itself to be pulled along by a 
conception of socialism that did not include ecological costs in 
its economic model.
     Today's socialists, therefore, owe a great deal to today's 
ecologists, including the "greens," who have resurrected and 
expanded on the ecological consciousness of 19th century 
socialists. The correction of this aspect of socialist doctrine 
is a task of self-criticism, and an indispensable responsibility.
     But it is also indispensable to note the gradualist and 
neo-reformist origins of the green parties, which proceed like 
their social democratic counterparts, or like the Stalinist and 
post-Stalinist Communist Parties in the imperialist countries. 
They rely on a philosophy of "realpolitik" and participation in 
the daily administration of the bourgeois state and capitalist 
economy. This makes it harder and harder for them to remain 
faithful to their initial ecological creed. It also renders them 
incapable of understanding that no struggle to wipe out all of 
the menaces which threaten our natural environment is possible 
without overturning capitalist rule.
     It is clear that the main obstacle to resolving such 
problems is not a lack of scientific knowledge, but the fact that 
pollution continues to be more profitable than ecologically sound 
alternatives. In addition, imperialism's role--keeping "Third 
World" peoples in misery, therefore in need of immediate 
solutions to basic problems of survival and unable to take future 
generations into account--helps create such problems as 
destruction of rain forests, poaching of endangered species, and 
agricultural/horticultural practices which contribute to 
desertification. 
     In a society founded on the search for profit and the 
pursuit of private riches, dominated by competition, egoism, and 
short-term economic success, resources are employed without 
regard to the long term consequences and, therefore, without 
regard to their consequences for the environment. There will 
always be those entrepreneurs who will evade any legal 
restrictions inspired by ecological concerns in order to 
accumulate private profit.
     All legislation which tries to reduce the ecological cost of 
current production in the name of "making the polluters pay" 
cannot have any more than a partial effect. In cases where "the 
polluters" are the most powerful corporations, they will transfer 
most of the burden of these costs back to the consumer.
     An effective struggle against pollution, a systematic 
defense of the environment, a consistent search for renewable 
resources, a strict economy in the employment of non-renewable 
resources would therefore require that decisions concerning 
investment and choices about production techniques be taken out 
of the hands of private corporations and transferred to a social 
collective which can decide them democratically. It requires also 
that such private interests have no power to interfere with these 
choices and priorities. This, then, requires the creation of a 
society without classes.
     A real, democratic, socialist regime will have to concern 
itself with ecological questions, and not merely with the 
suppression of private property in the commanding heights of the 
economy. Still less can it be a bureaucratically-dominated post-
capitalist society. The experience in the ex-USSR and similar 
countries demonstrates the tragic manner in which bureaucratic 
pretentiousness, arbitrariness, and irresponsibility, can create 
ecological catastrophes at least equal to those caused by 
capitalism.
     The demographic explosion in the "Third World" is considered 
by some as one of the principle causes of the threats that bear 
down on the environment. This reasoning, based on hasty 
extrapolations, is more than dubious.
     In reality, the demographic explosion is neither permanent, 
nor due to some ethnic-racial necessity or cultural 
inevitability. It is a product of misery, and of the absence of a 
suitable infrastructure for social protection. Children are used 
to replace that infrastructure.
     It is even a product of the oppression of women, of 
pregnancies that are imposed on them, of their illiteracy, of 
their insufficient education about family planning, of their 
inability to gain access to contraceptives. The fundamentalist 
wing of the churches, above all the Vatican, carry a grave 
responsibility in this regard.
     There will not be rational control over demographic growth 
without socialism and without a decisive advance toward the 
liberation of women.

17. The struggle against national oppression
     The national question remains one of the most explosive in 
the world. In the "Third World" some countries (Puerto Rico, 
Antilles, Kanaky ...) remain colonies. But even for the rest, 
mere "decolonization" has not led to real national sovereignty. 
Through mechanisms ranging from direct politico-military 
domination to financial, technological and cultural dependence, 
they remain under the thumb of imperialism. In fact the 
dependence of these countries is worsening as a result of the 
debt and measures of privatization/denationalization, especially 
those imposed by the IMF. 
     Under the pretext of fighting against drug trafficking, 
imperialism is redeploying its direct military presence in Latin 
America, a phenomenon that is likely to be extended to other 
regions of the world. The control of television and radio 
communication by the multinationals and the imperialist 
states--including the production of programs and their diffusion 
by satellite--is a growing method of cultural manipulation. The 
creation in many parts of the "Third World" of purely artificial 
states and the encouragement within them of ruling and 
nationalist elites set up by imperialism, leads to the division 
of nationalities between several different countries and numerous 
oppressed national and ethnic minorities. 
     Even in the imperialist heartlands where the process of 
forming nation states began in the 18th century, oppressed 
national minorities exist (Black people, Latinos and others in 
the United States, the peoples of Quebec and Ireland, the 
oppressed peoples in the Spanish state ...). In many such cases 
this oppression has fueled powerful mass national liberation 
movements. All attempts to resolve these problems through a 
combination of brutal repression and limited political reforms 
have come up against the resistance of the peoples concerned. The 
idea, now current, according to which such questions can be 
resolved in the framework of re-jigging the European Community is 
an illusion. On the contrary, the economic, social and 
territorial imbalances provoked by the Single European Act are 
likely to create a resurgence of unresolved or badly solved 
national demands.
     In the USSR and Yugoslavia in particular, the crisis of the 
bureaucratic regime which developed in the 1980s has also been 
expressed through an explosion of national demands and mass 
movements. This clearly demonstrates the incompatibility between 
real national democratic rights and a bureaucratic and police 
dictatorship using national chauvinism as an integral part of its 
ideological arsenal. The continuing forms of national oppression 
in these countries are extremely varied. The masses' anti-
bureaucratic aspirations have often found a general political 
expression through nationalist demands, including linguistic, 
cultural, economic, ecological aspirations and the demand for 
national sovereignty and/or independence.
     Concrete political solutions to the national question cannot 
be defined in a general way, but only case by case, starting from 
revolutionary democratic principles. Revolutionary Marxists are 
above all internationalists. We always defend the common 
interests of workers of all nationalities, without subordinating 
them to particular national or parochial interests. We fight 
against all forms of racism, xenophobia, chauvinism, hatred and 
ethnic contempt and discrimination, repression, and all violence 
in regard to any national "racial" or ethnic group, whatever 
their objective roots or subjective motivation.
     But the starting point of all real internationalist policies 
must be a radical distinction between the nationalism of the 
oppressed, whose struggles we solidarize with unconditionally, 
and the nationalism of the oppressors, which we oppose 
irreconcilably. This means the unconditional defense of the right 
to self-determination of oppressed nations--that is, their right 
to independence or to organize themselves in a sovereign way 
either in union or as part of a confederation with other nations, 
freely consented to and freely reversible in all cases. To this 
end the workers in the dominant nation must vigorously support 
the struggle of the oppressed nation, not only to strengthen the 
fight for basic democratic rights, but in order to weaken the 
state which also oppresses them.
     There is, however a distinction between mass movements for 
the right of national self-determination, which we support 
unconditionally, and nationalism as a political ideology and 
doctrine, including among oppressed nationalities.
     Bourgeois or petty-bourgeois nationalist forces, as soon as 
they come to power, begin questioning, restricting or even 
denying basic national and democratic rights to other peoples. 
Pretexts have been manifold: state security , guaranteeing unity 
, linguistic necessity, restoring historical borders, making 
foreign aggression more difficult, assuring stability etc. Thus 
this kind of nationalism rapidly transforms itself into an 
oppressor and often becomes expansionist after conquering state 
independence--as the example of Yugoslavia tragically 
demonstrates. 
     In addition, revolutionary Marxists oppose any nationalist 
ideology, even of an oppressed nation, which is based upon the 
creed of class collaboration, of solidarity of the nation's 
employers and wage earners (or bureaucrats and workers) against 
the "foreign enemy." This is contrary to the need for 
international solidarity between all toilers, regardless of 
color, nationality, gender or creed. 
     It has only been in those countries where the struggle for 
national independence has been combined with a fight for 
socialism--for example in Cuba and Nicaragua--where such dangers 
have been avoided to any significant degree. The clearest example 
is the way in which the Sandinista government, after serious 
initial mistakes in its dealings with the Indian populations on 
Nicaragua's East Coast, was able to correct its policies and 
attempt, even under the very difficult circumstances of the 
contra war, to establish relations based on mutual respect and 
solidarity. This is living proof that the slogan of national 
independence, and the mobilization of masses of people around 
that question, is not necessarily in contradiction to 
internationalist goals and perspectives.
     Revolutionary Marxists struggle for a world without 
frontiers, for the abolition of all types of privileges, and for 
the integration of all nations in a world socialist democracy, 
where a common universal culture and all national and ethnic 
cultures will flourish together. This ambitious objective demands 
not only the abolition of all national or linguistic privileges 
and all forms of domination exercised over even the weakest 
nations, but also a correction of centuries of national and 
racial oppression through "affirmative action" in favour of 
oppressed nations. Only then can a strict equality be established 
between all nations. 
     The struggle against national oppression is thus inscribed 
in the perspective of democratic socialism. It means the working 
class puts itself at the head of the struggle against national 
oppression, that it does not consider itself external to this 
cause but behaves as the vanguard of the oppressed nations and 
"races" while maintaining its internationalist solidarity with 
the struggles of all workers, including those of the oppressor 
nation. 

18. The fight against militarism
     One of the most striking developments since the 1960s has 
been the emergence of mass opposition within imperialist 
countries against rearmament and wars carried out by their own 
bourgeoisies. In the cases of Algeria and Vietnam, ordinary 
French and U.S. citizens played an important, and in some ways 
decisive, role in forcing an end to the slaughter. The anti-
missiles movement in Western Europe during the 1980s was the 
largest mobilization of youth in the history of these countries.
     For revolutionary Marxists, any mass action that puts 
obstacles in the way of intervention by imperialism into the 
affairs of smaller nations is a positive development. We will 
work with all our might to stimulate and build such movements 
whenever the opportunity to do so arises--stressing especially 
the right to self-determination of oppressed nations. We oppose 
all attempts by the imperialists, including under the auspices of 
the U.N., to determine the future of countries in the "Third 
World" or in Eastern Europe, contrary to the principle of the 
right to self determination of all nationalities. There is no 
legitimate role whatsoever for the U.S., Capitalist Europe, or 
Japan, in determining the future of Asia, Africa, Latin America, 
Eastern Europe, or the Pacific Island region.
     Recently many countries of Europe and Japan have seen the 
emergence of radical movements among the youth rejecting the 
bourgeois army, military service, and production of weapons. 
These movements attack the bourgeois state at its roots, because 
its military apparatus is its essential foundation. They also 
represent a potential threat to the military-industrial complex, 
another vital prop of the bourgeois state. Therefore, such 
movements merit the complete support of revolutionary Marxists.

19. Relaunch the struggle for internationalism
     During the last few decades, there has been an accelerating 
internationalization of productive forces. Less than seven 
hundred multinational corporations dominate the world market. 
They are increasingly escaping the control of any government, 
including those of the main imperialist powers. They transfer 
their investments, production and distribution centers from 
country to country solely in order to maximize profits. This 
internationalization of the productive forces of capital, of 
services, of the division of labor, leads to a growing 
internationalization of the class struggle. 
     By creating the first workers' internationals over a century 
ago, the socialist movement was able to take the initiative. 
Bureaucratic conservatism and chauvinism have led to a retreat, 
to collaboration with "national" bosses, to turning away from an 
effective international fight against the trusts. 
     In the imperialist countries, this regression of 
internationalism sometimes takes the form of classical 
chauvinism: "the Germans," or "the Japanese," or "the Mexicans," 
or "the Americans"--exploiters and exploited all mixed up 
together--are supposed to be the cause of the unemployment which 
affects "us"! It can also take the new form of lining up on the 
side of a Europe of the trusts and bosses, an affluent "Euro-
chauvinism," which is nothing but a variant of this reactionary 
nationalism.
     The only adequate response to the global strategy of the 
multinationals is international solidarity by the workers of 
every country--against their own national bosses as well as 
foreign ones. This can develop through coordinating trade-union 
activities across frontiers, fighting for raising the wages and 
improving the working conditions of the worst-off workers rather 
than lowering those of workers who enjoy a higher living 
standard. Far from damaging the possibilities for 
industrialization and jobs in the "Third World," such 
coordination could replace a "model of development" that is based 
on exporting low wages with an alternative centered on 
eliminating poverty, enlarging the internal market and the 
massive transfer of up-to-date technology to these countries.
      The entire workers' movement in the creditor countries 
should take up the slogan for a cancellation of the "Third World" 
and European debt, actively mobilizing around it. That is an 
obligation of basic solidarity with the poorest and most 
exploited. Internationalism today is also a fight against the 
division of the working class--with all of the racist and 
xenophobic consequences such divisions can have inside the 
imperialist heartlands themselves (in particular against 
immigrant workers), and the fascist dynamic that could develop 
out of it.
     Revolutions are not exported, any more than they are the 
result of conspiracies by "subversive international centers." 
Imperialism has imposed and imposes regimes of exploitation and 
dictatorship, of misery and humiliation. It is against these 
regimes that the masses rise up, without anyone having to 
manipulate them. On the other hand, counter-revolution has been 
and is being exported, by the imperialists.
     There has not been a single fight against the domination of 
capital (from the Russian, Finnish, German or Hungarian to the 
Spanish and Yugoslav revolutions), against the yoke of 
colonialism (from the Chinese and Indo-Chinese revolutions to the 
African wars of liberation) or against neo-colonial tyrannies 
(Cuba, Nicaragua, El Salvador and so on) that has not come up 
against military intervention, or threats, by the imperialist 
powers.
     Confronted by this imperialist aggression, massive 
international solidarity has proven its effectiveness at decisive 
moments. The Swedish labor movement prevented its own 
capitalism's war of intervention against the declaration of 
independence by Norway in 1905. The Russian Revolution was saved 
by the British labor movement from being crushed by British 
imperialism--intervening on the side of Poland in 1920. Mass 
solidarity put a damper on threats of military intervention 
against Cuba and Nicaragua, although without succeeding in 
breaking through the economic blockade inflicted on these 
countries. 
     But in many places, such as Indo-China and Nicaragua, the 
price exacted by counter-revolutionary interventions has 
nevertheless been extremely high. It has left destitute peoples, 
with ruined economies incapable of assuring rapid improvements in 
living standards. Militant solidarity in its different forms can 
help bring about the quickest possible victory at the lowest 
cost, and is a necessary response to the internationalization of 
the counterrevolution.
     Capitalism's social crisis increasingly takes on a global 
dimension. No serious solutions can be offered on a national 
level to questions such as disarmament, energy, the destruction 
of the biosphere, hunger and disease in the "Third World." These 
plagues can, and must, be attacked in each country. But they can 
only be vanquished on the scale of the whole planet.
     Gorbachev abandoned the reactionary myth of building 
socialism in one country or a single camp, emphasizing the 
globalization of vital problems. His diagnosis was more 
realistic. But he did not draw the same conclusions as Marxists, 
according to which only the world socialist revolution can 
resolve the crisis of humanity. 
     On the contrary, Gorbachev's approach leads to another 
reactionary myth, which says that it is possible to resolve 
humanity's problems by increased peaceful cooperation with 
imperialism. But any compromise with or capitulation to 
imperialism which contributes to the survival of that system 
makes the drift toward disaster inevitable in the long run. 

20. For the reconquest of hope, the right of every individual to 
dignity and to pursue happiness
     The bourgeoisie hypocritically accuses socialists of wanting 
to sacrifice the individual's right to pursue happiness on the 
altar of "utopias," or "state compulsion." The practices of 
labour bureaucracies--whether of the Stalinist, post-Stalinist or 
social-democratic variety--have undoubtedly fed this 
mystification. But the cynicism of the claim is obvious.
     It is bourgeois society and not "socialist utopia" which 
strangles the unfettered development of individuality for the 
overwhelming majority of this planet's inhabitants--not only in 
the "Third World" but also in the richer countries. Material 
restrictions and constraints, social inequality, alienated wage 
labour, a manipulated mass "culture," television-guided 
consumption, the lack of any real possibilities to chose freely 
in nearly all domains of social life, are the cause of this 
strangling.
     It is necessary to turn the legitimate struggle for 
individual freedom and happiness against bourgeois society and 
its rotten "values," as we do with a consistent struggle for 
human rights. On these questions neo-conservative pseudo-liberals 
are caught in a basic contradiction, as were their more 
progressive ancestors in the 18th and early 19th centuries: 
Everybody has the right to pursue individual happiness--except 
when this conflicts with the "iron laws of market economy," that 
is, a defense of the interests of capital. We reject the idea of 
eternal economic laws, unavoidable constraints of economic 
"efficiency" from which nobody can escape. Given the present 
level of material wealth and labour productivity the planet's 
inhabitants are perfectly capable of making a conscious choice 
between different priorities in the use of even relatively scarce 
resources. All men and women can and will conquer the liberty to 
make that choice on the basis of the right to individual 
happiness, to a real fulfillment of their own human potential.
     Conservative neo-liberals sing the praises of a society 
where unequal access to wealth is explained by differences in 
individual merit In fact, however, this "meritocracy" hides the 
reality of social inequality based on exploitation and 
oppression. To those who have much, much is given. Those who 
start with little or nothing, continue to have little or nothing. 
The "merits" of greed, corruption and crime as part of the 
process through which the rich and super-rich create and maintain 
themselves expose this hypocritical lie of meritocracy.
     To these mystifications we counterpose equality of social 
opportunity as the basis for each individual to pursue happiness 
in her or his own way. No social structure, no social 
power--neither state despotism nor market place "efficiency" nor 
patriarchal social institution--should be allowed to impose so-
called happiness on individuals against their own wishes. 
     Along with the struggle for physical survival, this is the 
principle driving force motivating socialists today.
     At the heart of the fight for socialism is the fight for a 
society where the free development of all depends upon the free 
development of each individual human being. In a world tilting 
toward disorder, skepticism, cynicism, and demoralization as its 
real future, the struggle for socialism also includes as part of 
its basic purpose a struggle for the rebirth of hope and 
happiness.

21. We are revolutionaries!
     The establishment of real and democratic socialism can come 
about only through a complete break with capitalist and 
bureaucratic regimes, their overthrow through mass 
mobilization--in a word, revolution.
     The balance-sheet of the century that is drawing to a close 
demonstrates not simply the bankruptcy of Stalinism. It likewise 
exposes the bankruptcy of social democracy, with its increasing 
integration into the structures of the bourgeois state apparatus, 
its loyal and brutal management of imperialist interests and its 
sacred union with its capitalist partners. It also shows the 
failure of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois nationalism in the 
"Third World," which is incapable of bringing about real national 
independence and social emancipation. The twentieth century has 
not been a century of gradual and peaceful progress. It has been 
a century of revolutions, wars and counter-revolutions. 
     The masses act in a revolutionary fashion only on rare 
occasions, when driven by necessity. But when they can no longer 
tolerate the intolerable they become transformed, breaking the 
circle of submission in a process of revolutionary crisis. And 
such crises are periodically inevitable.
     The task of those who are conscious of this reality is to 
aid the daily accumulation of mass experiences, to help bring 
together and educate the most combative forces, promoting goals 
that can lead to a revolutionary victory in order to prevent 
counter-revolution--aware of the high price which the exploited 
and oppressed have paid for the failure to make revolutions over 
many years.
     Both exploiters and governments talk about revolution as if 
it were synonymous with violence and terror. But to do this they 
falsify issues and responsibilities, adding together the cost of 
revolution and counter-revolution. And yet the "order" which they 
uphold is one of daily violence, sexism, poverty, hunger, forced 
labour, and war--much more devastating than any revolution. 
Counter-revolutions and totalitarian dictatorships (fascism, 
Nazism!) or semi-fascist dictatorships--to which they often 
lead--have historically unleashed violence that dwarfs anything 
real revolutions can legitimately be held responsible for.
     The millions of deaths in the Gulag are not the 
responsibility of the Russian revolution, but of the Stalinist 
counter-revolution. The American bombing of Indochina caused more 
death and destruction than the Vietnamese revolution itself. 
     One hears that the era of revolutions is over, that it 
belonged to a bygone age, that they have become impossible in the 
face of an imperialist super-power armed to the teeth. But this 
has all been said before. And then the Cuban revolution triumphed 
over the barbaric imperialist colossus, the Vietnamese liberation 
struggle put an end to American intervention using unprecedented 
methods, and the Nicaraguan revolution overthrew Somoza in the 
backyard of the world's policeman.
     The preachers of "lesser evilism" still say that it is 
better to put up with capitalism and its ravages than to risk 
totalitarian and supposedly irreversible bureaucratic 
dictatorships. Only yesterday, they were still claiming that 
"under communism" the monster state had devoured and forever 
paralyzed society. But now we see this society reawakening and 
fighting back. It is overthrowing the bureaucrats and breaking 
their yoke. 
     A new historical chapter is opening, in which the long term 
positive effects of Stalinism's disappearance as an obstacle will 
manifest themselves.
     --In Eastern Europe and the USSR, new mass struggles will 
erupt on two fronts: for democracy and against privatization. In 
the course of these struggles, the strategic goals of a 
revitalized political labor movement will gradually emerge: 
independence of the mass organizations from the state; no 
monopoly on political power for any faction of the bureaucracy; 
separation of political parties from the state; exercise of power 
through democratically elected bodies of the toilers and 
citizens; ensuring representation and equality for women and 
national minorities; dismantling of all repressive forces; 
generalized, planned self-management and self-administration.
     --In the imperialist countries, revolutionary strategy will 
combine the heritage of the first half of the century with that 
of the sixties and seventies, from May 1968 in France to the 
Portuguese revolution: We can expect to see more in the way of 
mass movements relying on their own strength and self-
organization, including around working class struggles, 
autonomous mass movements of women, anti-militarist campaigns by 
the youth, and struggles around questions relating to the overall 
quality of life. 
     --In the dependent countries, crucial experiences, victories 
or defeats, have confirmed that there are only two alternatives: 
either socialist revolution or a caricature of revolution. This 
does not imply any underestimation of national or democratic 
tasks, nor a confusion between the beginning and end of the 
revolutionary process. It does not eliminate the possibility of 
alliances, but it excludes any subordination of workers and 
peasants struggles to the so-called national bourgeoisie.
     The danger of bureaucratization is not inherent only in 
political parties. Its roots lie in the existence of the state as 
a professional organ of power, in the living and working 
conditions of the working class and in the effects of the 
division of labour on the workers' movement. Trade unions and 
associations are no less exposed to this danger than parties; the 
media demagogues, even "non-party affiliated," are no less 
bureaucrats. The only way to control and progressively reduce the 
risks of bureaucratization--they cannot be totally eliminated--is 
through a consistent and sustained activity by the rank and file, 
encouraged through internal democracy at all levels of all 
organizations, trying to combat and correct the social, gender 
and cultural inequalities in their ranks and also to draw the 
lessons of historical experience. This can be done with education 
and a collective practice that increases awareness and 
participation, a growing and continuous activity of members 
without which internal democracy remains largely fictitious, and 
the assimilation of the lessons of historical experience, notably 
in the domain of institutional guarantees for workers democracy 
(the right to form tendencies!).

22. For new mass revolutionary parties, for a revolutionary mass 
international
     The official revelations of Stalin's crimes by the Soviet 
authorities highlight the meaning of the unremitting struggle led 
by the Left Opposition after 1923 and the Fourth International 
since its foundation, in 1938, against the bureaucratic 
degeneration of the CPSU and the Communist International. Thanks 
to the steadfastness and courage of those who, in the USSR, took 
up the struggle against Stalinism, thanks to the determination of 
Leon Trotsky and those who, alongside him, contributed to 
founding the Fourth International, today we can look workers of 
the ex-Soviet Union, China or Eastern Europe in the eye without 
shame or guilt. 
     The construction at one and the same time of revolutionary 
organizations in each country--rooted as much as possible in 
their national realities--and of a revolutionary international is 
for us a question of principle which corresponds to objective 
conditions and to the needs of the imperialist epoch. For 
revolutionaries as much as anyone else, being determines 
consciousness. Simply participating in international solidarity, 
supporting struggles in other countries and exchanging 
experiences, however necessary, are insufficient by themselves.
     It is only by actively building an international together 
with revolutionaries from other countries and collectively 
developing its programme that we can realistically hope to see 
the world simultaneously through the eyes of the Soviet woman 
worker or the Chinese students struggling against bureaucracy; of 
the super-exploited toilers, peasants and women in the "Third 
World"; of the British miner, the Japanese auto worker or the 
North American electronic technician.
     Then we can consistently take our stand on the side of the 
anti-bureaucratic movement in the East, on the side of the 
oppressed crushed by imperialism, as well as on the side of 
workers in the imperialist centers struggling against the bosses 
and their state; then we can keep as our only guide and compass 
the general social and historic interests of the proletariat, and 
not some particular, diplomatic interests of states, "camps" or 
"blocs." 
     Today, although national revolutionary organizations exist 
that are struggling sincerely and sometimes heroically for the 
abolition of exploitation in their countries, there is 
unfortunately no significant current outside of the Fourth 
International that puts the construction of a revolutionary 
international immediately on the agenda.
     The reluctance of other revolutionary currents to build an 
international organization has deep roots. The failure of the 
Second International, and the chauvinist capitulation of its main 
parties and leaders when World War I began gave credence to the 
idea that internationalism consists only of good intentions and 
breaks down in practice when mass parties face critical 
situations.
     The experience of the Communist International after Lenin's 
death, with changes in orientation--and of leaders--dictated to 
member parties, has aroused strong and legitimate distrust 
towards the danger of international bureaucratic centralism. The 
equally disastrous experience resulting from a failure to make a 
distinction between the party and the state, or subordinating 
"fraternal parties" to the diplomatic and state interests of the 
diverse "socialist" countries--whether they be Soviet or 
Chinese--has reinforced concern for national independence among a 
number of revolutionary organizations.
     Finally, the material weight of the bureaucratized states 
has weighed heavily on the international workers' movement, 
including on revolutionary organizations. It has meant 
compromises in order to keep material aid flowing and avoid a 
political confrontation. Some have ignored tasks of 
internationalist solidarity with workers and peoples who were 
victims of the bureaucracy. 
     But in our increasingly interdependent world 
internationalism is not a simple moral imperative; it is an 
immediate tactical and strategic necessity. Building an 
international is an essential task that cannot be put off until 
tomorrow. The Fourth International today is an irreplaceable 
instrument, the only one we have for advancing in this direction, 
even if only in a modest way.
     We know that the construction of mass revolutionary parties 
in a series of countries and the building of a mass revolutionary 
international will not necessarily take place at the same tempo. 
Every time the possibility arises in a country to build a 
democratic mass workers' party independent from the state, the 
bourgeoisie and/or the bureaucracy, guaranteeing the right to 
form currents internally around political debates, and every time 
an organization exists whose objectives and direction in the 
struggle for the overthrow of capitalism we share, we have no 
reason to stand aside while cultivating the identity of a sect. 
On the contrary, we propose bringing all revolutionaries together 
in the same democratic organization on a national level, the 
better to take initiatives together towards reformist or left 
populist currents, propose unity in action at all levels against 
imperialism, the bourgeoisie and the bureaucracy. 
     But as long as we cannot convince our revolutionary comrades 
or partners of the necessity and the timeliness of working 
immediately to build a revolutionary international--founded on a 
programme to defend the interests of the exploited and oppressed 
in every country and collective action along these lines--we 
claim the right to do this openly ourselves.
     Thus, agreement on the project of the International is not a 
precondition for building national parties together with other 
currents as soon as there is agreement on basic tasks and 
practical work. But there is no Chinese wall separating national 
and international politics. In a world where the class struggle 
is more than ever international, the first is not the only 
immediate problem and the second is not just a question for the 
future. 
     Faithful to the fundamental principles of the Communist 
Manifesto, no special interests separate us from the whole of the 
proletariat. We do not proclaim any special principle with which 
we try to shape or mold the workers' movement. We distinguish 
ourselves from other workers' parties only on two points: in the 
various national workers' struggles, we assert and put to the 
fore interests that are independent of nationality and common to 
the whole proletariat; and in the different phases of the 
struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, we always 
seek to represent the historic interests of the entire movement.
     We believe that the daily practical work of all socialists, 
at all times and in all places, must strictly conform to what 
Marx called a categorical imperative, that is their moral 
commitment to fight for the elimination of all conditions which 
alienate, humiliate, and oppress human beings, whatever the 
social forces responsible for these abominations. Socialism's 
crisis of credibility can only be overcome if we act in such a 
way.
     The Fourth International calls for a united struggle against 
all forms of exploitation and oppression everywhere in the world; 
for socialist and pluralist democracy; for a planned, self-
managed economy based on the satisfaction of people's needs by 
freely-associated producers taking over the large-scale means of 
production, of exchange and of communication; for total, 
universal disarmament; for women's liberation and equality 
between the sexes; for international and internationalist 
solidarity; for the protection of the planet and the survival of 
the human race.