Against the Bosses' International
of
the proletariat and the oppressed
The G8 summit in Genoa is held at a moment of great unpopularity of
meetings of supernational organizations like the G8, the International Monetary
Fund, the World Trade Organization, etc., the numerous
"internationals" of the capitalists. This time the G8 Summit takes
place in a period where NATO puts again the Balkans in flames, Zionism is
confronted with the heroic Palestinian popular Intifada, and the world capitalist crisis is aggravated profoundly
with the slowdown of the US economy.
The idea is more widespread today than ever before that every time the
"powerful" get together, the problems of the world increase and
millions of people suffer the consequences.
In the last ten years all the major problems of the
planet have been aggravated: increasing poverty, continued worsening of the
conditions of life and work, wars and conflicts of various kinds on all
continents, environmental catastrophes, old and new epidemics... The balance of
all the supernational organizations (including the United Nations) and all the
"development" programs is catastrophic: all the problems have been
aggravated to the extreme.
The explanation is simple: the function of these supernational
organizations is to sustain the profit system. They are the arena for the
struggle of the rival interests of the multinationals, which have reached an
absolutely unprecedented level of concentration of wealth and power (but
entirely in line with what Lenin foresaw in his study of imperialism).
The bosses' policies are similar all over the world...
In economic crises, which follow each other ever more
closely around the world, the IMF intervenes, granting loans that serve only to
guarantee the solvency of the affected countries and the international
financial system (as always under capitalism, profits are private while losses
are socialized).
The conditions imposed to obtain the loans are the
same, although with other methods and other governments, even in Europe:
* Privatize everything possible (productive
infrastructure, public services, social security, health, education, etc.);
* Reduce direct wages, indirect wages (the so-called
welfare state), and deferred wages (pensions);
* Reduce workers' rights (above all through
"flexibilization", that is, the extension of precarious or temporary
labor) and in general all democratic rights;
* Apply scientific discoveries and technology without
precautions; dispose of the environment and nature without controls; obtain raw
materials at least cost, the main producers of which are "third
world" countries, which therefore see their own conditions constantly
worsen.
Today not only the "third world" is
devastated by terrible poverty, which constantly generates migratory waves, but
also in more industrialized countries workers suffer a constant worsening of living
conditions.
Capitalism is a system which always counterposes the
rule and the ever-increasing wealth of the few to the poverty and the
dispossession of the many. Globalization of finance capital
is nothing else than the latest phase of imperialism. Imperialism is not an ideological or
outmoded term It is the highest stage of Capitalism, its epoch of decline and
today as ever before threatens humanity with barbarism
The antiglobalization movement must clearly recognize
imperialism as its adversary, and this means to take as an adversary every
imperialist power: not only American, but also European imperialism, its
multinationals, its banks, its governments, be they center-right, center-left,
or social-democratic. In Europe the struggle against imperialism at home is a
central duty of the movement and a condition of its full political autonomy.
The "powerful of the earth" want to avoid
having the manifest contradictions become explosive and in some places put in
question the rule of their system. In these international meetings they discuss
the tools to be adopted, which range from more or less direct military
intervention (yesterday the "humanitarian war" against Iraq and
Yugoslavia, today Plan Colombia in Latin America) to the crumbs of "aid"
and "cooperation" sometimes distributed through the NGOs
(nongovernmental organizations).
The international antiglobalization movement, which
from Seattle to Prague to Genoa contests the summits of world imperialism, is a
fact of great political value: it has shown and shows that the great powers of
the planet and their order can be and are being opposed by increasing sectors
of the world population, particularly by the young generations. That all the
social, environmental, humanitarian, and "peace" causes constantly
stamped on by the ruling policies can reply to those policies in a united way
on international scale.
As always happens, the movement, in itself, expresses
a series of generous, but often confused and contradictory, impulses. In broad
outline, three tendencies can be identified in the movement:
* A naïve pacifist tendency that is opposed only to
the more devastating consequences of the system, promoting a
"nonmarket" economy (third sector, “fair” trade, ethical finance)
which would cohabit with the multinationals: an absolutely unrealistic
perspective or, worse, serving the system's need for consent. Equally
misleading are the campaigns to boycott some multinationals, as if there were
good and bad multinationals, or bad multinationals and good small and medium
national enterprises. This sector makes a dangerous fetish of nonviolence,
which helps to legitimate the attempt of governments to divide the movement
into "good" and "bad" and, therefore, in the final analysis,
to legitimate repressive measures against the movement.
* A neo-reformist, class collaborationist tendency that identifies the enemy as
"neoliberalism". But neoliberalism is not a bad policy of capitalism
replaceable with a good policy of the same capitalism. A struggle against
neoliberalism without a struggle against capitalism is an empty phrase and a
deception. If the enemy is neoliberalism, the solution is a series of
neo-Keynesian reforms: a "social" (or social-democratic) Europe with somewhat
less flexibility and somewhat more social agreement than in the United States;
the Tobin tax, a limited tax on the speculative movements of capital, proposed
thirty years ago by an adviser to Kennedy and demanded today by a part of the
big financial capital to make the international markets less unstable; or the
hypocrisy of the "participatory budget" on the model of Porto Alegre
(Brazil), where the population is called to express itself on the minimum part
of the municipal budget, while the most of it answers to the constraints set by
the central government or finances benefits for... the multinationals. At times
those who advocate these solutions seem to propose "radical" methods
of struggle, in sharp contrast with their so-moderate goal. In fact, this
radicalism often serves merely the purpose of image or to get purely symbolic
victories.
* A revolutionary tendency that seeks to destroy the
existing system, which by its nature includes poverty, violence, wars, and the
destruction of the environment. This tendency doesn't ask capital to be social,
democratic, environmentalist, and peaceful. It grasps all class, democratic,
environmental, and "peace" demands against capital and for its
overthrow. Only the overthrow of capitalism can liberate a future of progress
for humanity with rational use of the great discoveries of science and
technology in the service of people. What failed in the USSR is not socialism
but Stalinism. What failed is not economic planning, which guaranteed to those
populations great social conquests today canceled by capitalist restoration.
All the reasons for the antiglobalization movement in the final analysis lead
back to a fundamental necessity: to return to humanity the power to determine
the wealth that it produces and its relationship with the environment and with
life.
What is more irrational and inhuman than an economic
and social system in which a war or more unemployed can cause euphoria on the
stock exchanges and, vice versa, the end of a war or more employed can cause
their depression? What is more irrational than an economic system in which the
growth of poverty (recession and unemployment) is determined by an excess of
produced wealth (overproduction)? What is more hypocritical than a celebrated
international "democracy" in which two hundred multinational colossi
in struggle for control of the world economy concentrate in their hands an
uncontrolled and uncontrollable power?
Only a socialist revolution can end these true
monstrosities. Only by breaking the power of the capitalist colossi, returning
to social ownership the means of production and reproduction of life, under the
control of the workers and the people, only by this is it possible to create
the conditions for democratic planning of the economies of single countries and
the world, a planning that redefines basic priorities to the desires and needs
of the broad majority of humanity.
This future makes sense today only from the
perspective of the international class struggle. The workers, the fundamental
component of the Seattle mobilization but still a minority in other
demonstrations, must join with the other sectors of the movement.
We must work to build an international revolutionary
organization to unify the mobilizations globally and give them an
anticapitalist political perspective. To the numerous internationals of the
imperialists, we must counterpose a new revolutionary international. We must
take up again the attempt, unfortunately not successful in past decades, to
build the Fourth International.
The struggle for the Revolutionary International of
the proletariat through the refounding of the Fourth International is growing
inside the movement today: it is the banner and the perspective that can guarantee
him a future.
Another world is certainly possible and necessary, but
its only name is international Socialism, built through the destruction of the
rule of the bourgeoisie and the power of the proletariat.
We create in struggle the indispensable tool for the
victory of the socialist Revolution, the new International of the proletariat
and the oppressed: the refounded Fourth International!
·
Smash the IMF,
NATO, the European Union - Forward to the United Socialist States of Europe!
·
NATO out from the
Balkans! For a Balkan socialist Federation!
·
Smash the Zionist
State! Victory to the Intifada! For a united, secular, socialist Republic in
the whole historic territory of Palestine!
·
Expropriate the
expropriators ! For world Socialism!
The following organizations adhere: Worker Party (Argentina) • Revolutionary
Marxist Association Proposta (Ito, Italy) • Revolutionary
Workers Party (Grece) • Party of the Worker
Cause (Brasil) • Marxist Workers League
(Turkey) • Workers Party (Uruguay) • Trotskyist League (Ito, Usa) • Trotskyist Opposition (Bolivia) • “En Defensa del Marxismo” Collective (Spain) • Marxist Workers League (Finland) • Ukrainian Trotskyist Opposition (Ito, Ukraine) • Committee for the Construction of the Worker Party
(Chile) • Socialist Workers League
(Israel-Palestine) • International Trotskyist
Opposition (sections of Great Britain, India, Denmark, Germany)
E-mail addresses:
Worker Party (Argentina): lo@po.org.or •
Amr Proposta (Italy): amrpro@tin.it
• Revolutionary Workers Party (Grece): eek@ath.forthnet.gr
• Party of the Worker Cause (Brasil): pcodn@attglobal.net
• Trotskyist League (Usa): tlus@igc.org • International Trotskyist
Opposition: itofi@igc.org.