I. In defense of Afghanistan
1. Afghanistan, one of the poorest countries of the world, has been the target of around the clock bombing by the allied forces of American and British imperialism. Thousands of civilians have been killed and many more wounded. The bombing has raised the numbers of the refugees in neighboring countries from 1.5 million to 2.7 million and, if the attacks continue during the winter, this figure may be raised to around 6.5 million people, that is, about half the population of Afghanistan. Many refugees will die from starvation this winter, if the war continues.
This massacre is conducted with the support of a coalition of servants of imperialism, from Arafat in Palestine and the Arab and Muslim rulers to the Putin regime in Russia and the Chinese restorationist bureaucracy.
2. The US Congress voted a monstrous US$ 344 billion war budget, namely, to wage war on "terrorism". However, the aims of the imperialists are:
II. For a military united front with the Taliban's armed forces. No political support for the Taliban. For a workers' and peasants' government
4. The destruction and the killing of the masses in Iraq, former Yugoslavia, and now of Afghanistan cannot be ended by pious prayers and pacifist calls to end the war. Wars are an integral part of decadent capitalism, which is the main enemy of the world working class and the suffering masses. We condemn the role of the United Nations that has been acting as a partner of imperialism in the attack against the masses in Iraq, the Balkans, and now in Afghanistan. We have to defeat imperialism in the battlefield. In the imperialist countries it is necessary to carry out agitation against the government and bourgeoisie of each country, that is, for revolutionary defeatism.
5. We oppose as counterrevolutionary the idea that the international workers should take an "equal distance" between the Taliban and imperialism. For us whatever the political differences may be -- and they are huge ones -- the workers of the world and the revolutionaries should be on the same side as those who oppose imperialist aggression, regardless of the political nature of their existing leadership. For this reason we call for a military united front with the Taliban militia. At the same time a military united front is very different from political support, which we do not give the Taliban.
6. In order to defeat imperialism it is necessary to turn to the soldiers in the imperialist armies to help them to understand that the real enemy is the ruling capitalist class, to turn the weapons against the class enemy, to mobilize the working class and the poor peasants and the Afghan women independently of the tribal leaders.
7. The Taliban was created after the defeat of the Soviet army to stabilize Afghanistan in the interest of imperialism. Its ideology is a barbarous form of religious superstition and oppression of the people of Afghanistan. As such, notwithstanding the objective clash between the interests of imperialism and the national interests of the Afghan people, this conflict cannot and will not be won under the leadership of the national clans of Afghanistan, as it was never successful under the leadership of the national bourgeoisie of semi-industrialized countries in Latin America, Asia, Europe, or the Middle East. The only social force that can overthrow imperialist domination and consequently defeat imperialist aggression is the world working class. The only political program that can lead the working class and the national struggle to victory is the program of proletarian revolution.
8. The anti-globalization movement is facing now a new challenge that requires it to overcome its limited understanding of imperialism. It is not sufficient anymore to fight the enrichment of the capitalist class in the imperialist countries, as opposed to the poverty of the masses in the semicolonial countries. It is now necessary to support the war against imperialism and its servants and to develop a strategic political perspective for the world revolution against imperialism.
9. The bourgeois governments of the oppressed countries, as revolutionary as they may appear to a certain point of the struggle, have proved themselves at all crucial turning points of history to be capitulationist in the anti-imperialist struggle. Only the workers' and peasants' government has been and is capable of conducting the struggle against imperialism to a victorious outcome. Only a government led by the proletariat can rally all the energy of the nation and the oppressed of the world through the arming of all the population, the suppression of the privileged through the suppression of private property and profiteering, uniting all the people, creating a sound basis for the international revolutionary solidarity among the oppressed peoples. All this is a sine qua non condition for the defeat of imperialism.
10. In this fight we call on the masses to remove the governments that work with imperialism against the Afghan masses. These governments are tools of oppression against their "own" masses. For this reason we call on the masses to remove the hated military government in Pakistan
III. International political crisis and capitalist historical crisis: to refound the Fourth International
11. The 11 September blow is not, of course, the cause of the world crisis, but, on the contrary, it is determined by this crisis and now reacts on it by precipitating a slide into world depression. The main factor in the world downturn is the slowdown in the US economy from the end of 2000 onwards, after the burst of the financial bubble, particularly of the so-called "new economy" high-tech sector.
The most important feature of the present crisis is the presence of a synchronized downturn, a "synchronized sinking" of the economy in North America, Europe and Japan. Japan, in an indefinite recession, faces a worsening crisis of bad loans threatening the whole banking system with collapse. Europe's manufacturing industry is at or near recession, and the US tried to prevent a fully developed recession based on consumer confidence, which evaporated after 11 September.
The last time the imperialist countries faced a joint recession was in the 1973 "oil crisis". But the specific character of that synchronization was different from the present one. The previous slump came out from the collapse of the Breton Woods postwar settlement, the transformation of the protracted postwar boom into an unprecedented crisis of overproduction of capital, and the transformation of controlled inflation into uncontrolled inflation. The quadrupling of oil prices was the result of that uncontrolled inflation under the specific political conditions of the aftermath of the Yom Kippur 1973 war.
The liberalization of markets and finance globalization in the last two decades of the 20th Century was a result of that crisis and the attempt to find a way out from it and from its revolutionary consequences, shown clearly in the mass radicalization internationally in the late 1960s and early 1970s. But this globalization of finance capital led to the expanded reproduction and globalization of its contradictions that started to explode in the 1990s.
Neither interest rate cuts nor stimulus packages can have an effect on this unprecedented crisis of overproduction, exacerbated by the overexpansion of finance, i.e., fictitious capital. Synchronization of the slump is the product of globalization itself. No advanced capitalist economy can, in these conditions, play the role of a locomotive of the world capitalist economy.
12. The intensification of the world capitalist crisis brings to the fore and shows the truth of the immediate need for a revolutionary leadership of the struggles that are happening and that are going to grow more and more in the next period. We underline the decisive importance of the slogan for the immediate refounding of the Fourth International, not as a promise for the future, but as the program and the organization that are urgently needed to advance the fight for the revolutionary interests and for the revolutionary outcome of the present historical crisis of capitalism.
IV. The revolutionary strategy and program
13. The crisis represents a touchstone for the programs and strategy of all parties that have presented their candidacy as the revolutionary leadership of the exploited and oppressed masses. It is necessary, for this reason, to state clearly the slogans that may serve as guide for the action in the present situation:
Rome, Italy
4 November 2001
Coordination Committee
The Movement for the Refoundation of the Fourth International encompasses the following parties and organizations:
Workers Party - Argentina
Revolutionary Workers Party - Greece
Revolutionary Marxist Association/Proposta, ITO - Italy
Party of the
Workers' Cause - Brazil
Marxist Workers League - Turkey
Workers Party -
Uruguay
Trotskyist League, ITO - USA
Trotskyist Opposition - Bolivia
In Defense of Marxism - Spain
Marxist Workers League - Finland
Ukrainian Trotskyist Opposition, ITO - Ukraine
Committee for the
Construction of the Workers Party - Chile
Socialist Workers League -
Palestine
International Trotskyist Opposition (sections in Britain, India,
Denmark, and Germany)