Global Justice School

Friday, 17 June 2005

A New Internationalism: Subjects, Parties and Social Transformation

(Penny)

Nature of this report

Because final report has an element of "politico-organisational" as well as "politico-pedagogical" content. Know that comrades, from inside and outside our International ask for some answers as to what we are and what we're doing and how we think we are evolving in relation to what's happening. Have tried to keep up to date with what has been discussed in the school.

What is the Fourth International

* brief summary of organisational situation

From the "world party of socialist revolution"

*Where we've come from (see Chapter 9 of Role and Tasks)

*World vision/ project

• continuity of Russian revolution

*struggle against Stalinism

• programmatic foundations

•  right to tendency and faction (from the start)

*post 1968 -

•  new generation, new confidence

To "an international organization struggling for socialist revolution"

* 1979 Socialist revolution and the struggle for women's liberation

• autonomy of women's movement because

• understanding of women's oppression something other than a simple socio-economic question

• separate organisation of women is neither petty bourgeois nor splitting the working class

* Socialist democracy and the dictatorship of the proletariat (1970s ->1985)

* need for full freedom to organise political groups, tendencies and parties for full flowering of democracy

* possibility of plurality of revolutionary organisations

• still idea of "the revolutionary vanguard party"

* Manifesto of Fourth International and Appeal for a New Internationalism (1991)

* manifesto summarised thinking including on new questions (lesbian/gay liberation, ecology)

* emphasis on need to bring together all revolutionaries, learning from each other

* Positive action 1991 -

• full recognition reality of unequal power in our own organisations and legitimacy of women organising

Learning from social movement, programme develops also outside party, "black period" for politics and ourselves

* 1991 first attempt at ecology document

* 1992 adoption of Manifesto

* 1995 Building the Fourth International

• attitude to other revolutionaries

* 2003 lesbigay and ecology documents,

• apply Marxist methods of programme and analysis to these question

* 2003 new statutes

• concretisation of rejecting pretensions

• BUT still "acting together on the main political questions while discussing freely and respecting the rules of democracy" (democratic centralism"

* need for political organisation

• bringing politics into the economic struggle,

• active intervention to have an effect

* need for centralisation and democracy in action of such an organisation

• shared programme to be effective and democratic

• collective action to make a balance sheet

* need for an international

• even as small as ours

• and applying "positive action" to make our organizations closer to what we want to be

* women

• dynamic of exclusion of women from public (political) sphere

• unequal power,

• prefigurative relations

* youth

• new generations,

• new experiences (1982 IEC resolution, camp)

* positive action because bourgeois society is not a school for the proletariat

• striving towards "a new revolutionary pluralistic international" in new political situation

* after Berlin wall

• programmatic questions -> relations other groups

*Zapatistas

• strategic questions, power, taking power, the state

*global justice movement

• new form of internationalism –not direct solidarity with political movements

• new forms of organization

- old debates

- new technologies

- NGOs