The current world situation is pre-revolutionary. The bourgeoisie cannot govern through democracy and must resort to fascism, and the working class cannot live without world socialist revolution. How we will get there becomes the urgent question of reviving the revolutionary party and the program to end fascism and build socialism. We present our vision of how the conjuncture is caused by a terminal crisis, leading to wars and counter-revolutions, driven by rivalry between the two imperialist blocs for leadership in the distribution of the global economy. Next, we present our program for a new revolutionary international, the only alternative that can resolve the crisis of leadership, paving the way for socialist revolution and restoring the balance between nature and society.
Terminal crisis means that capitalism has reached the limits of its capacity to generate sufficient profits to accumulate capital. Concretely, this means a fall in labor productivity caused by an increase in organic composition (an increase in the capital/value ratio), where constant capital, which does not increase capital, surpasses variable capital, which increases value. Hence the Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall, the LTRPF. This law is uneven, affecting the most advanced capitals (USA and EU) before those that have recently emerged, such as China and Russia, where the cost/value (C/V) ratio has not yet drastically imposed the Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall (LTRPF). Therefore, competition between imperialist powers favors those that produce sufficient value to increase profits at the expense of those that can no longer produce sufficient value to prevent the fall in the rate of profit.
The LTRPF expresses itself as the struggle for total value produced. The winners can increase profits by economically outperforming the losers. The losers (the US and the EU) are forced to resort to war, economically, politically, and militarily. This law has developed and intensified since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1990, when growing economic and political rivalry inevitably led the US to go to war against “radical Islam” in Afghanistan and the Middle East. Furthermore, after 2008, the US began targeting its existential rivals, the emerging powers Russia and China.
The capitalist crisis leads to the destruction of productive forces worldwide and widespread attacks by bourgeois governments against workers. As a result, enormous migratory waves emerge across all continents, working conditions deteriorate, the environment is irreversibly destroyed, the bourgeois democratic regime is in crisis, and fascist groups emerge, attempting to channel mass dissatisfaction. We can see that the terminal crisis forces a zero-sum (potentially nuclear) military confrontation between the declining West and the rising East.
The pursuit of natural resources and commercial and technological monopolies is fueling a new neocolonial race to destroy and disintegrate entire peoples and territories. It is in this context that we understand the genocide in Palestine, the bombings against Venezuela, the wars in Africa sponsored by imperialist powers, the threats against Colombia, etc.
Faced with terminal crises and the destruction of the conditions for the existence of capital, the task falls to the proletariat (all those who need to work to survive, whether urban or rural, manual or intellectual, etc.), the only class with the potential to unite, organize, and defeat dying capitalism. For Marx, the bourgeoisie had already exhausted its historical mission of overthrowing the Ancient Regime when, in Europe in 1848, it joined forces with the remnants of the aristocracy to block the rise of the working class. Since then, the proletariat has been the only class capable of undertaking the historical task of eliminating both reactionary classes with a program of permanent revolution – completing the tasks of the bourgeois revolution as part of the proletarian revolution.
The Bolshevik Revolution was the ultimate test of permanent revolution to date, and yet its example did not lead to other proletarian revolutions. More critically, the failure of the German Revolution was a failure of revolutionary leadership in the absence of a Leninist party and program. This historical defeat was exploited by bourgeois reactionaries to pave the fascist path and destroy what remained of the revolution. We face wars and counter-revolutions in which the failure of revolutionary leadership has allowed the contradiction between nature and society to explode into eco-catastrophe and genocide, which can only end in socialism or barbarism.
Building a new international revolutionary party and program is an urgent task, but it cannot be done overnight without preparing the foundations for both. The party is the democratic organization of the most advanced workers, who debate the program for the revolution and then unite to put it to the test in practice. In the current pre-revolutionary conjuncture, in which there are small Marxist revolutionary groups (mainly, but not necessarily, Trotskyist), it is necessary to seek consensus on the fundamental principles of the program, raising demands that can be put into practice to test their effectiveness, for better or for worse.
What are these basic principles? First, who can join the party? Only the working class has the power to make the revolution. No other class is revolutionary, and the petty bourgeois who choose to join the revolution must prove their worth in practice. Party membership is based on agreement with the democratically defined program, which is then tested in the class struggle and corrected by the same process of democratic debate and majority vote. The method behind the program is transitional; it raises immediate demands to meet the elementary needs of survival, from jobs, wages, health and housing, to united fronts against fascism and wars that end with the overthrow of the bourgeois state and the creation of a socialist workers' state.
We have applied Lenin and Trotsky's program on the war against imperialism. In imperialist countries, the main enemy is at home; we call upon the workers to turn their weapons against the ruling class. In oppressed countries, we are building an international united front against imperialism to crush the Stalinist/Maoist popular front with imperialism. We are forming military blocs without offering political support to the bourgeoisies whose interests align with imperialism, against the socialist revolution. We are fighting to assume leadership in the war to defeat imperialism in both the East and the West and pave the way for national self-determination.
We follow Trotsky, who advocated accepting military aid from rival imperialisms, unless they are engaged in direct inter-imperialist war over oppressed countries, in which case we apply revolutionary defeatism.
None of these demands for a permanent revolution can be met by capitalism in terminal crisis, while fascism seeks to destroy the proletariat. It labels workers as national enemies and starves, imprisons, and murders them. The fascist reaction has put workers' tactics to the test. For example, fascists cannot be defeated by votes or pacifist protests. Workers must be armed and organized to defeat state forces and their paramilitary groups. In this process, workers' demands will escalate, moving from basic defense to strikes, armed pickets, militias, and political strikes. Only when the fascists are defeated and the workers have power in the streets can the socialist goal of destroying the bourgeois state be achieved and replaced by a workers' government and a workers' state.
In this situation, we revolutionaries have an obligation to undertake efforts to build an Anti-Imperialist Front on a global level; to create international committees of struggle that can support the struggle of oppressed peoples against neocolonialism from a revolutionary and socialist perspective; to build a permanent support network for the struggle of the working class in an active internationalism; to conduct joint campaigns against the Imperialist War; and to create the conditions for overcoming the crisis of revolutionary leadership through concrete units in the class struggle.
- Revolutionary Workers Group - GTR
- Revolutionary Workers' Alliance - ART
- International Leninist Trotskyist Tendency - TLTI
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