Founding Statement

Founding Statement

1. We are a revolutionary communist organisation. We believe that a new communist society needs to be built using Karl Marx's rough guide to communism - from each according to his (or her) ability, to each according to his (or her) need - as its starting point. We want a world in which the production of the necessities, and indeed the luxuries of life, is planned for the benefit of all humanity. We want to end the economic system where production is based on the exploitation of the labour of many as a source of profit for a tiny handful of people. We want to end capitalism. We regard communism as the only progressive alternative to the capitalist economic system. We regard communism as the only type of society under which all elements of exploitation of people's labour for profit can be finally removed. We believe that the fight for such a society is the strategic solution to all of the economic and social evils that blight our world - inequality, poverty, war and oppression. We believe that without communism there will be no end to unjust wars, racism, sexism, homophobia and discrimination against people with disabilities.

2. We are revolutionaries because we do not believe that capitalism will fade away peacefully. It will need to be overthrown. Capitalism has created, for the purposes of its own self defence, state structures that guard its interests. It uses a mighty and all pervasive propaganda machine, based especially on education and the media, to promote its ideological message. Whether it exists in either its democratic garb (parliament etc.) or its totalitarian garb (military or one party dictatorships) the capitalist state exists for the purpose of defending capitalism - to the death. The working class cannot simply take hold of these structures. We need to smash them - by means of violent revolution. Violent, because the capitalists will resist and use brutality to suppress our struggles. Revolution because capitalism cannot be removed in a piecemeal way, by stages, by reforms via parliament. Only a workers' revolution, one that forges its own forms of working class rule - workers' councils, a workers' defence organisation, workers'control commissions in industry, community organisations that draw in the great mass of unorganised workers - can rid the world of capitalism and its state.

3. The agent of change in capitalist society is the working class. This class is the great majority, bigger in size today than it has ever been. It is the only class with historic interests that are not only distinct from the handful of capitalist exploiters but from all the other classes (the middle class, the better off peasants and farmers). Because its labour is exploited by capitalism it has no strategic interest in the maintenance of the capitalist system. Because it is exploited not by this or that national capitalist but by global capitalism as a system, it has no strategic interest in the nation. Its real interests are international. Because it is obliged, by the attacks inflicted on it by capitalism, it is propelled into struggle, sometimes frequently, sometimes occasionally, depending on economic and political factors in any given situation. But always, when it does struggle, it is obliged to rely on itself, on class solidarity and internationalism, on militant struggle. Of course, this class can be temporarily "incorporated" into capitalism in this or that country. Top layers of the working class can be bribed into observing a semi-permanent truce with the bosses. They can and do use the organisations created by the working class - trade unions and political parties - to limit the struggle to the terrain of reforms. They can and do connive with the capitalist state to peddle the myth of class harmony and peace. Again, depending on objective conditions, such deceptions can be durable for longer or shorter periods of time. But reformism, depite its best efforts, cannot make the class struggle go away. And each time it erupts it raises the need for workers to take on and defeat their class enemy, including the bureaucratic agents of that enemy in its own ranks, by adopting new, revolutionary forms of struggle and by raising new, revolutionary demands directed against the entire system. We base our politics and our programme on this fact: the working class is the only revolutionary class in society, regardless of whether its current leaders are reformist and regardless of whether its current levels of struggle have not assumed a revolutionary form.

4. We believe it is the task of revolutionary communists to fight inside the working class for the creation of a party, an international communist party, that can win the majority to a revolutionary programme. Such a party must be made up, overwhelmingly, of workers. It must be an intransigent opponent of capitalism and be committed to its overthrow. But it must also engage in every struggle of the working class, no matter how small scale or partial, in order to prove to the majority, in practice, that the revolutionary programme and the revolutionary party are worthy of their support. It must fight to make the revolutionary class conscious of its revolutionary goal. It must act as a leader in the best sense of that word - championing every working class and progressive cause, and fighting in the most resolute and militant manner. It must be the most articulate advocate of the practical answers needed to win each particular struggle. But it must also utilise the dynamic and potential of those struggles to build permanent, democratic and fighting organisations of the working class, to win real material gains for the working class at the expense of capitalism. In fighting in this way it must constantly strive to enlist the support of more and more workers behind the clearly understood goal of the communist programme - the smashing of the capitalist state, the creation of a democratic workers' state and the destruction of capitalist society.

5. Our conception of communism, of revolution and of the party and international needed to bring these goals about is not a new invention by us. We stand in the traditions of a revolutionary movement that began with Marx and Engels, one that was developed by Lenin and later defended by Trotsky. This movement found an organised expression in the Marxist wing of the First International. The socialist and anti-capitalist politics of this wing found their highest expression in the first attempt of workers to forge a new revolutionary society during the Paris Commune of 1871. The revolutionary tradition was then continued by the left wing of the Second International, especially the Bolshevik Party in Russia. This party led the only successful workers' revolution in world history in October 1917. But others in the Second International, notably Rosa Luxemburg, also played a vital role in fighting the reformists who grew up in and eventually took over the Second International, turning it and its parties into agents of the bosses within the workers' movement. After the Russian Revolution the task of spreading the fight for communism fell to the Third International, the Comintern. At its first four congresses this played the role of leader and co-ordinator of the international struggle with capitalism on a world scale. Thereafter it was gutted of its revolutionary potential as the Stalin faction in the USSR strangled both it, and the Russian revolution itself. Both became bureaucratic monstrosities. The working class was sidelined and the very word, communism, became debased by the creation and expansion of a degenerated workers' state that was moving rapidly (within 80 years) back towards capitalism. But out of the collapse of the Russian revolution into Stalinism a revolutionary opposition was created by the Left opposition, led by Leon Trotsky. Under the banner of workers' democracy versus Stalinist bureaucracy, the Left Opposition fought to maintain the revolutionary tradition. It did this first inside the Comintern and later, when that organisation proved itself dead for revolution by allowing Hitler to take power in Germany without a shot being fired, as a new world party of socialist revolution, The Fourth International.

6. This tradition is rich in lessons for today's revolutionary communists. It is a tradition that we proudly recognise and accept as our own. But we do this not as idol worshippers trapped at the altar of former great revolutionaries. We do it as working class fighters, open to new ideas that can develop and enrich our struggle and our strategy for revolutionary change under today's conditions. Our goal is to build a new revolutionary International capable of winning majority support inside the world's working class for the goal of the revolutionary seizure of power by the working class. To fight for this goal we regard the programmatic legacy of our tradition as a priceless guide. But equally we recognise what each of the movement's before us learnt - the revolutionary programme, like the party and international - are living entities not dead sea scrolls. They must be tested and corrected, as Trotsky observed, in the light of experience, the supreme criterion of human reason. It was for that very reason that many of us joined (or indeed helped found) Workers Power, and later the international organisations it helped forge - the Movement for a Revolutionary Communist International (MRCI), later the League (LRCI). The defining feature of our tendency was its rejection of both the dogmatic sectarianism and the opportunism of the various wings of the degenerate Trotskyist (centrist) movement that emerged after the second world war. In place of dogmatism, typified by the wing of post-war Trotskyism most identified with Gerry Healy and his "International Committee" which turned Trotsky's programme and perspectives of the late 1930s into unchallengeable dogma, we urged the re-elaboration of the revolutionary programme - codified in Trotsky's 1938 "Transitional programme" . Trotsky's perspectives and programme needed to be re-worked in the light of the new political and economic period that opened after the war, the expansion of Stalinism, the development of a long economic boom post war. Trotskyism failed the test and collapsed into centrism. In place of opportunism, typified by Ernest Mandel and the United Secretariat wing of the Fourth International, we insisted on the primacy of the fight for a revolutionary programme inside the international working class movement as against attempts to find and adapt to alternative agencies and "blunt instruments" for revolution - Stalinist parties, peasant revolutionaries, guerillaist movements. Our openness to new ideas, our willingness to engage in and learn from the class struggle and our ability to admit and address our mistakes were all the hallmarks of a healthy revolutionary tendency. It is these very features that have been subverted by the leadership of today's Workers Power and its new international organisations, the League for the Fifth International, that have led us to break with that organisation and strike out independently under a new banner.

7. We found our organisation on the basis of the political programme, the Trotskyist Manifesto, established by the League for a Revolutionary Communist International (LRCI) at its founding congress (1989). That programme was itself based on the revolutionary programmes of Marx, Engels, the Bolshevik party, the revolutionary Comintern at its first four congresses and the Left Opposition/Fourth International under the leadership of Leon Trostky. The Trotskyist Manifesto was developed at subsequent congresses of the LRCI. All of this we claim as the bedrock of our own politics. However, we emphatically reject the perspectives and orientation agreed by the League for a Fifth International (L5I) at its sixth congress in 2003. The programme developed at that congress, "From Protest to Power", however, was based on this false perspective. Its crowning slogan, for a Fifth International, is wrong. We base ourselves on the critique of those positions developed first as a tendency and then as a faction. We reject the schematism, dogmatism, sectarianism and catastrophism which underlie the positions adopted by the sixth congress and are all features of the current positions being advanced by the majority on the eve of its seventh congress.

8. In particular the sixth congress insisted that globalisation had exhausted its economic potential. It claimed that world capitalism had entered a phase of stagnation and that the political situation was characterised by a world "pre-revolutionary period". In this period the crisis of leadership had assumed as acute a form as it had when Trotsky wrote in 1938, that "the crisis of the proletarian leadership, having become the crisis in mankind's culture, can be resolved only by the Fourth International." That is why, according to the L5I, the central task of revolutionaries is "agitation" - specifically within the WSF and ESF - for the formation of a Fifth International. We reject this analysis, we reject its simplistic conclusion and we reject the reduction of the fight for the revolutionary programme to a fight for a delimited number of organisational "key slogans".

9. We reject the entire method behind the sixth congress' fight for a Fifth International. This method was summarised by the public statement issued by that congress : "We call on the hundreds of thousands that have assembled in the European, Asian, South American and Middle eastern social forums, the trade unions and anti-capitalist initiatives that have linked up in action around the world, the mass working class parties that have taken to the streets against neoliberalism, capital and war, the revolutionary youth to unite at the highest possible level. This means forming the new International as soon as possible - not in the distant future but in the months and years ahead." This substituted the organisational call for unity between reformists and revolutionaries in a new International party, especially within the anti-capitalist movement, for the fight for a clear revolutionary programme as the basis for such a party. It has now found its reflection in the call by the British section of the L5I in the call for a new mass workers party as the immediate solution to the crisis of leadership in place of the fight for a revolutionary party and a revolutionary programme.

10. The L5I's positions are the direct result of a false estimate of the world situation, of the nature, scope and character of international working class struggles and of the tasks that confront the very small number of adherents to revolutionary communism in the world today. Our documents explaining our critique in more detail and our alternative analysis are available on www.permanentrevolution.net.

11. For two years we fought these wrong positions within the L5I while loyally maintaining the unity of the League in the public domain. However, the gap between the fantasy politics of the leadership, where the Fifth International is the immediate agitational issue because of the crisis of leadership, and the reality of the class struggle in most countries, has now, in our view, become unbridgeable. The leadership is set on a course of sectarian self-destruction. We have no intention of going down with them as yet another shipwreck at the bottom of the political sea.. The leadership, especially at the level of the International Secretariat, rejects outright that it has made a single error. It is 100% right on everything, including those things it got wrong. A leadership that regards itself as above error is a leadership that cannot be reformed.

12. Of course reform in a healthy and vibrant organisation of Trotskyist cadre could have taken place. This was the tradition in the LRCI (the forerunner of the L5I). There was no infallible leadership. There was a collective leadership, blending the skills of its members, resolving the political disputes in its ranks and educating and training a membership capable of holding it to account and when necessary changing it, wholesale if need be. This tradition of collective leadership has been destroyed by the current leaders.

13. We commit ourselves, 100%, to reviving this tradition and to using it as the best means we know for the purposes of building a new, revolutionary communist international. In beginning that fight anew we start by rejecting the L5I's "defining slogan" - the call for a Fifth International, and return to the historic position of the MRCI/LRCI, expressed in the pamphlet, "The Death Agony of the Fourth International": "Forward to the refounding of a Leninist Trotskyist International!"

14. Last but not least we re-assert our support for the organisation of our tendency on the principles of democratic centralism. However, we reject the idea that democratic centralism is merely a code word for monolithism. The revolutionary organisation, if it is both healthy and based on the working class, will necessarily reflect differences of emphasis, of tactics and of theory even though it remains united around an agreed revolutionary programme. For us the essence of democratic centralism is as simple as the decision to strike - once agreed all accept the decision, any who don't are scabs. It allows for maximum democracy in advance of a decision and maximum unity in carrying through a decision. But this principle is a far cry from the increasing bureaucratic centralism that evolved in our parent organisation and that has scarred so many groupings within the movement over many years. Unity in action does not mean uniformity of thought. And unity in action does not preclude open debates within the ranks of an organisation prior to action. The only provisos are:

• the opening out of discussions to a broader public are the decisions of the organisation itself, not of the individuals or groups involved

• individual members have the right to explain to people, if they so wish, where and why the disagree with the majority line in circumstances where such public disclosure does not threaten the security of the organisation or any of its members or the effectiveness of a particular action. Individual members, therefore, will only go public once this has been agreed between them and the relevant unit of the organisation (branch, union fraction, caucus, national committee, aggregate etc.)

15. The importance of both of these points is that within not only the L5I but in much of the Trotskyist left democratic centralism has become a means of disciplining loyal revolutionaries rather than real class enemies. It has become a weapon in the hands of "majority" committees against "minorities" who remain loyal to the point where they can be expelled merely for what someone described on a web discussion about our own tendency, "thoughtcrime". If that was the reality of democratic centralism then none of us would have had the privilege of being able to read Lenin's April Theses. We reject this Stalinist influenced version of democratic centralism. Membership of our organisation is voluntary - you join if you agree with our fundamental programme. If you disagree, fundamentally, with aspects of that programme you need not join us. However, the programme does not answer each and every question thrown up in the course of class struggle. There are many issues around which there can be substantial disagreement but those disagreements do not undermine the agreed programme. The fact that the Bolsheviks could, in the period of July and August 1917, have a debate in which one wing openly rejected the slogan "all power to the soviets" while others maintained its importance demonstrates this most graphically. For this reason, against the school of thought that paints democratic centralism exclusively in terms of "authority", "discipline" and the repression of internal dissent, we re-assert Lenin's view of democratic centralism, expressed in 1906: "The principle of democratic centralism and autonomy for local party organisations implies universal and full freedom to criticise so long as this does not disturb the unity of a definite action; it rules out all criticism which disrupts or makes difficult the unity of action decided on by the party & criticism within the limits of the principles of the party programme must be quite free & not only at party meetings but also at public meetings."

16. This founding statement is not the programme of our organisation. It is not the finished word on our politics. Still less does it signal that we regard ourselves as some type of fully formed and hermetically sealed sect. It is a statement of where we have come from, the principles we maintain and the direction in which we want to go. And a key part of the direction we wish to take is to engage in constructive comradely debate, and joint activity, with others on the left. The aim of such debates and joint work is to achieve a re-alignment of the forces of the left and, where possible, to enable us to fuse with others on a principled revolutionary basis. At the same time our comrades will work in the class struggle with the goal of persuading militants to join our ranks and strengthen our existing organisation. No doubt we will make mistakes, but we hope we will have the courage to say when we are wrong, and to accept valid criticism. Our view is that fraternal debate can enrich our understanding, inform our practice and help creatively develop Marxism in the twenty-first century.

To read a report of our founding conference click here 

Wed 27, September 2006 @ 19:27