In the imperialist countries, the Stalinist parties discredited revolution and social democrats discredited reform. Neither presently fulfill the same function as in the past. The former no longer base their identity on the reference to the socialist camp, and can only transform themselves into national reformist parties if they have supplant social democracy in this role. At the same time, the traditional social democratic parties, caught up in the liberal whirlpool of loyal management and the impasse of national Keynesian potions, are closely associated with European capital and want to be the active wing of Maastricht Europe. More and more, they are the incarnation of reformless reformism. This crisis of representation of the working class movement is also seen in a crisis of efficiency and representativity of the union movement (which varies according to country)
The world situation * and by the fragmentation and atomization of class consciousness. In the countries of East Europe and in the ex-USSR, the fact that class discourse was that of the old power and that words have totally lost their meaning, that there was no merger between the democratic their aspirations of society and the class movement, that the low level of mass anti-capitalist struggles in the advanced capitalist countries was hardly a positive reference (compared to what happened in 1968) constitute so many obstacles to the rebirth of a social movement that would be independent of capital, which is finding its rebirth in fractions of the bureaucracy.
In the dependent countries where progressive anti-imperialist currents were able to enter into conflicting alliances with the nationalist sectors of a potential (petty) bourgeoisie, the change in the international relationship of forces has led to a cascading "realistic" realignment (accommodations and compromises with the IMF and World Bank). The period when OPEC appeared to be a beacon and where the international division of labor inherited from colonialism allowed for a certain margin of maneuver and bargaining seems to be definitively over. Although for a time it was hidden by the rise in oil prices, the collapse of this system began at the end of the 70's with the collapse of raw
* The world situation materials prices, which undermined both the social basis and the self-confidence of this anti-imperialism. The changes in world political relations following the fall of the Berlin Wall, the dislocation of the USSR and the Gulf War were the final blows. There is now an outright and not conjunctural crisis of the forms of the preceding phase of radical anti-imperialism (confusion in Panama, in Haiti) and a strong tendency to destructively adapt a fall-back position in the name of an illusory "realism" (El Salvador, Nicaragua, South Africa). For now, the dominant tendency on a world scale is the weakening of social movements (first of all of trade-union movements). Although large-scale electoral shifts are taking place (as in Italy), they rarely benefit workers' parties, still less often radical alternatives to these parties. Caudillos and populist formations, even parties of the far right, are usually the first to profit from disaffection with the traditional parties. Compared with what we noted at the last World Congress, the revolutionary left itself has largely fragmented and become weaker (witness the crisis of the Central American organizations, the break-up of the Philippine CP, and the retreat of the South African trade-union left). We are setting out to rebuild a revolutionary project and an international in considerably deteriorated conditions. 13. OUR PREVIOUS DISCUSSION REQUIRES the addition of a few clarifications in order to try to avoid the worst misunderstandings. Comrades have carried on a great deal over the idea of a new epoch. Let's keep it simple. Historians have invented extremely refined, sophisticated categories in order to express the periodization of rhythms (cycles, phases, stages, etc.). Here we are merely trying … to emphasize that what we are going through is not a routine alternation of upturns and downturns. A contiguration is coming to en ena, and the changes linked to capital's reorganization really pose new problems. Even if the theme of globalization is used in an ideological 20 International Viewpoint way (to defend free-market liberalism without borders and resignation in tace of the constraints that follow from it), globalization is still something real. It determines the dynamics of social transformations, political fractures and the destabilization of states.
Other comrades have stressed the emergence of elements of an imaginable new mode of regulation. This is true as well as logical. There are no clean breaks in history. The new emerges from the old, and elements of a solution are maturing in the midst of the crisis: technologies, organization of labor, new markets and new products. But right now these phenomena have neither the magnitude (i.e. generalization) nor the coherence required to launch a new phase of lasting growth. This is why we emphasize the political institutional conditions required for any exit from the depressive long wave. This does not mean that these exit conditions necessarily have to take the form of a single catastrophe or a new world war. We brought up in the report the hypothesis of slow strangulation, of which local conflicts with global implications (such as Bosnia) could be one aspect.
To conclude, is it really necessary to spend so much time on a sterile polemic over the "New World Order", as if some people (the majority) were swept away by a desperate pessimism and believed that such an Order had come to stay, while others (true to their revolutionary faith) kept to their faith in the capacity of the masses? The majority resolution from the last World Congress already stressed (beginning with its title) the new disorders (like the Gulf War and future ones). You would have to be cross-eyed to open your newspaper each day and find proof in it of an orderly world! Antagonism, conflict and struggle are inherent in the system: that is not about to change. But this is just where the problem begins. We can only foresee the struggle, Gramsci said wisely; we cannot foresee
Revolution is necessary. We are struggling in order to make it possible and make it victorious. But it is not certain, and above all we are forced, like generals who are always behind the times because they have forced to reason on the basis of the last war, to imagine a revolutionary project in the shape of past revolutions, whereas a renascent social movement will probably bring answers that no one could foresee. 14. SOME COMRADES SEEM TO HAVE BEEN shocked by the question the report asks: Where is the power to be seized? True, one can simply answer that class struggle still begins, as the classics from Marx to Trotsky said, in the national arena and that its strategic horizon is still first of all the seizure of power on the national level. This is not yet false, but it is already no longer entirely true. We have clearly rejected in the report the idea of a super-imperialism that would really reduce nation-states to the status of vestiges and make struggles on the national level futile: a situation in which the praiseworthy but distant goal of a globalization of struggles (or a renewal of internationalism) would as a alibi for resignation, passivity, and adaptation to the neoliberal dynamic. On the other hand, these states and the power that they express is losing control of a growing part of the production process, monetary flows, and movements of capital. This means that the national dimension of the struggle for power is more and more immediately entwined in regional and global dimensions. We can no longer respond to the question of so-called "external constraint" in the same way we did at the time of our first polemics about the Common Program of the Left in France in the 1970s
From now on a transitional approach must directly combine demands that detend gains in a national framework and that propose transformations in at least a continental framework. Otherwise we are leaving the initiative to the bourgeoisie. A comparable problem is posed for the dependent countries, who are trapped in the new international division of labor and whose tactical space has been considerably narrowed. We have already emphasized that the Brazilian PT's program (meaning the program that we adopted too, not Lula's campaign) was already far more moderate that the programme of the Chilean Popular Unity. And this was Brazil. What can we say about countries that do not have this level of industrialization and productive capacity? In what conditions can delinking from the world market still development? What are the effects of what some economists call involuntary de-linking: the throwing of whole countries or regions onto the margins
The political situation in
Imperialist Europe
4.7 Building the regroupment and our organisation
4.8 The regroupment and the large reformist organisations
4.9 Political regroupment and mass revolutionary party
14th World Congress of the Fourth International 21
Summary:
I. The new European crisis
1. A new period of political instability
2. Two large-scale social crises
3. In the East: an uncontrollable break-up
4. In the West: bosses offensive and the crisis of the EU
5. The working class in imperialist Europe
Il. The Crisis in the West
1. The dynamic of the crisis in the West
2. The bourgeoisie: between class collaboration and authoritarian state
2.1 Nature and forms of the bourgeois offensive
2.2 Unprecedented crisis of the political regime
2.3 The rise of Fascist parties and the extreme right
3. Retreat, destructuring/disintegration and mutation of the
E LEUN REGIN workers movement
3.1 A historic crisis
3.2 Changes in the internal structure
3.3 Crisis of traditional trade unionism
3.4 Dangerous decline of the workers movement
3.5 Trade union reorganisation on the agenda
4. The historic exhaustion of Social Democracy as a current of the working class
4.1 The tendency towards separation
4.2 Four aspects of the political impasse
4.3 A new bureaucracy/class/bourgeois state dialectic
4.4 The limits of degeneration
4.5 The weakness of the Socialist Left
4.6 A process varying from country to country
Ill Our construction
1. Crisis of the subjective factor in the present situation
I. THE NEW EUROPEAN CRISIS
2. Defending the gains of our organisations
3. The necessary mutation of our organisations
1.1. A NEW PERIOD OF INSTABILITY
3.1 Reformulating the Socialist project
3.2 Clarifying the Transitional Programme
The political instability which struck the whole of Europe
3.3 Rethinking the tactic of construction within a few years constitutes a new and important aspect of
4. Our party-building tactic today the international situation. It is the result of profound and
4.1 The independent tactic rapid modifications, which — in the context of a long
4.2 The tactic of political regroupment depressive wave — affect all the social structures, political-state institutions, the workers and social
4.3 The concept of regroupment is not new
4.4 Political regroupment in the current period movement, and the behaviour and consciousness of
4.5 some general tendencies in the workers and social social classes and individuals. It has a deep and lasting movements
4.5.1 Crisis of the revolutionary left
There undoubtedly exist some big general trends.
4.5.2 Major changes in the social movement
But at the same time, this is reflected very unequally in new social movements different countries. Thus, and paradoxically, we note a the Green current greater heterogeneity, from which we go, country by
4.5.3 The left of the traditional workers movement country, to a concrete analysis of the political system, of
4.5.4 The trade union movement as a place of workers militancy
4.6 The present stage
Delegate votes
4.6.1 Interacting with the crisis of the traditional workers movement
The general line of this document was approved as
(and the greens)
4.6.2 The difficult take-off of regroupments
4.6.3 The dangers of a regroupment policy character.
follows
For:
Against:
Abstentions:
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CGT. CF HEMI CONTRA 69% 17% 14%