In the imperialist countries, central line of such an approach is the reduction of work time: mobilizing for such a demand if correctly posed leads increasingly to a critique of the system as unemployment. It raises the necessity ot fighting tor a redistribution of incomes intensification of labour, which raises once again the concept of workers control over the organization of labour. It rejects cheap jobs which means little by little demanding the implementation of efficiency, specifically, the right to oversee the social usefulness of investments.
In the dominated countries, the main lines of a popular agenda are rather easily identified: denouncing the debt, agrarian reform, wage increases, tax reform and social budgets. Once again, the resources of each country must be used differentlv and specifically be reoriented toward the domestic market and the satisfaction of local needs, breaking with the tendency to accord absolute priority to exports. The central economic rule consists of rejecting any alignment with the norms of the world market as the unique economic criterion. Its blind application can only, in fact, lead to the eviction of entire social layers. On the contrary, we have to accept and find the means to produce for the domestic market even if this implies disconnection and if there are countries which need social clauses they are: certainly the countries of the South which have been forced to contend with unequal arms with the most competitive industries in the world.
The fight against GATT and the World Trade Organization (WTO), the first function of which is to prohibit any measure allowing the countries of the South to realize any disconnection with the world market, lays out the road to a convergence of interests among peoples which raises the possibility of a new internationalism. Indeed, there is no objective contradiction between the satisfaction of workers' needs throughout the world. The well-being of some is not nourished by the abject poverty of others and pitting one against the other only leads, in reality, to the degradation of
At the ecological level, global wellbeing cannot be compartmentalised. The greenhouse effect, weakening of the ozone layer and deforestation may not affect everyone to the same extent, but there could come a moment when the very future of the human species is
Reciprocally, an improvement on the world level of the fate of workers could produce relationships of cooperation, of mutual support. The idea that trade is to the advantage of everyone would take on a real meaning but only if there is a radical reorganization of the world-
The necessity for such radicalism is not ideological; to the contrary, it is the product of the evolution of a system that has transformed the most reasonable and elementary aspirations to dignity and equity into unattainable objectives. The very existence of such a gap has put on the agenda the reactualization of a revolutionary project without which this gap may very well be filled by barbarism.
Challenges of the New
World Situation
14th World Congress of the Fourth International
THE LAST WORLD CONGRESS WAS HELD in January 1991, one year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, on the eve of the Gulf War and the USSR's dismemberment. It began to take note of the dynamics of a major world transformation. Now we must put this turning point in perspective.
a) We must take the measure of the changes that have been going on for a decade, instead of comforting ourselves with some routine idea about economic cycles or cycles of struggles. We are involved in a global (economic, social, institutional and cultural) transition. The reorganization of basic social forces and their political representation involves a long process, in the course of which new forms of struggle and organization will develop as a function of the structural changes (of a breadth comparable to those which shook up the workers' movement when it was confronted by imperialism and war at the beginning of the century) and the evolution of social formations. This means that there have to be new experiences and new generations.
b) We have to verify the existence among us of a basic agreement on events and tasks, in light of the major problems that we have been confronting over the past tew years. Without this basic agreement, an organized international militant current would quickly lose its usefulness for action and would be reduced to a think-tank based on affinities left over from the past.
c) We have to begin the necessary work of programmatic redefinition. Thanks to our traditions and our Addopted as an introductory report for the discussion inside the Fourth International on the world situation For: 75.0% Against: 13% Abstentions: 3.5% Not voting: 8.5% heritage, the world that is taking shape remains largely intelligible for us. Nothing would be more sterile than forgetting our whole past in order to rave about empty novelties. On the other hand, an international movement that did not help analyze this major transformation and help respond to problems that are really new would quickly be seen as useless.
The problems are real and substantial: consequences of globalization, reorganization of the international division of labor, crisis of the nation-state, formation of regional economic and political entities, development of international institutions and development of new juridical relationships. While we should be cautious with analogies, the tasks that confront us are comparable to those the workers' movement faced at the turn of the 20th century, when its theoretical and political culture was
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