14th World Congress of the Fourth International 9 obstacles: the balance sheet on this point seems to be rather ambivalent. There have been some considerable setbacks that have to be as considered as defeats even if they remain only partial. Thatcher's policies, for example, protoundly modified the relationship of forces by institutionally weakening the unions. But there exists, at the same time, a very strong social resistance which has held back the implementation of agendas that would destroy important parts of the social security nets. In some cases, the very successes of neo-liberal policies have lead to such severe dysfunctioning that the theme of the Welfare State is making a comeback, even if this comeback is closer to charity for the poor than social regulation.
This trend combines with the effects of globalization to develop an economic framework likely to produce a resurgence disarticulation of Nation-States and their relative loss of substance expose the mass of workers to living conditions that are increasingly unstable and precarious, thus creating a desire for a more reassuring social order. 3.5 THE END OF FULL EMPLOYMENT
Its inability to ensure a return to full employment centrally illustrates capitalism's loss of legitimacy. The major novelty here is the bourgeoisie's clearly and loudly declaring that, henceforth, any such return to the "good old days" is no longer part of their objectives because it has simply become impossible. This admission profoundly changes the ideological relationship of forces, because the bourgeoisie no longer has an adequate explanation tor unemployment in this day and age. Until now, it had always attributed unemployment to an excessive regulation of the labour market, to excessively high wages, to the inadequate training of youth and modernization and technological change. Since unemployment has continued after 15 years of wage austerity improvement in the average level of skills, the root causes of unemployment must be sought in the economic system itself. It is becoming increasing easier to prove this to workers insofar as those social layers and even those countries that appeared to be best protected from unemployment are now in the process of "catching up" to the rest.
The beginning of the 90's can thus be characterized as being a phase of revelation of capitalist contradictions, with a gradual disappearance of talse explanations and illusions about the capacity of the system to get itself out of the misadventure. Some elements of a recovery are showing up in several countries and the bourgeoisie is certainly not going to miss out on crying victory for every half of 1% in growth it can point to. This is an inevitable process that might even be fairly deep in certain countries given the seriousness of the recent recession but it will in no way modify our views in the middle run. All these movements of recovery are of a cyclical nature and occur within a middle term trend toward sustained social
To qualitatively reverse the course of it would be necessary to imagine the return over several successive years of growth rates in the order of, or higher than, that of the years of expansion, i.e. 5 or 6%. The structural conditions for such a scenario do not exist and are not within reach of contemporary capitalism. It goes without saying that the alternative which would consist of massively reducing working hours reorganizing production on the basis of the satisfaction of human needs is by its very nature foreign to the logic of 3.6 AN UNSUSTAINABLE MODEL
The unrestrained consumption of resources is part of an inegalitarian system, which forms a whole. It cannot, therefor, offer everyone in the world the same standard of living. But, even if things were different, it would be consumible to, bearase it is simply not consumption, sustainable from the point of view of the exhaustion of resources and the generation of waste. The consequences of intensive agriculture, over-exploitation of the seas, use of non-renewable energy sources, contaminating products and nuclear waste all fix certain physical limits to the extension of this model in space as well as in time. 4. THE CROSSROADS
The parenthesis of the post-war long wave of expansion has been closed. The possibility of returning to what now appears to be a "Golden Age" has disappeared and capitalism has, in a certain fashion, come back to characterized by inequalities, anarchy, social insecurity and wars. But this regression has occurred based on social acquisitions and a technological potential that are qualitatively different when compared to all previous epochs. Today,
Globalization * it would be possible to ensure for everyone decent conditions of existence and this is why a stabilization of capitalism on the basis of its present functioning is impossible.
In this context, it is not absurd to eventually envisage an recovery of a social movement that could take advantage of the conjunctural as well as structural conditions that can be anticipated in the coming years. From a conjunctural point of view, the coming recovery, in spite of its limited character, will favor a fresh upsurge of wage struggles and struggies against the most immediate forms of flexibility.
But, given the persistence of the deep-rooted failings of the system, the limits of which the workers have already felt, and which even the bourgeoisie recognizes as such, we find ourselves in the situation of a new beginning, where illusions have, in part, disappeared and where it has become possible to put forward demands opposed to those of the dominant economic system. From this point of view, we can say that the conditions have been created wherebv the labour movement will pass, at least for certain of its sectors, from a defensive attitude weakened by a certain demoralization to a positive expression of demands addressed to the system and its mode of functioning. It is in the course of this turnaround, evolution of capitalism is producing the obiective conditions, that a renewed anticapitalism may be born. What would be
The central difficulty concerns the emergence of a new internationalism. This is objectively necessary and possible, insofar as capitalist globalization, which pits the workers of the entire world against each other, creates the condition for unifying their fight. The model of development that contemporary capitalism has everywhere imposed is, at one and the same time, extraordinarily systematic and
* Globalization incomplete. Very systematic, it applies indifferently to all countries: the prevailing neo-liberal model in the imperialist countries does not differ fundamentally from the structural adjustment policies imposed on the countries of the South and the East. The three sectors of the world revolution, hithertofore relatively distinct, have in practice been unified by capitalist globalization. The workers ot the world have a common interest in putting an end to the process of levelling down to the least common denominator which concerns all of them. Objective conditions obviously do not suffice, and consciousness is one de-siècle. It has not spared the European workers, put into competition among themselves by the logic of Maastricht, who have not, for the time being, found the path to a united and coordinated response on the international level, in the same way the bourgeoisie's offensives are coordinated. The main material obstacle to this consciousness resides in the durability of the functions left to each State. More and more, the socially regressive policies are carried out in the name of external constraints (Maastricht, NAFTA or IMF) but they continue to be applied by national States. submission to the logical of giobalization is, moreover, contradictory even within the bourgeoisie; there exist nonhegemonic sectors of the bosses who are opposed to the neo-liberal overture. There are some outlines of potential bourgeois alternatives developing but they have not yet gelled except when polarized to the far right. The neo-liberal agenda does not respond to all the necessities of the reproduction of bourgeois domination, but is internally highly consistent and eliminates selfcentred variations since it is based on the dynamics of accumulation of the most powerful and dynamic factions of international capital.
Looked at from the point of view of the exploited, there is a major risk of slipping into nationalist-populist temptations, the attraction of which resides in two elements: on the one hand, the fact that, within this generalized competition, not everybody can win and so you have to protect yourself; on the other hand, the vague feeling that nobody controls the process going on world-wide and that it is necessary to give back to the national States the means needed to once again regulate the 10 International Viewpoint economy. This idea is not without some basis but it is, in the original meaning of the term, reactionary, since it attempts to setuturing of Capital and stan only base itselt on minority, even retrograde, sectors of Capital. We have to avoid like the plague any convergence of this criticism of Capital and distinguish ourselves by setting clearly progressive objectives for our rejection of savage free-trade.
The best way of doing so is to use the logic of a renewed transitional approach which corresponds perfectly with the requirements of the moment. The starting point is the idea that a different economic orientation is possible, everywhere in the world, one that would be better able to satisfy social needs. The main flaw of contemporary capitalism is that it introduces a deepening distortion between what it finds interesting to produce according to its own criteria and the priority needs of humanity. This distortion is present in both the imperialist and the dominated countries and putting forward basic and specific demands on capitalism brings out its limitations and shows the necessity of organizing the economy otherwise, whatever we want to call the thing.