Laying the basis of a Trotskyist Tendency for the reconstruction of a Fourth International

1. The events of 1989-91 gave rise to a situation of collapse for the world Trotskyist movement.

In many currents, the lessons drawn from these events led them to distance themselves more and more from the revolutionary positions of Trotskyism. Out of these we can identify two large groups.

On one side there were those who thought that we were experiencing a limitless offensive advance of capital. These currents talked about having suffered a "strategic defeat". From this point of view, whether explicit or hidden, they proposed the abandonment of the Trotskyist "Transitional Program" for a social democratic one which combined a program of minimum demands with "socialist propaganda".

On the other side was the group that held that 89 marked the first step towards a generalised recomposition of the workers movement; generally those who claimed this did so by adapting to the thoroughgoing to the right of the reformist leaderships of the workers movement. For example, maintaining openly sindicalist policies, they transformed the tactic of the demand on the reformist leaders for the "workers united front" into a strategy for struggle, leaving out the picture the layers of the proletariat that were not included in the narrow definition of the unions which themselves were subordinated to their bureaucratic leaderships. A clear example of such adaptation was the PT and the bureaucracy of the CUT implemented by the Brasilian PSTU or the more general policies praised by the Lambertist currents. These currents in reality abandoned the whole historical experience of the revolutionary struggle in the 20th century, wiping out the borders between reformist and revolutionaries, that is those who in the name of the working class serve the bourgeoisie practising the most open of class collaboration and those who, without mercy, confront the bourgeoisie through the strategy of workers power. In this way they abandon all reason for being Trotskyists: the struggle of revolutionaries against the treacherous leaderships of the working class.

Both points of view, including all their variations, far from reinterpreting new facts in a revolutionary way, distance themselves more and more from Trotskyist strategy embodied in the theoretical program of the permanent revolution and the transitional program.

This way they do no more than set themselves up as another obstacle to the building of a true revolutionary leadership. From the Trotskyist Fraction we declare that the task of the hour is to lay the basis of a revolutionary tendency for the reconstruction-refoundation of the Fourth International.

2. Our current has been maintaining that the imperialist counteroffensive of the 80's was possible after the diversion in Europe and the smashing in Latin America - thanks to the role of Stalinism, Social Democracy and the nationalist leaderships - of the march of worker's and popular struggle which developed between 1968 and 1976.

The events of 1989-91 in China, Eastern Europe and the USSR were expressed in the first generalised resistance of the masses to this offensive, in a "basic" way and with very backward consciousness (full of "third worldist" and procapitalist illusions) in the weakest "slab" of the world imperialist economy.

With the absence of strategic leadership, rapidly diverted, the revolutions of the period 1989-91 of Eastern Europe and the ex-USSR were, as we have described them before, "blind, deaf and dumb", incapable of defeating the bourgeois offensive. These revolutions could be deflected by a true "democratic counter-revolution" led by imperialism and the recycled bureaucratic government giving rise, in the ex-USSR and Eastern Europe, to very unstable governments which pushed ahead with the restoration of capitalism. In China the mobilisations which happened in 1989 were smashed in a counterrevolutionary manner by the bureaucracy which has gone on since then to place the Chinese masses under the immediate exploitation of international capital. But capitalist restoration cannot be completed in the countries the size of China and Russia without inflicting qualitative defeats on the proletariat of those countries.

In spite of their "basicness" these events managed, by dealing the death blow to Stalinism, to cause a crisis in the whole power order which and ruled during the post-war period, opening up a situation of true world "disorder" and allowing, as it were, in a slow, delayed, torturous and unequal way an explosive wave of processes that have developed as far as the West.

Today we can say how the tensions between the imperialisms have grown and how they are in deep crisis and have even let states and regimes collapse that they maintained during the lifetime of the Yalta order. Examples of this are the collapse of the Italian political system, the crisis of regimes like the Mexican PRI and parties like the Japanese PLD and the Indian Congress party and the situation in the State of Israel.

It was not the stability or the upward growth of capitalism, therefore, which started the revolutions of 89-91, rather they happened in the midst of crisis and decay, during a "speculative" economic period (external debt, stock exchange speculation, futures markets, etc.) which had changed essential elements of the world economy and where parasitic branches (drugs, arms traffic, etc.) worked fundamentally to put the brakes on the fall in the rate of profit of capital which had become more and more concentrated and centralised. A capitalism where the logic of the valorisation of capital left less and less space for the different utopias to achieve economic "autarchy" within the framework of imperialism. Far from having reached a new stage of more or less harmonious development as a result of "globalisation", the law of uneven and combined development was shown in all its magnitude, capital, while it valued science and technology for the profits that could be squeezed, social inequalities grew to unthinkable limits, increasing not only the differences between imperialist nations and the semi-colonies - sinking whole continents into poverty - but also generating pockets of extreme poverty and increasing the exploitation of workers and generating millions of unemployed even within the imperial heartlands.

The contradictions generated by the uneven and combined development of the capitalist economy form the basis for understanding the apparent paradox generated by each advance made by capital to avoid an open crisis or to produced new superprofits which were produced at the expense of undermining the very institutions on which they had based their power.

The crisis of the institutions of "Yalta" forced North American imperialism to open itself up more directly to confront the world's conflicts. Fundamentally the crisis of Stalinism and the phenomena which happened around it, like the rise of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois nationalist movements, demanded that it fight almost alone all the contradictions of the world situation, accelerating its decay, which was best expressed in the large increase in direct military interventions of Yankee imperialism in the last years.

The "pacts and treaties" with which imperialism has diverted and stopped the resistance of the masses after the smashing of the masses with direct counter-revolutionary actions, as in the case of ex-Yugoslavia, or the trickery, through the granting of certain concessions to the masses, as in the case of Palestine and South Africa, cannot resolve the instability of the world situation. These agreements are questioned by the right and the left, as we can see in the Middle East with the electoral victory of Likud and the fears of imperialism at the resurgence of the Intifada. This shows the lack of a reliable agent of any weight in the heart of the masses as Stalinism was.

Therefore today we find ourselves faced with an imperialist order, in reality a "world disorder", which is much flimsier than the previous period.

3. With the end of the "world of Yalta" the resistance of the masses to the capitalist offensive, even thought they are tending to generalise, manifest themselves in the form of basic struggles, mostly spontaneous (the continuity of the Intifada until their deactivation with the signing of the "Peace Accord" , the anti-Poll tax revolt in Britain in 1991, Los Angeles in 1992, Santiago del Estero and the later Argentinian revolts in 1994 and 1995, the peasant revolt in Mexico, etc.)

Within the confines of this period marked by struggles with these characteristics, which we have described as revolts and uprisings, we are witnessing a slow but insistent increase of real proletarian activity, whose maximum expression was the general strike of the French service workers in November-December 1995. The were similar important manifestations in the battles led by the reanimated working class of the Southern Cone of Latin America. Direct workers actions were combined (the petrol workers in Brasil, the general strikes in Bolivia and Paraguay, multitudinous demonstrations with confrontations against the "charra" bureaucracy in Mexico for the last First of May, etc.) with others which were a mixture of revolts and workers action (for example, the revolts of the state employed workers in the Argentinian provinces) and important actions of the peasant movements (multitudinous demonstrations and land occupations in Paraguay, actions of the "Sem Terra" of Brasil, etc.)

Besides, this is all an expression of the process of increased proletarian activity in workers struggles (which ended up with the combative mobilisation of students) in South Korea, the strike waves that we saw in Greece, Denmark and Belgium, the current mobilisation of workers in Turkey, the workers movement that toppled the government of Berlusconi in Italy and the strikes and demonstrations which took place in the different European countries against the "austerity" plans imposed by the Maastricht Treaty.

But all these struggles had the same handicap to the benefit of imperialism, the low level of consciousness of the exploited and the crisis of revolutionary leadership of the proletariat.

In order to give an honest idea of reality it is not enough just to point out the high level of activity of the masses which was seen after the accounts of 89. It is necessary to explain why the struggles did not surpass the level resistance, why we are not experiencing a period of workers and popular counter-offensive.

Today the workers movement is going through an historical crisis. A crisis which is not due (if we look at the proletariat across the world) to the loss of "objective" forces, as many bourgeois sociologists have been trying to show for years, (particular those who in response to the sole action of the French workers have eloquently written hundreds of books) rather it is due to the fact of the turn to the right and the bankruptcy of the reformist organisations (Stalinists, Social Democrats, Bourgeois Nationalists) which led the workers movement in the last few decades, leaving them at the mercy of the capitalist offensive, to total disorientation as to how to struggle. Thus the base and explosive character which the struggles assumed.

It is not the first time that the proletariat has been through such a situation. For more than a century capitalism has found ways to corrupt whole layers of the workers movement coopting for the defence of its own order. If at the beginning the different tendencies of the workers movement expressed disputes that were essentially ideological with the development of the labour aristocracy in the imperialist countries first and the Stalinist bureaucracy afterwards, the confrontation between the different currents in the heart of the workers movement expressed different social interests which put some in the position of defending the capitalist order and others in the struggle for its liquidation. Hence the counter-revolutionary essence of Social Democracy and Stalinism.

The extent of this phenomenon was revealed when the majority of the parties of Second International supported their own bourgeoisies and led millions of workers to their deaths fighting against each other in the imperialist butchery of the First World War. Also after the triumph of the bureaucratic counter-revolution of the Soviet Union and the bureaucratisation of the Third International, the proletariat was led by Stalinism and Social Democracy to one defeat after another (Mussolini in Italy, Hitler in Germany, Franco in Spain etc.) including the break out of Second World War.

During the boom of the post-war imperialism managed, in exchange for strangulation of revolutions in the semi-colonies, for two decades, to pacify the labour aristocracy of the imperialist countries, giving them wage rises and social security systems. The Stalinist bureaucracy, for its part, was able to internally keep the Russian and Eastern European proletariat in-line during these years, combining the smashing by blood and fire of the uprisings which questioned their authority (Berlin 1953, Hungary and Poland 1956, Czechoslovakia 1968, Poland 1980) with bureaucratic oppression of the whole of the proletariat and some improvements in the standard of living for the masses until the beginning of the seventies. In the semicolonies they used the whole weight of their gigantic apparatus (persecuting and assassinating the most rebellious and buying off others) in order to keep the different anti-imperialist movements under their control.

Two to three generations of struggling workers lived with their movement dominated by omnipotent Stalinism at its very centre and bourgeois and petty bourgeois nationalist movements which developed in their margins, which owed their force to their ability to transform every struggle of the masses into an instrument of negotiation with imperialism, and prevented any struggle from going beyond the margins of the status quo established at Yalta. Social Democracy basically played the same role in the imperialist countries but with a lot less power of action than Stalinism during this period.

During Yalta the Stalinists, Social Democrats and bourgeois nationalists were able to hold the masses behind reformist strategy. Therefore we can say that during this period the whole revolutionary process was tied up in a "straightjacket" which wentway beyond the limits imposed by the leadership.

The end of the boom and the period of the popular and workers counter-offensive between 1968 and 1976 questioned the hegemony of these leaderships but was unable to bring them down. Stalinism and Social Democracy, although hurt, showed their new counter-revolutionary loyalty by diverting and containing the struggles in Central America and bloodily smashing them in South America. This gave imperialism a break to absorb the catastrophic defeat of Vietnam and unleash a generalised counter-offensive (Reagan and Thatcher).

The imperialist offensive of the 80s, on the one hand, and the mirror of the revolution in Poland, on the other, convinced Stalinism to withdraw their margins in order to keep acting as the "indirect agent" of imperialism and started on the path to converting themselves to a "direct agent" of capitalist restoration.

Given a death blow by the uprisings of the masses between 89 and 91 the restorationist course of the bureaucracy deepened. The different nationalist bourgeoisies joined the imperialist offensive against the semi-colonies. The guerrilla leaderships joined the pro-imperialist regimes. All these leaderships - like the Social Democrats when they voted for war credits in 1914 and the Stalinists when they signed the reactionary pact with Laval (the French representative of imperialism) in 1935 and the Yalta and Postdam treaties of 1944-45 - today, in a "neoliberal" or "humanistic capitalist" way, have shown themselves to be openly compromised on the side of the defence of capital.

The treacherous leaderships are accomplices to the imperialist strategy of fragmenting the proletariat and terrorising them with chronic unemployment. It is this swing to the right of their agents on which imperialism has based itself to launch an ideological campaign on the "end of socialism" and such themes.

But in spite of all this the masses, although in a basic way, as we have indicated, has increased its resistance. Even amidst the current tremendous confusion we can sees the direct beneficial effects and the potential crisis of the Stalinism. Now the proletariat and the oppressed do not have an all powerful straightjacket which contains their revolutionary energy. The mediations that are growing today (Islam, recycled Stalinism, various populist currents etc.) are much weaker than the apparatus controlled by the bureaucracy of the Kremlin.

The rebellions we have seen during the last few years are the direct expression of the disorientation on how to resist the offensive of capital and at the same time the energy of free struggle. The growth of direct activity of the proletariat last year is also a sign that the working class of the world is slowly beginning to enter into combat (France).

If this process develops (together with the attack of capital against which it is pushing) there exists a more vulnerable power order (disorder) of imperialism and an "open field" for the action of revolutionaries. Thus opened the potentially revolutionary stage in 1989.

However, the spontaneity of the resistance of the exploited could end up bogging down the offensive of capitalism. It is incapable of destroying it by itself. Today the main handicap, which imperialism counts on, is the crisis of revolutionary leadership of the world working class. Therefore it is necessary, right now, to build an international revolutionary leadership of the proletariat. In particular, the current crisis of the working class is that building the revolutionary leadership of the proletariat must be taken forward by simultaneously building new fighting organisations in place of the impotency and crisis of those which struggled during Yalta.

If the immediate presence of the working class, which is evident in the world situation, develops and the imperialist offensive feeds it, as, for example, the Kohl plan in Germany, the objective conditions will be established for the emergence of such a revolutionary leadership, which will not develop if the basic level is not overcome and the proletariat does not predominate in the actual resistance.

The French events of November-December 1995 have pushed forward the potential.

In the first place we see the contraction of heavy industry and the growth of the service sector in the economy which is not synonymous with a weakening of the working class, instead the service workers (trains, post, banks etc.) are an essential sector of the working class with a great capacity to halt the unravelling of capitalist production. The working class has in their hands all the resources of the functioning of capital. The weight which transport, finance and communications has acquired in contemporary capitalism turns the service workers into a central element for the effectiveness of all generalised action of the proletariat. Just as the strike of the service workers in France had the effect of a General Strike. The factories were unable to function even though their workers did not participate actively in the strike. Besides, against all predictions of bourgeois sociologists, the imposing 22 strike days showed that far from behaving like the middle class the service workers were also able to act as the vanguard of the whole working class.

Secondly, the leadership of the reformist parties (Social Democrats and Stalinists) and the unions were completely impotent when faced with the task of defeating the bosses offensive. All the time they were trying to prevent the movement from slipping from their hands so that they could ensure free negotiation with the government to lift the strike which they eventually did. Thus they avoided the fall of Juppé and kept the service workers struggle within the bourgeois strategy of leaving the struggle as a "corporate" conflict. At the same time, the development of the of the strike revealed the weakness of the reformist politicians and trade unionists.

Thirdly, the centrist currents speaking in the name of "Trotskyism" (in France, the LCR, Lutte Ouvriere and PO) adapted to the reformist apparatus. Caught in their strategy of putting pressure on the unions they never broke the corset in which the wanted to seal the struggle of the service workers.

None of them were able to raise the transitional programme which would have been the most appropriate given the circumstances nor did they show the way, starting from the demand of the masses fro the defence of Secu and the gains that were under attack, how to lead the struggle to the defeat of the Juppé government and his plan. They did not even propagandise or push for the necessity of building works or co-ordinating committees which could be transformed into real alternative organisations to the bureaucratic leadership of the union organisations (in effect "soviets"). We cannot say for sure that such a policy would have led these currents to change the destiny of the strike, however, we can say that this was the only one from which could have emerged an alternative pole to the bureaucratic leadership of the unions which in turn could at least have left markers for the clear lessons of the struggle on the way to follow when the movement rises up again. To deny this, to hide the impotence behind which put the thousands of workers of talked, in the name of Trotskyism in France, now reduces the importance of the process that emerged in France and blames the fact that there was not a general strike, not on the bureaucracy, but on the workers of the "private sector". Their adaptation to the reformist apparatus made it impossible for them to take advantage of the highly favourable conditions (because of the state of weakness the reformist apparatus was left in) that had emerged in France for the building of a formidable revolutionary party. In order to do this the most urgent tasks are the defeat of the politics of the centrist currents which speak in the name of Trotskyism and the raising of a truly revolutionary strategy.

In order to consider an example in another continent where a centrist current also spoke in the name of Trotskyism and was a force which proved to be impotent we shall look at Brasil. Here there were various tendencies which could count on a significant influence in the workers and popular vanguard, like the PSTU of the LIT-CI, SU (Democratic Socialism) and O Trabalho (Lambertist). The first came from Convergencia Socialista (which was expelled from the PT after more than 10 years of "entryism") while the others continue in the PT. During the mobilisations which led to the fall of the Collor government none of these organisations went further than to raise a more "revolutionary" demand of "Collor out ! Early Elections". Today they hold posts in the administration or the reformist apparatus of the PT (the DS or the OT) and in the leadership of important unions and the CUT together with those who gave political cover to the policy of class collaboration of Lula and the union bureaucracy led by Vicentinho.

All of this reaffirms the necessity of laying the foundations of a tendency for the reconstruction-refoundation of the Fourth International.

If not lets look at Argentina where the MAS, yesterday proclaiming itself as the "biggest Trotskyist party in the world", after capitulating to Stalinism in the United Left and shamefully ceding to the union bureaucracy in the struggles against privatisation in the first years of the Menem government, ending up by exploding and becoming a minimum expression of its former self.

4.Where is the world actually going ? Even the most optimistic of the bourgeois analysts are force to insist how precarious the situation is. Far from the triumphalism that was characteristic of the "elaborations" of the bourgeois ideologues during the first moments after the "end of the cold war" today they are advising caution. Since the situation we described above, after the victories of imperialism of the last few years, it is far from having allowed or even on the way to allowing a new process of sustained accumulation of capital of a kind that we saw after the Second World War. What they have really gained is merely short respite in the process of their crisis, some points of support in their battle against the masses - for example, the exploitation of the low salaries of workers from China and some of the Eastern European countries and the enormous "reserve army of industrial workers" that are made up by the 800 million unemployed in the world in order to depress all wages worldwide. In spite of the enormous energy which unfolded in the last few years (as a result of which we call it the "crisis of Subjectivity" of the workers movement), they are positioned in against a popular and workers counter-offensive, like we saw between 1968-76. It is a situation in which the confrontations are becoming more direct but neither capital of the workers can win decisive victories.

The political panorama of various European countries, although distorted, expresses this situation. Government coalitions of the centre right and left with enormous differences between their programmes (PP-PSOE in Spain, the "Pole of Freedom of the Olives" in Italy, Major-Blair in Great Britain, etc.), sectors of the Bonapartist right which lend their support (Fini in Italy, Le Pen in France) and reformist sectors of the left which express the deep discontent of workers, within the margins where there exist no phenomena of workers radicalisation, (Izquierda Unida in Spain, Rifundazione Comunista in Italy, the vote for the CP and LO in France and the SLP in Great Britain).

Conscious of the limitations which make it impossible for a small current like ours to reach a full picture of what could be happening in the world, we shall, in a "pedagogical way", try to distinguish the different tendencies that are expressed and that allow the advancement of different and alternative forecasts. We can say that the form in which we shall do this is "schematic" because these tendencies are interrelated and combined and because what we want to indicate is the possible domination of one over another.

a) The first alternative could be a world "crash", the product of the explosion of extremely deep contradictions provoked by the process of the finance capital on a large scale, worldwide. Tendencies of this can be found in the crash of Wall Street in 1987 and the smaller crashes of 89 in Japan and the Mexican economy of 1995 or in the repeated crises of the European Monetary System (the way the Lira and the Pound left which forced a new and more relaxes exchange scheme) which made it practically impossible to adhere to the terms of Maastricht. A situation of this type could couple the first moment of unrest and response of the mass movement and increase the intensity of inter-imperialist conflicts; and perhaps also could open up a tendency to more direct war or revolution as happened in the crisis of 1929.

b) A second alternative may result from the development of struggle of workers and the oppressed masses (above all in capitalist Europe) which surpasses the current period of more or less generalised resistance (what we have called "rebellions and uprisings" and open up a popular and workers counter-offensive like the period of 68-76, of which we have seen the seeds in the development of the service workers strike in France at the end of 1995 (which seemed to be the antechamber to a process of further deepening of the contradictions of Europe and Maastricht) or in the current struggles of the working class in South America.

c) The last possibility (less probable) would be given by the generalisation of partial defeats like the war in ex-Yugoslavia combined with a consolidation and qualitative leap in the process of capitalist restoration in Russia (with the closure of thousands of companies which are "unprofitable" for capitalism and millions of unemployed workers) and China. From this perspective, one of a defeat (direct or because of the accumulation of partial defeats) of the Russian or Chinese working class would mean a historical retreat for the world working class which would be forced to resist in a much more adverse situation. This hypothesis would lead to a deepening of inter-imperialist contradictions in "dividing up the pot", which leads us back to the first hypothesis but in much more adverse conditions for the proletariat and the exploited.

It is difficult to see the development of one of these alternatives in a pure form over the next few years. Moreover we must be open to any combination of the different tendencies. However, whichever perspective predominates, we shall have to say that what has been seen over the last seven years was no more than a pallid anticipation of the deepening processes of the years to come. We are on the opposite side to those who claim that a new period of capitalist stability is coming. This is not because we see "the revolution just round the corner" but we do maintain that there is a good possibility that we shall live through a period of intensification of class struggle, breakouts of revolution and counter-revolution. For this we also oppose those who believe that capitalism can be restored in Russia and China without fierce battles between the classes,; rolling the film of "reformism backwards" as Trotsky said. How can anyone think that the gigantic task of the destruction of the forces of production, which would be involved in the restoration of capitalism in Russia (more than 70% of industrial companies are not "profitable" in terms of the world market), will go ahead without workers resistance ? How can anyone think that this process will be effective in China in an "evolutionary", "gradual" and "peaceful" way when there are more than 140 million workers occupied in state enterprises which are considered "not viable" by the IMF ?

Far from a perspective of early defeatism or simplistic triumphalism we believe that our characterisation allows us to orientate us towards phenomena to come, having defined the key to avoiding that the enormous energy that is unfolded by the masses in their battles is dissipated in impotent rebellions and diverted, smashed or aborted revolutions, that is, the overcoming of the crisis of revolutionary leadership.

This crisis will not be resolved by anything less than the hardening experience of the revolutionary vanguard in the struggles to come. As Trotsky said "The capitalist world has no way out, at least one that they consider to be a way out from prolonged agony. It is necessary for us to prepare ourselves for many years, if not decades, of war, insurrection, brief interludes of treaties, new wars and new insurrections. A young revolutionary party has to base itself on this perspective. History will give it sufficient opportunities and possibilities to prove itself, to accumulate experience and mature itself. The quicker the vanguard is fused the shorter the stage of blood convulsions will be, the less destruction our planet will suffer. However, the great historical problem will not be resolved at all if a revolutionary party does not put itself at the front of the proletariat. The problem of rhythm and intervals is of enormous importance but this does not alter the general historical perspective nor the orientation of our politics. The conclusion is simple: We must take forward the task of organising and educating the proletarian vanguard with our energy multiplied tenfold. This is precisely the objective of the Fourth International" (Manifesto of the Fourth International on the imperialist war and the world proletarian revolution, May 1940)

5. New political attempts to lead the struggle of the masses towards a reformist perspective are emerging on the world horizon. The Mexican Zapatistas are postulating an openly reformist policy of building "a movement that does not propose to take power" and negotiating with the PRI government the end of the peasant uprising. Stalinism is resurgent in Russia under the banner of "market communism" proposed by Zyuganov, Scargill has launched the SLP behind a clearly reformist strategy... All are variants that enter into the logic of what it is possible to achieve in a "humanised or social capitalism" and that the dictatorship of the proletariat is something of the past. There function is to transform themselves into a channel in order to contain within the margins of the bourgeois regime the energy and eventual radicalisation of the masses.

Lamentably, the majority of the centrist currents that speak in the name of Trotskyism have adapted to these new phenomena without giving up from prostrating themselves in front of the old apparatuses.

The United Secretariat has dissolved the majority of their sections into reformist organisations (in Spain into Izquierda Unida, in Mexico the majority of their followers dissolved themselves into the FZLN, etc.) confirming that after 1989 there was no distinction between "reformists and revolutionaries" (sic). In countries like France they maintain an independent organisation, the LCR, because they have failed all attempts to a superior force into which they could evaporate.

The current oriented to Pierre Lambert whose principal organisation, the French PT, confirm that "they do not pronounce" on questions such as "the dictatorship of the proletariat" or "the socialist revolution". They have built an "International Alliance of Workers" together with a series of reformist groups and union bureaucrats, proposing a return to the times of the First International.

The LIT finds itself divided into two tendencies with equally dreadful politics. The minority oriented to the Argentinian MAS (which after their break up in 1992 have not stopped splitting) distance themselves more and more openly from Trotskyism and, moving closer to the positions of Sozialismo Rivoluzionario from Italy by abandoning the dictatorship of the proletariat and condemning the "red terror", protest, in the name of "anti-statism", give up the defence of workers gains and take up a fast-track to openly Social Democratic positions. The majority sector led by the Brasilian PSTU, while it orientates to national sections behind the formation of popular electoral fronts blocks (like the Brasilian Popular Front for the presidential elections of 1995) capitulate to the reformist leadership of the trade unions and seek to make opportunist understandings on the international front, like the recent agreement signed between the LIT and the small international current orientated to the British WRP.

The IOC, with Militant Labour as its principal current, maintains openly pro-imperialist positions, opposing the defence of the right to self-determination in Ireland and refusing to defend the semi-colony of Argentina against the imperial British fleet in the Malvinas war.

International Socialism, the current built around the British SWP from its origins as the "state capitalism" current not only opposed the defense of the degenerated and deformed workers states - maintaining for decades in their paper the reactionary slogan "Neither Washington Nor Moscow" - but also openly gave up the Transitional Program.

The UIT, the result of the alliance of followers of the Argentinian MST and the POR from Spain, capitulates to whatever reformist or popular front phenomenon that exists: Zapatism in Mexico, CP, PTP (Maoist) and "opposition" union bureaucracy in Argentina and Izquierda Unida.

The ICL (Spartacists) were with the tanks of Jaruzelsky in Poland showing how a decidedly pro-Stalinist current acts in the "defence of the bureaucracy" on many occasions.

Smaller tendencies like that led by the Argentinian PO, after having proudly integrated into the Sao Paulo Forum together with all the treacherous leaderships of the Latin American continent, were determined to follow economistic and electoralist policies that one after another ended in failure.

In order to win it is necessary to defeat all these opportunist policies that deny the lessons of Trotsky. To be precise this means building a current which struggles for the building of revolutionary workers parties to defeat the reformist leaderships in the course of struggle. A current that learns from the lessons of recent battles and upholds a programme and a strategy that brings up to date in a revolutionary way the legacy of Lenin and Trotsky. A current that can lay the foundations for building a tendency for the reconstruction-refoundation of the Fourth International.

6. This tendency must start from the method and lessons left by the revolutionary tradition of our epoch (in particular the resolutions of the first four Congresses of the Third International and the Transitional Program) and propose the bringing up to date of the revolutionary program in the light of new events.

We are against any dogmatic perspective which while it proclaims formal adhesion to the principles and programmes left by Trotsky, in practice and in daily struggle, it denies it. Every truly revolutionary tendency must base themselves on programmatic unity, treating the program as the common understanding of all the revolutionary tasks. It is not enough to claim formal adhesion to the legacy of principles left by Lenin and Trotsky. In order to this programmatic basis it is also necessary to reach a common understanding of the major historical events after the death of Trotsky and the degeneration of the Fourth International during the post-war period. We do not treat the programme as a dogma rather we treat it as an instrument for revolutionary action which needs to be sharpened in the heat of action and deepened in the same revolutionary way as its founders did. This was not what the "Trotskyists" did in the post-war period when the took the "Transitional Programme" as stone tablets while in action they did nothing more than deny it, or they just changed it to contradict its fundamental premises.

How to rebuild or refound the Fourth International ? The Second World War did not end in the way Trotsky had predicted; the sinking of Stalinism and the transformation of the Fourth International into the Revolutionary International of the masses. In spite of the death of Trotsky and the difficult conditions created by the war the Trotskyists did respond, on the whole, in a principled and revolutionary way to the war, being the only ones to not cede to the imperialist view of treating the war as a struggle between "democracy and fascism. With the end of the revolutionary period, which started in 1943, after the signing of the pacts between the imperialist victors and Stalinism in Yalta and Potsdam, the strengthening of Stalinism and Social Democracy led the Trotskyists to cede to the pressure of these apparatuses and to the degeneration of the Fourth International. The end of the war did not bring with it the end of the crisis of revolutionary leadership of the world proletariat. Far from it, the crisis deepened.

Apart from the many politically correct and principled fights in the heart of Trotskyism (which has left what we call "threads of continuity" with the revolutionary programme) which were really just episodic phenomena, the whole of the Fourth International was transformed into a centrist movement by the beginning of the 50's. Since the split in 1953 the Fourth International ceased to a centralised party and Trotskyism transformed itself into a movement. After this, during the rise in struggle of the 70's, in spite of the numerical strengthening of their ranks, none of the divided Trotskyist currents found itself capable of overcoming their centrist conceptions and adopting a revolutionary strategy. In the 80's a fresh leap to the right ended generating the current panorama of disintegration.

Since the beginning of their disintegration the necessity of arguing for the defeat of centrism within the heart of Trotskyism and for rebuilding the Fourth International. However, the different efforts, from the IC in 1953 to the Preparatory Committee in the middle of the 80's, were either centrist abortions from the beginning - the second - or they degenerated after the first progressive steps. The different tendencies that during Yalta expressed progressive positions also had to confront unfavourable situations in the working class movement dominated by Stalinism, Social Democracy and Nationalist leaderships. The current crisis of Stalinism today has created favourable conditions for overcoming the crisis of revolutionary leadership. We affirm that the struggle for the reconstruction-refoundation of the Fourth International is a task which assumes absolute relevance.

Firstly, because the historical premises on which the Fourth International were founded are still relevant. We continue to see an epoch of wars, crises and revolutions. Trotsky's definition of fascism and the popular front have as much relevance today as they did then, that they are extreme resources which the bourgeoisie confronts the threat of revolution. The crisis of humanity continues to be centred around the crisis of leadership of the world proletariat. The fundamentals of the theory of Permanent Revolution have been shown to be valid throughout the revolutions of the post-war period and the Transitional Programme as the irreplaceable tool to measure the distance between the objective revolutionary character of the epoch and the level of consciousness of the masses. Adequate for the current phase of decomposition of the bureaucratic workers states, the programme of political revolution is the only one that can give a revolutionary response to the process of capitalist restoration that is underway. Furthermore, the Trotskyist analysis of the degeneration of the USSR was the only one that predicted that if the proletariat did not push the bureaucracy from power it would transform itself more and more into the agent of imperialism within the heart of the workers state. The reformist leaderships have shown again and again how politically bankrupt they are. It is necessary to build the World Party of Social Revolution.

Secondly, because the building of such a revolutionary leadership must start from the legacy left by Trotsky and the principled threads of continuity left by the Fourth International before its degeneration at the beginning of the 50's and in the partial struggles led by different Trotskyist currents, even within the limits of their own degeneration. Amongst the most important we must count:

the activity during the war and the conclusions drawn from the World Conference of 1946 on the activities of Trotskyists during the Second World War

the majority of the resolutions of the Second Congress in 1948

mainly the fight against "state capitalist" and "bureaucratic collectivist" tendencies

the positions maintained by the same Congress by the majority of the British RCP on the character of the glaciated States, Yugoslavia and China (despite ceding politically to Tito and Mao) as deformed workers states

the formation of the IC facing the Pabloite orientation towards sui-generis entryism into the Communist Parties (now that they were transforming themselves into "objectively revolutionary" parties)

the positions of the IC before the uprising in Berlin in 1953 and the majority position of Trotskyists with respect to the Hungarian Revolution of 1956

the fight between the North American SWP and the Morenoite PST of Argentina against the diversion into guerrillaism in Latin America led by Mandel at the beginning of the 70's

the lessons drawn from the Portuguese and Chinese revolutions by the Morenoite current

the theoretical considerations of Mandel on the character of Soviet society

Thirdly, because of the building of a revolutionary leadership on an international scale it could not emerge beyond the basis left by Trotsky and the Fourth International. No other political tendency has put forward any better revolutionary conclusions to those contained in the Trotskyist programme. Only the Trotskyist programme expresses the interests of the most exploited sectors of the world proletariat (blacks, Asians, Latinos ....). It is the only one that places a series of demands capable of uniting the struggles of the exploited and oppressed of the world against the common imperialist enemy, relating the struggle of the semi-colonies for their liberation with the workers of the metropolis.

For all these reasons we do not believe that today it is on the agenda to call for the building of a "new International" or a "Fifth International" instead the task is to build a revolutionary tendency what is committed to cleaning the banners of the Fourth International defeating the centrists which speak in the name of Trotskyism to further the reconstruction-refoundation of the Fourth International. This the task of the day.

7. If we have some merit, those of us who make up the Trotskyist Fraction, it is that we have reorientated ourselves since our split from the LIT in 1988, from a scientific study of the theory and programme of proletarian revolution. Although it may seem a paradox that the majority of the currents that claim to be revolutionary have abandoned scientific reflection on revolution. Day after day, in every language, we can read hundreds of papers and magazines written by different currents which claim to be Marxist and Trotskyist revolutionaries. However, you can count on one hand the those for whom the workers revolutionary perspective is something true and more than just a ritual illusion while their daily work their real worry is nothing more than seeing which electoral tactic can win a parliamentary seat or how to win a trade union post.

Our major preoccupation, advancing the lessons we draw from revolutionary strategy to sharpen the programme, is expressed as much through political battles resulting from the main events of the class struggle in which we participate as through theoretical criticism of the centrist currents of Trotskyism (in particular Morenoism from where we come). Apart from the fact that our positions certainly contain errors from which our current cannot be immune, in the current crisis of Revolutionary Marxism, we have developed theoretical , political and programmatic baggage which we submit for consideration by all currents and individual of the Trotskyist movement who coincide with our perspective of defeating the centrist currents which speak in the name of Trotskyism (US, LIT, IOC, UIT, IS etc.) and leading a revolutionary tendency for the reconstruction-refoundation of the Fourth International. These are lessons that we should like to share with struggling workers and youth who have launched struggles against capitalist-imperialist exploitation and who themselves actually suffer the impotence of battles which advance with the explosion of tremendous energy but without the clarity to confront the enemy.

As part of the battle to establish a Revolutionary Trotskyist tendency the TF has recently signed a "Declaration of Intention" with the comrades of the LRCI - which we have printed in this issue of "International Strategy" - where we have established principled method of discussion of agreements, differences and aspects of which we need to deepen our analysis between our organisations. We hope this proves to be of positive influence on other groups, tendencies and revolutionary individuals who propose the advance of the building of a superior revolutionary pole.

8. In previous issues of "International Strategy" (basically issue 3 and the double issue 4-5) and in the publications of our national groups which make up the TF (PTS in Argentina, LTS in Mexico, and the LOT in Chile) our theoretical and programmatic developments since our expulsion from the LIT are synthesized.

In "International Strategy" no.3 we published a critique of the revision, by Nahuel Moreno, of the theory of Permanent Revolution. In the name of an objective conception of revolution he formulated a "new" neo-Menshevik theory about "democratic revolution" and undervalued the importance of the working class as the subject of the socialist revolution and the revolutionary party, that is Trotskyism and the programme, as the leadership of the same.

In "International Strategy" no.4-5 we pointed out how the Trotskyists of the post-war abandoned the "strategy of soviets" and the mechanism of the Transitional Programme as the pole star for orientating the intervention of revolutionaries in order to defeat the reformist and centrist leaderships and to be able to lead the masses towards the dictatorship of the proletariat. As a consequence we criticised the "Trotskyists of Yalta" who argued for different policies which had as their foundation the placing of pressure on the reformist and centrist apparatuses to go further than their intentions. They thus created illusions that the counter-revolutionary leaderships (Social Democracy, Stalinism and national bourgeois) could be transformed into "progressive" centrists or "empirical" revolutionaries and subordinating to second place the necessity of revolutionary intervention by the Trotskyists. In the same issue we developed the importance of the Transitional Programme and the revolutionary use of minimum and democratic demands.

In the current issue of "International Strategy" we fight the economist strategy which the "Trotskyist" currents of France followed during the events of November-December 1995. We give a Marxist analysis of the relation between revolt and revolution which must be the policy of revolutionaries when faced with the such basic struggles which have been developing since 1989. We put forward the importance of defence of the right to national self-determination (including the formation of their own state) of the black people of the USA.

Over more than 150 issues of the paper edited by the Argentinian PTS and the 20 by the Mexican LTS we have developed an intense struggle against the policy of class collaboration defended by different expressions of Latin American "Trotskyism". Since the beginning, we have fought the embryo of the popular front of Izquierda Unida in Argentina and the policy of class collaboration expressed in the "Plaza del NO" in 1990 organised by the Argentinian MAS, as well as their bungling in the struggle of resistance against the privatisation plans of the Menem government and the strategy maintained by the MAS, MST and PO during the new period of struggle in Argentina from the end of 1993, through the rebellion of Santiago del Estero. We also confront the deceitful policy of the Brasilian PSTU on the class collaboration front (Popular Front of Brasil) built by Lula and the PT as well as the "democratising" policy supported by their antecedent, Socialist Convergence, when faced with the mobilisations which led to the fall of the Collor government. We have supported the hard struggle against the reformist strategy of the Mexican Zapatistas followed by the groups that came out of the PRT (the old Mexican section of the US, whose majority has now evaporated into the FZLN), UNIOS (close to the Argentinian MST) or the POS (LIT-CI). At the same time we pointed out the opening up of a pre-revolutionary process in Mexico which peasant revolt showed.

Also we argued for the importance of the political revolution when faced with the national question, an aspect of which was shown in the magnitude of the war that broke out in Yugoslavia, where we supported the necessity of being on the side of the Bosnian nation in the military field in their struggle for self-determination raising independent working class politics, synthesised in the struggle for the need for a workers, multiethnic and independent Bosnia.

We firmly believe that these conclusions a positive steps in the task of updating revolutionary strategy and programme in the heat of class struggle, trying to return to the method of Trotsky which was abandoned by post-war "Trotskyists".

9. The current crisis of the workers movement shows the bankruptcy of reformist strategy which Stalinists, Social Democrats and bourgeois and petty bourgeois nationalists follow. The rest of the new variants of these currents are preparing themselves in order to prevent the battles of the working class taking the path of proletarian revolution. With all their differences to one side they share one thing in common, the desire to lead the working class up the path of class collaboration. From the neo-Stalinists of Zyuganov to the Socialist Labourites of Scargill, the Zapatistas of Marcos to the PT of Brasil, Izquierda Unida of Spain to Rifundazione Comunista of Italy or the ANC of South Africa. This is also the same path that directly bourgeois currents like the Islamicists in the Arab nations, the Nation of Islam of black North Americans or sectors of the Catholic Church in Latin America which presents itself as the "church of the poor"

The crisis of humanity continues to centre itself on the crisis of revolutionary leadership of the working class. Decadent capitalism, with its growing sores of hunger, misery, war, unemployment and super-exploitation, pushes the workers and oppressed into struggle. The reformists of different flavours have nothing to offer the oppressed to leave their dreadful situation. They permanently try to hold back their struggle and, at the end of the day, only promise some sort of "humanisation" of the system.

During Yalta the fortress of Stalinism, Social Democracy and the nationalist leaderships closed the path to the masses to Trotskyists which led to the degeneration of the Fourth International. The debacle of these intercessions and the growth of the struggle of the exploited is shown in the new opportunities for revolutionaries to test the validity of our theory and action programme.

The strength of Trotskyists does not lie in our numbers it lies in our programme which is the only one that proposes the liberation and unification of the energy of struggle of the most exploited sectors of the world working class in order that they can make their dreams of a society without oppression come true. The Black, Latin and Asian workers robbed in their own countries and victims of racism and super-exploitation in the imperialist heartland; those in Eastern Europe and the ex-USSR who see their illusions, which developed with the fall of the one-party regimes, collapse and begin to confront the introduction of "real capitalism"; those who in the imperialist nations see their rights limited and their gains threatened; the young and women to whom capitalism only promises a worse future: Their struggle is enriched by the force of our programme because it is the only one that argues for the necessity of leading the battle of all the exploited against the common enemy: imperialism; and propose the only method capable of defeating it: the proletarian revolution.

Unfortunately, as we said before, the majority of the "Trotskyist Movement" has put the lesson left by Trotsky aside and have adapted to the policy of new and old intercessions with reformism. They have abandoned (in deed and in law) the theory-programme of Permanent Revolution.

Starting from the legacy left by Trotsky and drawing up the dispersed threads of revolutionary continuity, refining the revolutionary programmes with the lessons of the major events of the class struggle, we can form the basis we support to begin build a tendency for the reconstruction-refoundation of the Fourth International.

June 1996 (translated July 1996, by LRCI)