Appeal for an International Conference for the reconstruction of the Fourth International

In view of the magnitude of the crisis and the acceleration of the war preparations, aware of the consequences that this implies for our class, it is urgent to make an appeal for an International Conference, addressed to those currents that still raise the need for the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Our purpose is to open a debate within the currents that claim to be Trotskyist, since Trotskyism is the only Marxist tradition that keeps alive the perspective of socialist revolution. It is necessary to take a step in the sense of regrouping part of the vanguard behind a revolutionary program and to intervene in the international situation. Our current aims to take part in this process as a tendency within a revolutionary leadership that promotes the development of a new generation, that takes up the historic tasks of building the world revolutionary party, which in this epoch is no other than the Fourth International. It is imperative to build this party at a time when the ideas of electoral movements or coalitions prevail, which later become rotten mediations and go into crisis due to their inability to confront the advance of ultra-reactionary sectors. We saw this, for example, in Brazil where the PSOL supported Lula; in Chile with the collapse of Boric's Frente Amplio and its alliance with the PC and related currents, or the NPA in France that made a campaign in common with Melenchon's “France Insoumise”, to give just a few examples.

From the TRFI we define that the international situation is in a stage characterized by the decomposition of imperialism and the processes of assimilation of the former workers' States. We are witnessing how times are speeding up, driven by the warlike policy of imperialism, in need to assimilate the former workers' States and to create new markets amid a crisis in the organization of capital and its institutions, such as the bourgeois State, and of its form of domination, with decadent Bonapartism.

On 01/20/25 Donald Trump took office for his second term, surrounded by the world's most concentrated financial and political establishment and international political representatives. The speech he delivered on Capitol Hill put forward the idea of reclaiming the leadership lost in recent years and, based on an aggressive policy in economy and military power, his aim is to recover the influence lost in different regions- due to its decline -, especially against China, in order to try to impose a new road map for the world situation.

We must discuss the tasks we have as revolutionaries and the policy towards the organized sectors of the proletariat in the face of the extension in time of the world economic crisis opened in 2008. The warmongering elements are worsening, as shown by the Russia-Ukraine war, which is destabilizing a large part of Europe; the genocide in Palestine by the enclave of Israel, which is generating an open crisis in the Middle East region, as was demonstrated in the fall of Al Asad in Syria; the trade war between the U.S. and China; the crisis in Africa.

We must discuss what role the proletariat of the former workers' States, like the Chinese, Russian and Ukrainian, should play to stop the war and defeat NATO and the restorationist governments. In these States we are witnessing a historical contradiction, in which the counterrevolutionary bureaucracy, which has not yet succeeded in constituting itself as a class and continues to fruitlessly seek experiments of accumulation, must take up bourgeois tasks of the imperialist epoch, such as restoring the rule of capital. But, at the same time, imperialism does not recognize this social formation as a representative for this historical task. The extension in time of this anomaly is what is leading to a war, still encapsulated. However, if it reaches this point, it would no longer be like the other world wars, which were for the distribution of the market in the expansion of the capitalist system, but it would be to assimilate the former workers' States at this moment of greatest decadence and decomposition of imperialism. We maintain that we are in a new scenario, not only because the economic and political conditions of the world war period no longer exist, but also because the party mediations or political movements with a working-class basis that developed in that period no longer exist either. That is why it is difficult and even sterile to look for historical analogies, such as those that state that we are in a moment like the one prior to 1915 or others. What we should note is that imperialism in its decadence can lead the workers to military confrontations and we believe that the world dynamics are giving signs of such preparations. We must confront war with revolution, guided by the theory of permanent revolution.

Today we witness the crisis of the currents that still claim the legacy of Mandel, Moreno, Ted Grant, Lambert and others that cannot utter a political response to the open processes. Since they were in the need to develop their political theories in a period that is already disappearing, those are becoming obsolete to guide the current revolutionary practice. At the time they had to respond to very contradictory historical processes such as the counterrevolutionary policy of Stalinism (from the authority of the Russian Revolution and the USSR), the emergence of the welfare States and a whole series of imperialist policies to give concessions to sectors of the masses in their competition against the Soviet system, etc. Because the revolutionary leadership did not develop, and the IV International did not manage to overcome the germinal stage, they ended up developing different variants of adaptations to the State and its institutions, whether in the imperialist or semicolonial countries. In general, they ended up separating economy from politics and fell into class conciliation traps, keeping this idea as a goal, without understanding the dynamics of the permanent revolution where the organized tendencies of the past are no longer present, and where the character of the revolution is posed in a worldwide key rather than national revolutions. Now, because of this adaptation, they cannot give an answer to the fall of the welfare States in Europe, to the processes of assimilation of the former workers' States, to the decomposition of the imperialist system, and to the challenges presented by class struggle. Even so, our current is still alive as a continuity of revolutionary Marxism. This makes it imperative to reclaim the method taught to us by the great revolutionaries of the past, to complete the task of developing the struggle for socialism in the present conditions. We need an International, which for us is the IV International, to organize the debates and define the tasks in all the national sections, unifying the struggle of the battalions of the proletariat that stand out all over the world.

We launch this appeal so that we begin to address this historic task, in pursuit of settling the crisis of humanity, which is the crisis of revolutionary leadership of the proletariat.