Freedom Socialist Party =80 International Executive Committee =80 PO Box 266 West Brunswick VIC 3055 AUSTRALIA =80 Phone/fax: 61-3-9386-5065 =80 E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] The following article "Let's Reclaim the Fourth International" is published in the current issue of the Freedom Socialist newspaper. The International Executive Committee of the Freedom Socialist Party invites Trotskyists around the world who are concerned about the future of the Fourth International and share our perspective to work with us. Interested? We look forward to hearing from you! Alison Thorne International Executive Committee Coordinator Or to find out more visit www.socialism.com Let's reclaim the Fourth International! by Guerry Hoddersen Sixty-two years after Leon Trotsky founded the Fourth International (FI), the organization is in deep trouble - not new trouble, but worse than ever. After long degeneration, the FI threatens now to turn into its opposite - to devolve from a revolutionary leadership body into an aimless network of loosely affiliated radicals. This is a crisis that the far-flung forces of Trotskyism, the Freedom Socialist Party included, must rise to, laying aside past differences and joining together to keep alive an entity with the unique potential to develop world revolt into world socialist revolution. First and foremost, the FI was designed to be the embodiment of a political program based upon all of the lessons learned in key working class struggles. At its founding, these events ranged from the defeat of the 1871 Paris Commune, to the triumph of the Russian Revolution, to the role of Stalinism in making possible the rise of fascism. The International's second purpose was to be the organizational means for unifying and coordinating the workers' movements, using the democratic centralist model created by Lenin and the Bolsheviks of the early Third International. The need for such an organization today is profound. Following the tremendous Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization, the question on the mind of every activist has been: what next? The job of a healthy international is to be ready to answer that question. Just as the need is great, so are the opportunities. From the uprising in Chiapas against the signing of NAFTA to the bold wharfies' strike in Australia, the past few years have been marked with manifold signs of working and oppressed people awakening to our common interests and potential power. But at just this promising moment, the leadership majority of the Fourth International (United Secretariat) is proposing to junk the entire legacy of the FI and liquidate the world party. By revising the statutes of the FI, they want literally to turn back the clock; they intend to propose at the World Congress in 2001 that the FI be remade in the image of the First International, a goulash of political types that caused Marx and Engels no end of frustration before its inevitable collapse. If their plans are approved, the FI will become a virtually program-free hodgepodge of socialists, anarchists, social democrats, ex-Stalinists and Greens. It will cease to be an agent for world revolution and turn into yet another obstacle to be overcome, a "progressive" swamp where well-meaning people are derailed, demoralized, confused and co-opted. In the last decade, the FI majority has been deeply unnerved by the fall of the USSR, the free-market offensive, the unparalleled dominance of U.S. imperialism, and growth in the social democracy. Demoralization has given rise to opportunism, the willingness to junk revolutionary principle in search of quick fixes and easy popularity. This flows from seeing the global glass as half empty rather than half full. In the manifesto "Socialism or Barbarism on the Eve of the 21st Century", the FI devotes scant attention to the beating Stalinism has taken in the last decade and what this means: imperialism has lost its most significant prop for undermining revolutionary upsurge. The massive entry of women into the global workforce and the rise of international feminism, the most powerful social movement of the last three decades, is likewise skipped over; the liberation movements of other specially oppressed groups of workers are barely mentioned. No wonder the FI leadership sees the world as a depressed and depressing place. They are not looking in the right places! By underestimating the capacity of the super-exploited to revitalize the entire working class, they completely overestimate the stability of world capitalism. Having sought fruitlessly in the past for a "new mass vanguard" among students and in heavy industry, they are now ready to throw in the towel, a victim of their own blindness to the portentous sea changes that began under their noses three decades ago. The Freedom Socialist Party has existed for 30 years outside the FI, but not by choice. Despite our enforced isolation, we consider ourselves inheritors of the tradition out of which the FI was born and on which the program is based. It is our movement, if not our organization. Today, Socialist Action (SA) is leading the fight against the liquidators in the Fourth International. In a letter written by U.S. FSP National Secretary Henry Noble to SA on behalf of our party's International Executive Committee, we said this: "We are completely committed to your fight within the F.I. and want to work with S.A. in a comradely and respectful manner to promote the cause of revolutionary socialism at this important juncture.... And so we offer your forces here and elsewhere our assistance and promise to rise above past differences for the good of our movement." Hereby, we extend that same offer to each and every Trotskyist who believes as we do about the importance of the FI's future. Let us come together to make a difference at the 2001 World Congress! To contact the Freedom Socialist newspaper: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To contact Guerry Hoddersen: [EMAIL PROTECTED]