Declaration of the International Communist League
Defeat Imperialism Through Workers Revolution-Defend Serbia!
All U.S./UN/NATO Troops Out of the Balkans!
For a Workers Europé!
The foIlowing April 21 statement by the International Communist League (Fourth
Internationalist) is being issued in eight languages for distribution at May Day
demonstrations and other events internationally.
The imperialist war against Serbia is already the biggest military conflagra-tion in
Europe since World War II. Having pounded Serbia for weeks with bombs and cruise
missiles, there is a growing crescendo among the Western imperialists for a full-scale
invasion of the rump Serb-dominated Yugoslav republic. Once again the Balkans have
become the powder keg of Europe, bringing us a step closer to a new world war. As
proletarian international-ists fighting to build a world party of socialist
revolution, the Interna-tional Communist League (Fourth Inter-nationalist) says:
Defeat imperialism through workers revolution! Defend Serbia against U.S. NATO attack!
Down with the United Nations economic sanctions! All U.S./UN/NATO troops out of the
Balkans!
A 25 March statement of the Sparta-cist League U.S. asserted:
"Every blow against U.S. imperialism in the Balkans will help to weaken the class
enemy, providing an opening for the working class and oppressed here to fight against
the torrent of attacks being leveled by Wall Street and its political agents, the
Democratic and Republican parties. We fight to build the multiracial revolutionary
workers party, forged in the crucible of class struggle, which is the necessary
instrument to lead the working class to the overthrow of this entire system based on
racism, exploita-tion and war through a socialist revolu-tion which rips industry and
power away from a small handful of filthy rich and creates an egalitarian socialist
economy."
In Europe, the brutal imperialist attacks on Serbia are being carried out by
capitalist governments headed by social democrats and ex-Stalinists. As the mil-itary
historian Clausewitz once said, war is the continuation of politics by other means.
Having demonstrated their loyalty to the bourgeoisie at home by enforcing racist
capitalist austerity, today the social democrats are if anything more vigorous than
their right-wing predecessors in doing the imperialists' dirty work abroad. The
Berliner Zeitung (25 March) ob-served: "That a red-green government sent units of the
Bundeswehr into a mili-tary intervention.for the first time since the founding of the
Federal Republic is saving the country from an unproductive ideological and political
conflict." At the onset of the war, sections of the Interna-tional Communist League
immediately issued statements unmasking the imperi-alist war propaganda and seeking to
mobilize the workers of the world against their "own" bourgeoisies.
The destruction of the Soviet degener-ated workers state ushered in a sharp rise in
regional wars and imperialist military adventures, as a- virulent new national-ism
became {he hammer of counterrevo-lution. Interimperialist strife, previous Held in
check by the need for a common anti-Soviet alliance, erupted anew. Just beneath the
surface of the current unity of the NATO "allies" over the bombing of Serbia lie
fundamental and escalating interimperialist rivalries expressed in the growing trade
war between the U.S. and Europe, as well as Japan. The post-Soviet world increas-ingly
resembles the pre-1914 world. It was imperialist machinations stoking nationalist
hatreds in the Balkans which led directly to World War I.
Today, NATO bombing is a trip wire for a broader and even bloodier interna-tional
conflagration, potentially drawing in Greece, Turkey and Russia. While act-ing as a
soft cop for NATO, capitalist Russia's denunciation of the U.S./NATO military attack
on Serbia is in line with its ambition to assert itself as a regional imperialist
power. Both Russia and the U.S. have huge nuclear arsenals, and the U.S. has already
demonstrated its readi-ness to use these weapons with the nuclear incineration of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Who could believe that the French, the British or the
Israelis would be any more restrained? Capital-ism is an irrational system, and the
mad drive for profit and power inherent in this system will inevitably lead to a
nuclear third world war if it is not stopped through international proletarian
revolution.
Imperialists Rain Terror on Yugoslavia
NATO's war against Serbia has nothing to do with "human rights" or defense of the
Albanian population of Kosovo against "ethnic cleansing." This war is not about the
Kosovo Albanians. It is a war of domination aimed at realizing longstand-ing American
plans to insert a substantial U.S./NATO military presence in Serbia through subduing,
or if necessary dis-lodging, Milosevic. Since when do the imperialists care about the
oppressed peo-ples? Hundreds of thousands of immi-grants are deported every year by
the European governments. Indeed, these same governments went into a virtual frenzy at
the thought of having to open their borders to the refugees from Kosovo.
The ICL stands in the tradition of V.1. Lenin, whose "Socialism and War," a
powerful handbook of revolutionary internationalism written in 1915 and cir-culated
clandestinely to workers and sol-diers throughout Europe during the war, teaches:
"The standpoint of social-chauvinism is shared equally by both advocates of vic-tory
for their governments in the present war and by advocates of the slogan of 'neither
victory nor defeat.' A revolution-ary class cannot but wish for the defeat of its
government in a reactionary war, and cannot fail to see that the latter's military
reverses must facilitate its overthrow."
Lenin stressed that in the case of an imperialist war against a small nation or
semicolonial people, it is the duty of the working class not only to fight for the
defeat of dne's "own" government but to defend the victims of imperialist aggres-sion.
In the present war, we are for the military defense of Serbia, without giv-ing the
Milosevic regime a shred of political support. We called for the right of
self-determination for the Albanian population of Kosovo against the Serb-chauvinist
regime in Belgrade until the Albanian separatists became simply a pawn of NATO's
predatory designs. For Marxists, the democratic right of self-determination for the
Kosovo Albanians is necessarily subordinated now to the struggle against the
imperialist bombing and threatened invasion.
In fact, the all-sided nationalist blood-bath in the Balkans was directly insti-gated
by the imperialists in their drive to destroy the former deformed workers state of
Yugoslavia through capitalist counterrevolution. The Socialist Federal Republic of
Yugoslavia was born out of World War II, when Tito's Communist partisans battled the
occupying Nazi German Welrrmacht as well as the Croa-tian fascist Ustasha and Serbian
royalist Chetniks. Tito's partisans were the only force in Yugoslavia during the war
that opposed communalism. But the socialist and democratic ideals to which the Tito
regime publicly appealed were under-mined by the bureaucratic deformations and the
inherent limitations of Stalinism, with its program of building socialism in one
country Tito introduced "market socialism," which opened Yugoslavia to imperialist
economic penetration and re-inforced disparities among the various regions, fueling
resurgent nationalism.
After Tito's death the bureaucracy began to fracture along national lines.
Milosevic, who promoted "market re-forms" as head of the central bank, launched his
political career by appealing to "greater Serbia" chauvinism particu-larly against the
Kosovo Albanians. In this, he embodied the link between capi-talist restoration and
nationalism. But Milosevic was not alone in this regard. His Croatian counterpart,
Franjo Tudj-man, idolizes the World War II fascist Ustasha-a puppet of the Gerinan
Nazis and Bosnian leader Alija Izetbegovic is a rabid nationalist and Islamic
reac-tionary Marxists oppose the poison of nationalism and fight for the class unity
of the workers of Serbia, Croatia, Slove-nia, Bosnia, Macedonia, Montenegro and Kosovo
in overthrowing all the bloody nationalist regimes of the region, from Milosevuch to
Tudjman. For a socialist federation of the Balkans!
The terminal crisis of Titoist Yugosla-via came in early 1991, when newly elected
right-wing nationalist govern-ments in Croatia and Slovenia declared secession from
the federated state. Ger-many moved in to steamroller its Euro-pean allies into
recognizing their inde-pendence. The U.S. then joined Germany in throwing its weight
behind an inde-pendent Bosnia under the leadership of Muslim nationalist forces. In
Croatia the U.S. and Germany provided the fascistic Tudjman regime with not only large
quantities of modern weaponry but also high-level training and advisers. This enabled
the Croatian army in mid-1995, in league with NATO's air assault, to rout the Bosnian
Serb military forces. Hun-dreds of thousands of Serb civilians were expelled by
Croatian forces in the largest single act of "ethnic cleansing" in the war. At the
same time, the U.S. covertly funded and armed Islamic fundamentalist killers in Bosnia
including the mujahedin cutthroats who had fought against the Sovie!
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t army in Afghanistan.
Euro "Socialists"
War is always a decisive test for revo-lutionaries. Trotsky insisted that a
prole-tarian position on war required "a com-plete and real break with official public
opinion on the most burning question of the 'defense of the fatherland'." The fake
left proves Trotsky's point in the negative. They join in the imperialists' war cry
over "poor little Kosovo" while rejecting the defense of Serbia, whose very right to
national existence is under attack by the imperialist powers. Despite a pacifist
veneer of opposition to the bombing, they march in lockstep behind the war aims of
their own imperialisms and the social-democratic or popular-front governments whose
election they supported. The camouflage: stop the NATO bombing; the message: go to war
in the Balkans with ground troops under EU control. For today's "death of com-munism"
leftists, who long ago gave up any confidence in the revolutionary capacity of the
proletariat, the bloody imperialists-whether under the flags of the UN o!
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r the EU or NATO-are the means for bringing "human rights" to the oppressed peoples of
the world!
In -its supposedly "antiwar" propa-ganda, the European "left" is simply act-ing as the
spokesman for their own impe-rialist bourgeoisies, whose interests are by no means the
same as those of the American imperialists. "The partnership with NATO in the Yugoslav
crisis is sim-ply a cloak, masking great differences between the United States and its
Euro-pean allies," a former UN official told the San Francisco Chronicle. The same
arti-cle (15 April) quoted a range of people running the gamut from left to right "who
view the intervention in Kosovo as a thinly disguised effort to impose Washington's
will on Europe's future. In France, the Chronicle noted, "newspaper commentaries are
so unremittingly hos-tile to the United States that a reader might well imagine Paris
is at war with the Pentagon, rather than with the Yugoslav army," while former German
chan-cellor Helmut Schmidt cQmplained about being "held on a leash by Americans."
Thus, the "left" is running point for their own capitalist ruling class: their
"anti-Americanism" is a cheap substitute for and an obstacle to anti-imperialist
proletarian internationalism. Swimming with the tide of bourgeois "public opin-ion,"
the slogans of the "left" dovetail with those of outright fascists; for exam-ple, in
Germany the Nazis raise the call, "No German blood for foreign interests!"
Perhaps the most blatant of the pro-war "leftists" are the former Stalinist parties,
exemplified by the French CP which is of course in the government. Headlining, "Europe
and France Must Participate in Building Peace," a leaflet signed by the PCF along with
the Ligue Communist
Revolutionnaire (LCR) in Rouen com-plained that the NATO bombing hasn't gotten rid of
Milosevic: "Milosevic is still in place! The Albanians are being hunted down or
massacred! These are the first results of the military adventure. In con-trast, peace
in the region implies active and determined support to the weak social and democratic
forces fighting against the nationalist dictatorships and for the right of ethnic
minorities."
The fake-Trotskyist LCR, the French organization of the United Secretariat (USec), in
its own press is more explicit in beating the drums for war. The LCR openly called for
imperialist military intervention in Kosovo under the Organi-zation for Security and
Cooperation in Europe (OSCE)-a European-dominated military bloc~r the United Nations.
In its 1 April issue, Rouge declared:
"NATO was not the only, and above all not the best, linchpin for an accord. The
conditions for a multinational police (paricularly composed of Serbs and Albanians)
could be found under the auspices of the OSCE to enforce a transi-tional accord."
The following week a Rouge statement advocated an accord with Serbia that would be
policed by "a multinational force under UN control." The UN-truly a den of thieves and
their victims-has been an instrument for imperialist milita-rism from the 1950-53 war
against the North Korean deformed workers state to the slaughter of tens of thousands
of Ira-qis in the 1991 war in the Persian Gulf.
Alain Irrivine's USec is acting as a mouthpiece for the interests of French
imperialism, counterposing to the U.S.-dominated NATO intervention the call for a
European imperialist expeditionary force in the Balkans. Rifondazione Corn-unista (RC)
in Italy and the PDS in Ger-many (as well as some SPD members like e~party chairman
Oskar Lafon-tame) push much the same brand of nationalist anti-Americanism. While the
American government is the foremost
imperialist military power, this attempt to depict the European imperialist states as
more benevolent than the U.S. is noth-ing but vile social patriotism. Presum-ably,
then, the German bourgeoisie of Auschwitz is morally better than its American
counterpart? And what about the dirty history of French colonialism in Algeria and
Indochina, or the British empire's history of pillage and murder in Ireland, the
Indian subcontinent, Africa and the Middle East? And it was the Ital-ian bourgeoisie
which invented concen-tration camps in Libya, which first used poison gas against the
Ethiopian popula-tion, and which carried out countless aets of butchery in the Balkans
during World War II.
The Prench pseudo-Trotskyist organi-zation Lutte Ouvri~re (LO) has a well-deserved
reputation for catering to the backward prejudices of the working class by ignoring
special oppression, whether it be women's oppression, homophobia, racism or the
national question in France,
where along with the rest of the fake left it denies the right of self-determination
for the Basques in France. But they too have suddenly become champions of the right of
self-determination of the Kosovo people. In its 9 April issue, Lutte Ouvri~re writes:
"If the French govern-ment, as well as the other Western gov-emments, were really
helping the Koso-vars, it would be noticeable and we would not see the endless lines
of refu-gees that we see on TV." Despite its claimed opposition to NATO military
attacks, the logic of this position is that the imperialists should intervene more
decisively and really crush the Serbs. By demonizing Milosevic-rather than the
imperialists-as the main enemy in this conflict, LO serves as a left apologist for the
bourgeoisie.
In the same vein, the minuscule Inter-national Bolshevik Tendency (IBT), which sneers
at independence for Que-bec and more generally is notorious for its indifference to
the rights of oppressed peoples, such as the Catholics in North-ern Ireland, today
howls for "independ-ence for Kosovo"-apparently they only champion independence for
those who have imperialist sponsorship.
In Italy, Rifondazione preaches confi-dence in the UN and calls for a confer-ence of
European capitalist powers to resolve the Balkans crisis. RC revels in
anti-Americanism in order to alibi its support to its own ruling class. RC's call to
shut down the NATO air base in Italy is raised from the perspective of Italian
nationalism and in the interest of a stronger capitalist Europe directed against its
imperialist rivals (like the U.S.). We Trotskyists appeal not to the bourgeois state,
but rather to the Italian proletariat to mobilize labor actions against the U.S./NATO
bases, from which a deadly war is being launched against the interests of all
workers-Serbian, Italian, Albanian and American. We say:
Smash the counterrevolutionary NATO alliance through workers revolution!
A four-page supplement issued 10 April by Proposta, the limp "left opposi-tion" of RC,
never calls for immediate withdrawal of Italian troops from the Balkans. Proposta
supported the previ-ous "Ulivo"IRC bourgeois government which invaded Albania.
Social chauvinism means defense of "national interests," i.e., calling on the working
class to identify with the imperi-, alist aims of the ruling capitalist class. It
means the explicit abandonment of class struggle by reformists and pro-capitalist
trade union leaders. Thus, the Italian CGIL-CISL-UW bureaucrats called off a railroad
strike as soon as the war broke out. Serbian workers are not the enemy of Italian rail
workers! The enemy is the Italian bourgeoisie!
As Lenin asserted: "Opportunism and social-chauvinism have the same
politico-ideological contentelass collaboration instead of the class struggle,
renunciation of revolutionary methods of struggle, helping one's 'own' government in
its embarrassed situation, instead of taking advantage of these embarrassments so as
to advance the revolution." The reformist trade union leaders are bribed with the
crumbs of imperialist profit. In France unions get more revenue from the state and the
capitalists than from their own members. Fake left groups like LO and LCR emulate this
political corruption by taking their own financial subsidies from the bourgeois state.
But he who pays the bills calls the political tunes! We struggle for the complete
independence of the trade unions from the capitalist state!
Under the impact of a major war in Europe involving the imperialist powers, we are
presented with the spectacle of erstwhile "revolutionaries" and "anti-imperialists"
joining pro-imperialist war rallies. The centrist Workers Power joined the deeply
Labourite Alliance for Workers Liberty. in a 10 April "Workers Aid for Kosova" rally
in London domi-nated by NATO and Albanian flags and, placards screaming, "NATO Good
Luck" and "NATO Now or Never" "Workers Aid for Kosova" is modeled on "Workers Aid for
Bosnia;' initiated in 1993, which, under the guise of providing humanitar-ian aid for
workers in Bosnia, promoted support to the Bosnian Muslim govern-ment and worked hand
in glove with UN troops in the fratricidal war between Serbs, Croats and Muslims. It
thereby served as a stalking horse for direct im-perialist military intervention
against the Bosnian Serbs.
A statement distributed at a London public meeting of 30 March by WP's international,
the League for a Revolu-tionary Communist International (LRCI), claimed to defend the
Serbs against NATO attack-"though not in Kosova which they have no right to occupy"!
At the same time, WP urges the Albanian separatists "to take full military advan-tage
of the imperialist bombing to drive out the 'Yugoslav' forces," adding: "If [Clinton
and Blair's] primary concern were for the Kosovars they would recog-nise their
statehood, and give the KLA the weapons to drive out the Serbian troops." This is an
unvarnished appeal to the NATO imperialists.
Workers Power has in fact supported every reactionary force in the Balkans (including
in Serbia) as long as they are opposed to the imperialists' current main enemy,
Milosevic. Thus, in June 1991 when the German Fourth Reich was engi-neering the
destruction of the Yugoslav deformed workers state, they called for immediate
recognition of the capitalist -restorationist Slovenian and Croatian declarations of
independence. A year later WP's Austrian affiliate, the Arbei-terlnnenstandpunkt, was
involved in a "united front" with the local chapter of Vuk Draskovic's Serb National
Rebirth, an organization of Great Serbian mon-archists and Chetniks, then in
oppo-sition to Milosevic. During the 1995 NATO air strikes, WP refused even on paper
to defend the Bosnian Serbs against imperialism.
It could not be clearer that the fake lefts are social-chauvinists whose bottom line
is support to imperialist war aims in the Balkans, despite the theoretical
con-t9rtions they go through in trying to jeconcile their lip-service opposition to
NATO with their support to the separatist Kosovo Liberation Army, which is now simply
a pawn of NATO. Against the social-chauvinists of his time, Lenin polemicized against
Karl Kautsky, a cen-tral leader of the German SPD who dur-ing the first
interimperialist war main-tained "loyalty to Marxism in word, and subordination to
opportunism in deed." Lenin wrote that "Kautsky 'reconciles' in an unprincipled way
the fundamental idea of social-chauvinism, recognition of defence of the fatherland in
the present war, with a diplomatic sham concession to the Lefts-his abstention from
voting for war credits, his verbal claim to be in the opposition, etc." (Lenin,
"Socialism and War," 1915). But today's "leftists" like Workers Power are indeed far !
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to the right of a Karl Kautsky.
It took the opening of the first imperi-alist world war, World War I, and an orgy of
chauvinism to shatter the Second International and for the "socialists" of that time
to lead the working class to the slaughter. Today, as the first bombs were being
dropped on the Balkan peoples, what passes for the "left" was already prostrate before
its own imperialism. In the face of World War I, Lenin called on the workers to turn
the interimperialist war into a civil war in all belligerent countries, demanding a
split of authenric socialists from the Second International.
The fake left's ideological prostration before imperialism reflects their many years
support to Western imperialism against the Soviet Union in the name of "democracy" and
"human rights." As long as the Soviet Union and the de-formed workers states of East
Europe existed, as Trotskyists we called for their unconditional military defense
against imperialism and internal counterrevolu-tion. We fought for proletarian
political revolution to oust the nationalist Stalinist bureaucracies. In contrast, the
fake left supported all manner of pro-capitalist forces in the name of
"anti-Stalinism." The state-capitalist British Socialist Workers Party (SWP) of Tony
Cliff along with its satellites and fake Trotskyists like the USec and Workers Power
(the latter with some contradiction) all opposed the intervention of the Soviet Army
into Afghanistan, the last objectively progres-sive act of the Kremlin bureaucracy. In
the early 1980s they joined in fervent support to ClA/Vatican-sponsored P!
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olish Solidarnosc, which was in the forefront of the drive for capitalist restoration
in East Europe. A decade later, all these groups cheered on Yeltsin and his
pro-imperialist "democrats" as they launched the coun-terrevolution which was to
destroy the Soviet Union.
The SWP, who rejoiced when New Labour was elected, tails after Labour "left" Tony
Benn, saying, "Tony Benn has opposed the Falklands War, the Gulf War and this war"
(SWP pamphlet, "Stop the War," April 1999). Tony Benn is a "liule England" nationalist
who called for UN sanctions during the Gulf War and today complains the bombing
doesn't have UN authorization. Meanwhile, the press of the Socialist Party (formerly
"Militant") calls for "workers' action to overthrow Milosevic" (Socialist, 16 April)
while, needless to say, never calling for British workers to overthrow British
capitalism.
Politically apart from the British "poor little Kosovo" crowd is the Socialist Labour
Party (SLP), headed by mine-workers leader Arthur Scargill. An SLP press release of 24
March, quoting Scar-gill, forthrigh~y branded Labour Party prime minister Tony Blair a
murderer. It pointed to the hypocrisy of the imperialists, noting that "Britain still
occupies part of Ireland." However, Scargill's statement that the bombing is being
car-ried out "without even the fig-leaf of a United Nations Security Resolution"
implies confidence in that institution of the imperialists. A more left-wing
state-ment by the Normanton Constituency SLP is titled: "Defend Yugoslavia and
fraq-Fight Imperialism." The statement correctly nails Blair's New Labour Party as
"anti-working class, pro-imperialist." It says, "We firmly believe in the princi-pie
of the right of nations to self determi-nation, and in the case of Yugoslavia that
means the right of a sovereign nation to solve its own problems." However,!
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both SLP statements are uncritical of Milosevic '5 virulent Serb-chauvinism.
Yet in the April/May issue of its Socialist News, the SLP says nothing about defeating
imperialism, hints at a call for ground troops ("Neither Clinton nor Blair has any
intention of putting their soldiers into Kosovo on the side of the Kosovar Liberation
Army") and calls on "UN Secretary Getieral Kofi Annan, Russian Prime Minister Yevgeni
Primakov and the Pope to devise a form of peace negoiations which could stop the
bombing"! Talk about an unholy alli-ance-the Pope who was a key opera-tive for
Solidarnosc' counterrevolution in Poland, the chief of the UN which in-vaded Haiti and
Somalia and is starving Iraq, and the prime minister of capitalist "post-Soviet"
Russia the SLP now be-seeches to bring us peace! Scargill's opposition to the
Vatican-sponsored Soli-darnos'~ was used by the Thatcher gov-ernment as a
union-busting spearhead against Scargill and the British miners before and during
their 1984-85 strike.
Militants in the SLP who want to oppose British imperialism must under-stand that the
"old Labour" political tra-dition which the SLP fondly harks back to is anything but
anti-imperialist. The "little England" nationalists of the pre-Blair Labour Party
"left" stood on the side of their own imperialism from India to Ir~and to the
"virginity testing" of Asian women seeking admittance into Britain. The line of
Labourism is the so-called parliamentary road to socialism- as though the ruling class
would hand over state power to the proletariat after a democratic election; in the
meantime, they seek to participate in the "humane" administration of the capitalist
system. You can't fight imperialist war without a revolutionary fight against the
capitalist system which breeds war.
The Working Class Must Fight National and Racial Oppression
Under Lenin and Trotsky, the Bolshe-viks led the Russian working masses to
successfully smash the capitalist state in October 1917. The Bolsheviks took
revo-lutionary Russia out of the imperialist carnage, and founded the Communist
International for the purpose of spread-ing the revolution worldwide.
But unlike in Russia, the sharp revolu-tionary opportunity presented by the first
World War did not lead to the proletariat overthrowing the bourgeoisie in Western
Europe. The chief responsibility for this lies with the social democracy. These
bloodhounds of counterrevolution served their bourgeois masters well, butchering
revolutionaries like the German communists Karl Liebnecht and Rosa Luxemburg. The
pressure of imperialist encircle-ment on the economically backward Soviet state, the
devastation of the Rus-sian working class in the civil war that smashed the
counterrevolutionary Rus-sian and imperialist forces, and the fail-ure of proletarian
revolution abroad set the stage for a political counterrevolution in 1924 (Thermidor),
in which political power was usurped by a nationalist, para-sitic caste headed by
Stalin and his heirs. Their false dogma of "building socialism in one country" meant
in practice an accommodation to imperialism. The Sta-linist program of class collab!
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oration has led to the defeat of incipient workers rev-olutions from China in 1925-27
to Spain in 1936-39, Italy 1943-45 and France in May 1968. Having destroyed the
revo-lutionary internationalist consciousness of the Soviet proletariat, the Stalinist
bureaucracy finally devoured the workers state, ushering in the capitalist
counter-revolution of 1991-92.
U.S. imperialist president Jimmy Carter waged Cold War II under the rubric of "human
rights." Today, "human rights" imperialism is the watchword of the imperialists and
their hangers-on to jus-tify their war aims. During World War I, Britain and France
justified their war against Germany in the name of liberat-ing Belgium while Germany
claimed to be fighting for the liberation of Poland from Russia. Lenin savagely
ridi-culed this bourgeois deception. While strongly supporting Poland's right to
self-determination, he argued that raising this slogan in the context of an
interim-perialist war could only mean "stoop-ing. . to humble servitude to one of the
imperialist monarchies" ("The Discus-sion on Self-Determination Summed Up," July 1916).
While the bourgeoisies today howl about "poor little Kosovo," they per-petuate
numerous instances of national and racial oppression, including in west-ern Europe.
The French bourgeoisie oppresses and expels thousands of North Africans and other sans
papiers from "Ia belle France." Germany has deported Kurds back to sure repression and
p05-sible death in Turkey, while Bosnian ref-ugees were victims of mass deportations
by the Fourth Reich. Italy sank a ship of Albanian refugees on the high seas. Roma and
Sinti peoples are hideously tormented across "socialist" Europe.
The repression of the Basque people exposes what capitalist "European unity" is all
about: trans-national police-state coordination of terror against oppressed peoples
fighting for liberation. We de-mand freedom for the Basque national-ists in French and
Spanish prisons, and call for the right of self-determination of the Basques, north as
well as south of the Pyrenees!
The ICL fights for the immediate unconditional withdrawal of British troops from
Northern Ireland as part of the fi ht for an Irish workers republic within a socialist
federation of the British Isles. In this situation or interpenetrating peoples, in
which the Catholic minority is currently oppressed within the sectarian Orange
statelet, we recognize that there is no equitable solution to national oppres-sion
short of the mobilization of the pro-letariat throughout the British Isles for the
revolutionary overthrow of British impe-rialism, smashing the Orange statelet in the
North as well as the Catholic clerical-ist state in the South.
While screaming about Milosevic, the imperialists are silent about the
oppres-sion-including massive forced popula-tion transfers~f Kurds in Turkey. The
government of Turkey, the southeast bas-tion of NATO, has carried out a 14-year war
against the oppressed Kurdish popu-lation that has left some 30,000 dead, totally
destroyed 3,500 villages and forced more than three million Kurds to flee their homes.
It is notable that the leader of the petty-bourgeois nationalist Kurdistan Workers
Party (PKK), Abdul-lah O~calan, was tracked down by the CIA and was denied asylum by
every European country, while in Germany the PKK is banned. We say: Freedom for
Ocalan! Down with the persecution of Kurdish militants! For a Socialist Repub-, lic of
United Kurdistan!
The domestic face of bourgeois nation-alism is the sharp increase in racism directed
at Europe's dark-skinned and Eastern European immigrant comtnuni-ties, who face
massive deportations and state and fascist violence. Immigrants who are no longer
needed as "guest work-ers" for low-paid dirty work are being thrown out while
second-generation youth in particular are viewed with'contempt by the rulers: with no
jobs and no future for these youth, the ruling class fears them as social tinder
waiting to explode. Across Europé, capitalist regimes administered by supposed
"socialists" unleash their cops to terrorize minority youth, while in Blair's Britain
the oppression of blacks and Asians has become such an acute embarrassment that the
government was forced to acknowledge ''institutionalized racism" in the police.
Racist oppression is integrally linked to the mechanism of capitalist exploi-tation.
Social-democratic regimes and popular-front governments (coalitions which tie
working-class parties to the bourgeoisie in government) have been put into office
since the collapse of the Soviet Union, with the express purpose of destroying the
"welfare state." The capi-talist rulers no longer feel obligated to maintain a high
standard of living for Western workers to compete with the social benefits of the
planned economies of the East European deformed workers states resulting from the
victory of the Red Army in World War II. As the bour-geoisie seeks to drive up the
rate of exploitation, immigrants are not only targeted for deportation but are used as
c6nvenient scapegoats for unemployment and immiseration. Anti-immigrant racism is the
cutting edge of attacks on the whole working class. The interests of the work-ing
class and minorities must advance together, or they will fall back separately!
!
!
!
. The workers movement must fight for full citizenship rights for all immigrants and
refugees from right-wing repression.
Along with the intensification of the bourgeoisies' war against their own work-ing
masses, the final undoing of the Octo-ber Revolution has intensified social reac-tion,
and as always women are among the chief targets. Capitalist counterrevolution in the
former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe has pauperized women, driving them out of jobs
and back to the tyranny of "Kinder, Kirche, Kuche." Across West-em Europe and North
America, abortion rights are under concerted attack, while in the so-called "Third
World" (but not only there), fundamentalist religious forces are on a rampage of
anti-woman terror, seek-ing to buttress every kind of familial and social obstacle to
the emancipation of women.
The' fake left spreads the illusion that putting' the social democrats into power is a
means of "fighting ,the right" 'and the fascists. This is a bald-faced lie. These
capitalist governments have relentlessly persecuted the immigrants, while protect-ing
the fascist gangs who spread their murderous terror. Appealing to the racist bourgeois
state to ban the fascists is sim-ply suicidal and augments the arsenal of state
repression, which will invariably be used against the left, not the right. We fight to
mobilize the social power of the organized proletariat at the head of all the
oppressed to smash fascist provocations!
West Europe's dark-skinned proletar-ians are not just defenseless victims but an
important component of the workingclass forces capable of destroying the racist
capitalist 'system. To mobilize the power of the integrated proletariat, how-ever,
requires a political struggle against the social-democratic parliamentary and union
leaderships, which are transmission belts for racist poison into the working class and
whose pro-capitalist policies have siniply perpetuated the conditions of mass
immiseration and despair which serve as the breeding ground for fascism. Only active
engagement in the urgent social struggles against racial oppression and repression can
lay the basis for the unity of the multiethnic proletariat against the bourgeoisie.
But the labor "leaders" pursue the opposite policy, for example by organizing the
racist cops into the trade unions. Cops are not work-ers! We demand: Cops out of the
unions!
To once and for all smash the fas-cists-the armed gangs which capital holds in reserve
to use against the work-ing class-requires socialist revolution. But the fake lefts
who politically tail the larger social-democratic bourgeois work-ers parties are
totally incapable of a bold assault on the capitalist system. 'It is instructive that
the electoral platform of the LO-LCR lashup in the European par-liamentary elections
does not even men-tion "socialism," let alone "revolution." For these timid reformists
the maximum program is to go back to the good ~ld days of the "welfare state"-the
program of social democracy! It is a measure of the retrogression of proletarian
con-sciousness since the destruction of the Soviet Union that most of those who once
paid lip service to the Fo'u'rth Inter-national, founded by Leon Trotsky and destroyed
by revisionism, have become open mouthpieces for the politics of the Second
International, which the' heroic Rosa Luxemburg already aptly describe!
!
!
!
d as a "stinking corpse" at the time o'f the First World War!' In sharp distinction to
these pseudo-Trotskyists, who openly acquiesce to capitalist rule, we fight for new
October Revolutions, which requires the reforging of the Fourth International as a
world party of socialist revolution!
Down With Maastricht! For a Workers Europe!
Previously a diplomatic appendage to the anti-Soviet NATO alliance, today the European
Union is an unstable adjunct to the econ6mic, military and political pri-orities of
the European capitalists, and is directed against the workers of Europe and
non-European immigrants, as well as against Germany's main imperialist rivals, the
U.S. and Japan. With Germany as its strongest component, the European Union is also an
arena in which the fundamentally conflicting interests of the major European bourgeois
states are expressed.
Because capitalism is organized on the basis of particular nation states, itself the
cause of repeated imperialist wars to redivide the world, it is impossible to cohere a
stable pan-European bourgeois state. The perspective of a progressive European
"superstate," as preached by Jospin, Schtroder et al. is a bald-faced lie. As Lenin
noted long ago, a capitalist United States of Europe is either impos-sible or
reactionary:
"Of course, temporary agreements are possible between capitalists and between states.
In this sense a United States of Europe is possible as an agreement between the
European capitalists.. but to what end? Only for the purpose of jointly suppressing
socialism in Europe, of jointly protecting colonial booty against Japan and America"
("On the Slogan for a United States of Europe," August 1915).
n contrast, Workers Power actually maintains that the EU is progressive, or
potentially so, arguing that "to some extent European workers will be better armed to
fight back on a continental scale after the implementation of the terms of Maastricht"
(Workers Power, June 1992). Thus WP becomes the mouthpiece for capitalist "united"
Europe. As Trotsky wrote of the centrists of his time, "But it is a law that whoever
is afraid of a break with the social patriots will inevitably become their agent"
("Lessons of Octo-ber," 4 November 1935). In a parody of parliamentary cretinism, WP
even calls for a Europe-wide constituent assembly!
LO similarly had an abstentionist posi-tion on Maastricht. In reality, these groups
act as left democrats, seeking to put a "democratic" face on capitalist reac-tion. We
stand with Lenin in. The "unity" of the EU has been directed against the against the
proletariat and oppressed: raining bombs on Yugoslavia, policing the borders against
"illegal" immigrants, turning over Öcalan to the torture chambers of Turkey.
A statement for the Europarliament issued by Scargill's SLP calls for getting Britain
out of the European Union. Titled "Vote Us In to Get Us Out," the statement presents
the EU and the Maastricht Treaty as the root cause of rising unemployment and the
general worsening of economic conditions. This obscures the fact that, with or without
the Maastricht Treaty, the main enemy of the workers of each coun-try is their "own"
bourgeoisie. Thatcher's Britain pioneered the dismantling of the "welfare state" years
before there was any serious talk of a common European cur-rency. Our opposition to
the EU is based on a proletarian internationalist perspec-tive, not the nationalist
protectionism of the SLP. Only the overthrow of capitalism through workers revolution
and the estab-lishment of a Socialist United States of Europe, as part of a worldwide
socialist society, can lay the basis for the develop-ment of productive resources that
will genuinely benefit mankind.
Reforge the Fourth International!
Sharply impacted by the Asian eco-nomic collapse, the Japanese economy has suffered
its greatest crisis in 50 years. Japanese imperialism, for its part, has reacted with
an aggressive attempt to refur-bish bourgeois militarism. As the U.S. and its NATO
allies began their barrage of cruise missiles and bombs against Ser-bia, the Japanese
navy fired at two vessels suspected of being North Korean spy ships. This was only the
second time in the postwar period that the navy has fired its weapons, the other time
being in 1953 against the USSR off Hokkaido.
A statement by the Spartacist Group of Japan (SGJ) noted:,
"While endorsing the U.S.INATO massa-cre of Sems, the Japanese ruling class is well
aware that American imperialism's role as top world cop is also directed against them,
America's main imperialist rival in the Pacific. Since the destruction of the Soviet
Union, the Japan-U.S. security treaty less and less suits the real interests of the
Japanese bourgeoi-sie. Already the second biggest military spender in the world,
Japanese imperi-alism is pushing the revised military guidelines to prepare its own
battle-ready army and navy."
Asserting "Not one man, not one yen for the imperialist military!" the SGJ emphasized
that the struggle against imperialist war cannot be conducted sep-arate and apart from
the class struggle:
"Japanese workers must join with work-ers from Indonesia to the Philippines in the
struggle for a socialist Asia, in the unconditional military defense of China, North
Korea and Vietnam against impe-rialist attack and for pmletarian political revolution.
What is needed is an uncom-promising proletarian party to lead the working class to
state power."
The sharp escalation of interimperialist rivalry reflected in the growth of bourgeois
militarism in the U.S., Europé and Japan expresses a fundamental law of imperialism.
Imperialism is not a policy that can be made more humane, as the lib-erals and
reformists contend, but "the highest stage of capitalism," as Lenin defined it:
"Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of
monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has
acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the
international trusts has begun, in which the division of all terri-tories of the globe
among the biggest cap-italist powers has been completed."
Lenin sharply polemicized against Kautsky's theory of "ultra-imperialism," today
resuscitated as "globalization," which claimed that the great capitalist powers could
peacefully agree on the joint exploitation of the world by interna-tionally united
finance capital. Lenin asserted, to the contrary, that "the only conceivable basis
under capitalism for the division of spheres of influence, inter-est, colonies, etc.,
is a calculation of the strength of those participating, their general economic,
financial, military strength, etc." The small number of impe-rialist powers are
engaged in a ruthless struggle to improve their relative compet-itive position by
increasing the rate of exploitation of their domestic working class, by plundering the
colonial and semicolonial world and by seizing mar-kets at the expense of their
rivals. Thus, the basis is laid for new wars to redivide the world in accord with the
changing relative strengths of the imperialists. As Lenin asserted: "'inter-!
!
!
!
imperialist' or 'ultra-imperialist' alliances, no matter what form they may assume,
whether of one imperialist coalition against another, or of a general alliance
embracing all the imperialist powers, are inevitably nothing more than a 'truce' in
periods between wars" (Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism).
The view held by fake leftists like Workers Power that a European capitalist
superstate can be constructed by peace-ful means is simply a modern-day vari-ant of
Kautsky '5 theory. Another variant is ~e view that the existence of nuclear weapons
will restrain the capitalist impe-rialists-at least the "democratic"
imperi-alists-from resorting to a new world war. In a polemic with Peter Taaffe's
Committee for a Workers International we pointed out that this demonstrated touching
faith in the democratic imperi-alists, who gratuitously atom-bombed their already
defeated enemy at the close of World War II. Today's "leftists" who expect rationality
and restraint from the imperialist rulers have deliberately short memories: the
bloody-handed car-pet bombers of Vietnam have little ration-ality and even less
scruples.
There is an element of fatuousness in the presumption on the part of the American
bourgeoisie that Russia's weakness and indebtedness preclude it from military
intervention. The Russia of the tsars was not strong when it chose to mobilize against
Austria (and therefore Germany) in WW I. None of the combatants indulged in such
"rational" calcula-tion; they all expected the war to be over in a few short months.
This is how wars start, and our centrist opponents are as foolish as the bourgeoisies
they tail in this regard. We are not dealing with a rational social system, but rather
with imperialism. Only world socialist revolu-tion can save mankind from a barbaric
outcome.
Writing on the aftermath of Hitler's coming to power, the Russian revolu-tionary
leader and founder of the Fourth International Leon Trotsky wrote: "The catastrophic
commercial, industrial, agrar-ian and financial crisis, the break in internationa{
economic ties, the decline of the productive forces of humanity, the unbearable
sharpening of class and inter-national contradictions mark the twilight of capitalism
and fully confirm the Len-inist characterization of our epoch as one of wars and
revolutions." He con-cluded "War and the Fourth Interna-tional" (1934) by asserting:
"It is indis-putable at any rate that in our epoch only that organization that bases
itself on international principles and enters into the ranks of the world party of the
prole-tariat can root itself in the national soil. The struggle against war means now
the struggle for the Fourth International! We seek to carry forward the work begun by
comrade Trotsky: Reforge the Fourth International!
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